Cryptocurrency: Anarchism re Orania, Liberland, Galt's Gulch, Free State Project, Seasteading

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Fri Sep 25 00:20:53 PDT 2020


https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/24/an-indictment-of-south-africa-whites-only-town-orania-is-booming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dMYhLZb96Q Kill the Boere vs NAP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ora_(currency)
https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/south-african-orania-town-launches-e-ora-crypto-to-preserve-culture-facilitate-payments-and-minimize-theft/

Voluntary subscriptive free association self determination and
contracting options, being valid under anarchism for any group,
must necessarily present opportunities, choices, forms, and
various basis for all NAP groups...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania,_Northern_Cape



"
'An indictment of South Africa': Whites-only town Orania is booming.

"Note to all white journalists from Europe: Please leave your
prejudice at the entrance."

Twenty-five years after apartheid, black people cannot live and work
in this small South African city.

Photographs by Madelene Cronjé
by Dennis Webster in Orania
Thu 24 Oct 2019 15.17 BST Last modified on Mon 3 Feb 2020 12.45 GMT

Children at the public swimming pool in Orania

October in Orania can be charming. When the sun sets, long ribbons of
burnt orange settle on the horizon. The flies and mosquitoes that come
with the oppressive summer heat haven’t arrived yet. It is Magdalene
Kleynhans’ favourite time of year. “You can sit outside until late
into the night,” says the businesswoman, whose family spend much of
their time outdoors. Her children fish from the banks of the Orange
River whenever they choose. Kleynhans leaves the house unlocked. “It’s
a good life. It’s a big privilege.”

But there is much more to this small Northern Cape town than the
bucolic ideal painted by Kleynhans. Incredibly, 25 years after the
fall of apartheid, Orania is a place for white people only.

    Orania represents downright hostility to the idea of a single,
united, non-racial country
    Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, author

Kleynhans runs one of Orania’s biggest enterprises: a call centre
whose business is recruiting and retaining members for Solidariteit, a
trade union primarily for Afrikaner workers, and Afriforum, a
self-styled “civil rights” movement. Afriforum recently met with US
president Donald Trump’s administration and Tucker Carlson of Fox Nows
to tell them that Afrikaners are facing a widely discredited genocide.
Both have made extensive investments in Orania’s construction boom.

Oranians claim the town is a cultural project, not a racial one. Only
Afrikaners are allowed to live and work there to preserve Afrikaner
culture, the argument goes.

    Magdalene Kleynhans owns a call centre that employs around 55
people in Orania

The reality, however, is a disquieting and entirely white town,
littered with old apartheid flags and monuments to the architects of
segregation. While there are no rules preventing black people from
visiting, those who live nearby fear they would be met with violence.

The town has faced numerous calls for it to be broken up over the
years, with prominent author and advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi arguing
its existence violates South Africa’s successful dismantling of racial
segregation. “Orania,” he says, “represents downright hostility to the
idea of a single, united, non-racial country.”

Large-scale eviction

Orania was created in 1991, a year after Nelson Mandela’s release from
Robben Island, and three years before the country’s first democratic
election.

Set among lush pecan nut orchards in the otherwise arid Karoo, it was
set-up as an Afrikaner-only hamlet, not dissimilar from the ethnic
Bantustans established under former prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd,
often dubbed the “architect of apartheid”.
Monument Hill in Orania. Busts of former presidents of the town
surround the statue of town mascot De Kleine Reus (The Little Giant),
a young boy rolling up his sleeves

    Busts of former presidents of the town surround the statue of town
mascot De Kleine Reus (The Little Giant), a young boy rolling up his
sleeves, intended to symbolise the Oranians’ belief in self reliance

HF Verwoerd museum in the house where his wife Betsie retired.

Spokesperson of the Orania Beweging rests his hand on the town’s
mascot “De Kleine Reus” (The Little Giant) that symbolises the
Oranians’ belief in self reliance.

By the end of the 1980s, the probability of losing control had already
occurred to many Afrikaners, with some believing that impending
democracy posed an existential threat to the white Afrikaans way of
life. A few felt protecting that required becoming a demographic
majority somewhere, rather than remaining a minority everywhere.

So a small group of Afrikaners – Verwoerd’s daughter and son-in-law,
Carel Boshoff, among them – purchased a strip of land on the southern
banks of the Orange River, and went about setting up a volkstaat, or
independent homeland, where Afrikaners would decide their own affairs.

Orania’s founders did not settle on virgin territory, but on the
remains of a half-realised 1960s project to build canals and dams
along the Orange River. A community of 500 poor black and mixed-race
squatters who had made their homes in the buildings left behind by the
project stood between the new owners and their whites-only vision.
Black people are restricted to using the petrol station on the edge of Orania.

    Black people are restricted to using the petrol station on the
edge of Orania

Speaking to the community after the purchase, Boshoff reportedly said
he “did not buy a bus with passengers”. What followed, according to
Cambridge historian Edward Cavanagh’s history of land rights on the
Orange River, was one of the last large-scale evictions under
apartheid. It was carried out by the future residents of Orania, with
the assistance of beatings, pistol whippings and dogs.

The population has doubled

After three decades as a quiet backwater, Orania is booming. Its
population – currently around 1,700 – has doubled over the last seven
years. The most recent census estimates growth of more than 10% a
year, outstripping most comparable rural towns and more,
proportionally, than South Africa’s biggest cities.

