Inside South Africa’s whites-only enclave where young people are flocking after deciding

A generation has grown up in the closed world of Orania, South Africa‘s whites-only Afrikaner enclave on the margins of the rainbow nation that this year celebrates its 35th anniversary.

And more young people from the white minority are moving to the small town, drawn by a new college and a sense of home carved out of the country’s melting pot of cultures.

The Friday night crowd at Stokkies bar appeared mostly aged under 30, all Afrikaans-speaking descendants of the early European colonisers.

Bathed in blue light and lulled by country music, sons and daughters of Orania mingled in the tobacco smoke with students in engineering or plumbing.

The owner of Stokkies, where a table is set aside for arm-wrestling bouts to ‘settle disputes’, has the profile of many of Orania’s young people: someone who left only to return.

After moving to the town with his parents at the age of eight, Thomas de Villiers left as an adult for the cosmopolitan metropolis of Cape Town.

But the high cost of living drove him back, the 31-year-old told AFP.

Charlotte van Niekerk, 22, also chose to return to the arid town, which was founded in the Northern Cape province in 1991 and now counts just over 3,000 residents.

She lived here with her parents between the ages of four and 14 before they moved to outlying farms.

‘Lot of kids that grew up with me can’t wait to be 18 so they can just leave this place,’ said the Taylor Swift lookalike who works in marketing.

‘But it’s funny because they go away and then a lot of the time they just come back after a couple of years when they’ve seen it’s not so wonderful out there,’ she added.

She misses the cinema most of all but says the launch of a training college in 2019 has brought new energy to the town.

Nearly all its 250 students come from elsewhere, selected – as are all residents – on the basis of ethnicity, religion, a strong work ethic and a clean criminal record.

The college is planning for an intake of 800 students within four years, town spokesman Joost Strydom told AFP, pointing to dormitories under construction.

Few are likely to stay after graduation: jobs are scarce and the biggest nearby town, Hopetown, with 10,000 inhabitants, is 25 miles away.

But at least while they are here, the students are spending money at the petrol pump, the minimarket and at Stokkies.

‘The social life is quite different from Pretoria or Joburg,’ said David Loock, 21.

‘We go fishing in our free time,’ he said, as a friend took out a photograph of a huge catfish pulled from the adjoining Orange River. 

Motocross is another favourite pastime.

Orania’s small-town feel has won over 19-year-old Divan van der Westhuizen, originally from sprawling Johannesburg about 600 km to the northeast.

‘It’s been a big change coming from where you mingle with a lot of people,’ he said.

‘It did me good to be back with my own people, the Afrikaners,’ said van der Westhuizen, wearing a moustache and ‘Boere-style’ shorts.

Orania’s inhabitants make up only a fraction of South Africa’s Afrikaner population, estimated at around 2.6 million of 62 million people in 2022.

But its reinforcement of identity appeals to young Afrikaners in much the same way as MAGA conservatives in the United States and European far-right parties, both attracting a younger demographic.

The Afrikaner minority led South Africa through much of the stark apartheid-era oppression of the black majority, who were only given the vote in 1994.

The establishment of the new ‘rainbow nation’ led some Afrikaners to fear for the future of their culture and language.

While thousands of Afrikaners are seduced by US President Donald Trump’s offer of refuge, 23-year-old Doret Le Cornu found a harbour in Orania when she moved in three years ago.

‘This is a place where we want to build on that culture and not lose it,’ she told AFP.

‘We are the majority here, without having to fear that there are a bigger majority around us.’

For Cara Tomlinson, 25, ‘Orania is a place where you can be yourself’.

‘In your house you can just lay down on the couch, watching TV,’ she said. 

‘But at a stranger’s home you should sit upright, talk to them nicely, and I think that’s the difference.’

Twenty minutes east of South Africa’s capital Pretoria, past a high fence, is another secluded community where every one of its 1,500 residents is white.

Founded in 1990, the secretive enclave of Kleinfontein is manned by white security guards and presents itself as a counter-model to the challenges facing the democratic South Africa.

Residents of Kleinfontein are strictly Afrikaner, and claim they are an oppressed and endangered minority in a country where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party gives preferential treatment to the black population.

Three decades after apartheid, the average white household in South Africa still holds 20 times more wealth than the average black household, and white people, who make up less than 10 per cent of the population, own nearly three-quarters of the country’s private land.

