What Can South Africa's Whites-Only City-State Tell Us About the Rainbow Nation's Future?

The official national story of South Africa since 1994 is of "the Rainbow Nation". In theory, then, Afrikaners – descendants of the first European colonists in South Africa – fit in just as much as any other group in a country with 11 official languages, where black Africans are likely to identify themselves in part by their mother tongue and culture (Mandela was a Xhosa; current president, Jacob Zuma, is proudly Zulu).

But the founding myths and history of this "white tribe" places it, even more than English-speaking whites, in an uneasy relationship with the rest of the country. Afrikaner identity has its heart in the countryside, its head in the Bible and its hands on a gun. This tension was evoked by writers like Rian Malan and Antjie Krog, and singers such as Koos Kombuis, who during the last decade of Apartheid wrote "Boer in Beton" (Farmer in [the] Concrete [Jungle]), a song that includes the lyrics: "Every ancestor is a pioneer / And I know I don't belong here / I sit in bars late at night / But I no longer recall the smell of the land."

For a tiny number of Afrikaners, their response to this tension has been to retreat into isolation. By the middle of the 1980s it was obvious to all but the thickest or most deluded racist whites that majority rule was coming to South Africa in some form. A small group centred around the right-wing academic Carel Boshoff, son-in-law of the former Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, concluded that in order for the Afrikaans language and culture to survive its people would have to live in splendid isolation. Their long-term goal was the creation of a volkstaat, a separate Afrikaner "homeland" within the present territory of South Africa.

In 1990, Boshoff and the others bought a patch of land by the Orange River, together with a cluster of houses that had been built by the Department of Water Affairs for workers digging irrigation canals. They called this small town Orania, and moved in the following year. This prototype homeland now has a population of just over 1,000. (The Afrikaans-speaking white population in South Africa in 2011 was 2,710,461.)

When she moved to South Africa in 2011 to work as a journalist, the Swedish writer Kajsa Norman was immediately intrigued by Orania. But, she says, her Afrikaans friends in Johannesburg were reluctant to talk about it.

"So many Afrikaners kind of avoided it," she told me when we met in London to discuss her new book, Bridge Over Blood River: The Afrikaners' Fight for Survival. "When I started asking people, they didn't really want to recognise its existence and they had highly exaggerated views of what went on there. People would say, 'They're into child labour,' or, 'They're a bunch of racists,' which is probably true for most of them, but still the people who had very strong opinions hadn't actually been and didn't know very much about it."

So Kajsa decided to visit and, ultimately, write a book about South Africa in which the story of Orania is a recurring theme.

But what could a town of a thousand backward nostalgists for Apartheid tell you about contemporary South Africa? Norman disputes the description, for a start. "If it had only been a quote-unquote racist community, then it's not as interesting, and I don't think I would have spent as much time describing the place," she said. "Because, you know, racists can be found anywhere." Especially in South Africa? "Indeed."

So, though she does not set out to defend Orania, Norman does try to set it into a South African context. In South Africa, segregation is the norm, she points out. In a sense, Orania is no more a white ghetto than the gated communities which can be found in the wealthiest suburbs of South Africa's cities. The difference is that those places select by wealth, and while money is colour-blind in theory, in practice it still isn't. "The problem isn't Orania in that sense" Kajsa argues, "the problem is the white society in general."

What's more, she argues, in a perverse way Orania has something valuable to teach white South Africans. Because of their commitment to living in isolation, all work in Orania is done by residents. House cleaners, gardeners, street sweepers, petrol pump attendants, fruit pickers: all are white.

"This concept of k*fferwerk [work done by black people], of having someone else do your work for you, is totally wrong," the PR Director of Orania told Kajsa when they first met. Kajsa suggests to me, half-seriously, that urban whites would benefit from a spell in Orania putting this lesson into practice. Like an internship? She laughs.

It's just a shame that the people of Orania can only realise their vision of selfwerksaamheid (self-reliance) in a whites-only conservative city-state where sex outside of marriage is forbidden. Ultimately, Orania is a dead end, as the Afrikaans tabloid Beeld concluded in 2010. White South Africans who are pessimistic about the country and want to live in a racist white-majority country are more likely to move to Australia, or Britain, than Orania.

For romantic reasons with which it's easy to sympathise, Norman hopes that the Afrikaans language and culture will survive, and quotes the historian Hermann Giliomee lamenting that his grandchildren prefer to speak English at home. The irony is that it's precisely the Oranians' isolationism that means the language will never be saved by their methods. It will survive, just maybe not in their mouths. The majority of speakers in South Africa are "coloured", a label applied (without the same stigma it has in Britain) to those whose ancestry is mixed, predominantly the descendants of Khoisan people and the slaves of the early colony. In fact, the first written Afrikaans was produced by slaves and freed people in Cape Town in the early 19th century. They copied out transliterated verses of the Koran, using Arabic script. If the language has a future, it lies in this past.

Kasja Norman, author of "Bridge Over Blood River" is in conversation with John Battersby at Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, on the 17th November

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