Population growth means a flourishing housing market and construction
industry. Neat suburban homes have been joined by new apartment blocks
and walkups which sell for as much as R1.5 million (£80,000), putting
them on par with comparable homes in Johannesburg. There is an
industrial zone of brick and aluminium factories which sell their
products around South Africa. China buys most of the pecan nuts.

    They will hurt you. There is nothing we can do
    Benjamin Khumalo,

The growth shows no signs of slowing. A sewage works meant to
accommodate 10,000 future residents is in the pipeline. There are
designs to transform the town’s humble technical training facility –
where many of the skills driving the town’s new construction were
taught – into a university.

Not a single brick has been laid by a black worker. In a reverse of
the usual situation in South Africa, all low-paying work in Orania –
from keeping the town’s gardens to packing the shelves in its grocery
stores – is performed by hard-up white Afrikaners. It is increasing
numbers of poor labourers, whose tenancy is often less secure and who
either rent or rely on subsidies from Orania’s cooperative bank, who
are largely behind the town’s growing population.
White Afrikaner Oranians build homes to house the hoped-for population boom.
Aunty Bets has worked as a cashier in several shops since she was 16
and says she enjoys it because she loves interacting with the people
of the town.
Oranians use the “Ora” as currency.

    All low-paying work in Orania is performed by hard-up white
Afrikaners. The town also has its own currency, the ‘Ora’.

Orania is owned by the Vluytjeskraal Aandeleblok (Vluytjeskraal Share
Block) company which, together with a series of internally elected
bodies, is responsible for the town’s municipal decision making.

People who want to live in Orania buy shares in the Vluytjeskraal
Aandeleblok, instead of freehold. The screening of prospective
shareholders allows for tight control. Buyers undergo extensive
vetting, central to which is their fidelity to Afrikaans language and
culture, a commitment to employing only white Afrikaners, and a string
of conservative Christian undertakings. Unmarried couples, for
instance, cannot live together.

The town exists at the mercy of the South African constitution. In the
early 2000s, a planned remapping of boundaries that would have brought
Orania under the control of a democratically elected municipality
appeared to spell the end, but the town successfully appealed to the
high court using the constitutional rights of the country’s minority
cultural groups.
Pursued and harassed

A quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, black people are
restricted to using the filling station on the edge of Orania.
Benjamin Khumalo* is one of them.

The 55-year-old and his wife, who have lived on a small nearby plot
since the 1980s, were once pursued and harassed by a pickup truck
covered with Orania stickers when walking home after an evening with
friends. “Now you must run,” he urged his wife, pushing her through a
fence. “I’ll be behind you.”

    It’s like boere [white Afrikaners] Disneyland. Except you never
have to go home
    Philip Nothnagel, town doctor

Khumalo still remembers when Orania was a home for black families. The
guns carried on the hips of many Oranians, however, have been enough
to convince him never to enter the town again. “They will hurt you,”
he says. “There is nothing we can do.”

Unsurprisingly, Orania’s white residents have a different take. The
town’s doctor, Philip Nothnagel, describes South African cities as
“warzones”. He lived in the country’s administrative capital,
Pretoria, before he moved to Orania. The 10 months since have been the
best of his life, he says.

“It’s the first time in history that a country has been established
without a war,” he adds, sporting a Lincolnesque beard after he
dressed up as Paul Kruger during recent celebrations of the Boer hero.
“It’s like boere [white Afrikaners] Disneyland. Except you never have
to go home.”
Noticeboards at a local restaurant carry a warning to European journalists.

    Noticeboards at a local restaurant carry a warning to European journalists.

The spectre of Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, is difficult to
escape. His portrait and bust seem to be around every corner. His
wife, Betsie, is buried in the town, and her old home has been
converted into a Verwoerd museum.

His grandson Carel Boshoff junior is a former leader of the Orania
Movement, which first proposed the idea of Orania in the 1980s.
Boshoff junior is perhaps one of the more unlikely fans of the pianist
Abdullah Ibrahim, whose music plays on a laptop in his office.

Like his parents and grandparents, Boshoff fears white Afrikaners face
a real threat of “being wiped out”, either through violence or what he
calls “amalgamation”. He believes the recent expansion of Orania is
just the start.
Carel Boshoff junior, grandson of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid.

    Verwoerd’s grandson, Carel Boshoff junior, worries white
Afrikaners could be ‘wiped out’

“We are something like the phoenix in the ashes,” he says. “The
questions to which Orania is the answer are so fundamental to the
structure of South African society that you can’t express and affirm
your Afrikaner identity without coming to the conclusion of a bigger
Orania.”
Offended by Orania

Orania has continued largely uncontested since its victorious appeal
to the high court in the early 2000s. The ANC government does not
appear to be considering an appeal of the high court decision. Zamani
Saul, head of the ANC-run Northern Cape government, has said an
inquiry into Orania’s legal status is yet to be concluded.

For Ngcukaitobi, the author, Orania “represents the reversal of the
constitutional project of national building.” The rights that
underpinned the town’s high court challenge against the remapping are
not unlimited, he says. Anyone who cares about South Africa “would
rightly be offended by what Orania represents, which is an enduring
legacy of racial mobilisation”.

Orapeleng Moraladi, Northern Cape secretary of the Congress of South
African Trade Unions, blames the town’s continued existence on the
courts, an uncooperative Orania leadership, and a lack of political
will from the ANC. “[The town] is like embracing an apartheid system
within a democratic state,” he says. “Orania is an indictment of the
government of South Africa.”

*Indicated names have been changed
"


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