But Dannie de Beer, the vice chairman of Kleinfontein’s board of directors, insists white farmers are ‘unwanted’ in the country and are facing a ‘travesty that is just as bad as apartheid’.

Echoing the recent sentiments of Trump, who made the contested claim that there was a ‘genocide’ against white South Africans, De Beer said that white farmers are ‘persecuted’. 

The US president’s claim has been widely discredited, with a South African court dismissing the idea of a ‘white genocide’ in the country as ‘clearly imagined and not real’.

Nevertheless, De Beer believes he and other Afrikaners are in a ‘battle for survival’.

‘They are being murdered on the farms. I have personal experience of being held at gunpoint. Violence in South Africa is completely out of control.’

In contrast, in the 30 years of life at Kleinfontein, he says there’s never been an example of a violent crime.

For De Beer, a positive of Kleinfontein is its cultural monotony and homogeneity.

‘Only Afrikaans is spoken in the community and as a Christian community Sunday is respected as a day of worship.

‘This means that all the complexities of different languages and religions are automatically absent,’ he says.

He’s neighbours with people like Dries Oncke and his wife, Annatjie, who arrived after burglars broke into their home in a nearby town. ‘It was black persons,’ Annatjie, 49, who works as a maid and nanny, told the Guardian.

Teaching student Sune Jansen van Rensburg, whose brother-in-law grew up in the small enclave, moved in three years ago with her parents following a ‘traumatic’ break-in attempt at their previous house in Pretoria.

‘If my child walks around my home, I want them to interact with people with the same values and way they see the world,’ the 21-year-old told AFP.

De Beer has been involved in the rural settlement since he was a student in the University of Pretoria, when in 1988 he helped out with initial construction. In 2000, he built his first house, and in 2015 he built his second.

He lives in a community of doctors, scientists, engineers and farmers who have collectively opted out of mainstream society in favour of the secluded neighbourhood.

‘We see the refugees from South Africa,’ he says, referring to the Afrikaners who have travelled to the states following Trump’s controversial signing of an executive order last February, giving them refugee status.

‘The Afrikaner farmers are being persecuted on their farms, and luckily the Trump administration has broken the silence about a travesty that is just as bad as apartheid.’

In May 2025, the first 59 Afrikaners had arrived on American soil, after the US suspended its refugee settlement programme for people fleeing war and persecution in countries including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan.

Last month, his administration said it will increase the number of white South Africans it admits as refugees this year from about 7,500 to 17,500, claiming that ‘unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation’.

‘Discrimination in South Africa is rough. If you’re not a majority black-owned company, you cannot do work, you cannot get a job,’ De Beer says.

‘We’re in a country that tramples on minority rights. Survival of the Afrikaner is of tantamount importance.

‘Why would the world take notice of apartheid, tolerate it for 40 years, condemn it, then approve of a majority black government that does exactly the same in reverse?’

The settlement abides by a totally different calendar to the rest of South Africa, with certain events given special importance such as the Day of the Vow, when a small force of Voortrekkers (Dutch immigrants) defeated a Zulu force on December 16, 1838, during the Battle of Blood River. 

For De Beer, the Protestant Christian community where he lives and farms is about preserving ‘Afrikaner people as a cultural community’.

The residents host harvest celebrations, where blonde children face off in games of tug-of-war and sack races.

On October 10, they’ll celebrate the birthday of Paul Kruger, the Afrikaner president of the gold-rich Transvaal – the independent Boer republic, before it was annexed by the British empire.

‘That is our history,’ De Beer says. ‘The Mandela history is not that much the Afrikaner history. The ANC revolution is also not Afrikaner history. The Afrikaner history starts with settlers from Europe, France, Belgium, Holland, in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape.’

In the community’s midst, you’ll find a shopping centre, a bank, a pre-school and a reservoir – normal features of any town, but what makes Kleinfontein uncanny is you’ll only see white faces.

De Beer rejects any suggestion that the rural settlement is governed by white-supremacist racial ideology; instead, Kleinfontein is about preserving ‘Afrikaner people as a cultural community’, he argues.

In the same breath, however, he notes that Kleinfontein is about preserving Afrikaner people as an ‘ethnic community’ – that is, a people descended from white European settlers.

In a nation of 51.5 million black people, only white people live within its high walls. When asked whether a person of colour might ever be permitted to enter, he says: ‘It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s not possible for me to exclude that possibility, whether it be next year or whether it be in five years from now.

‘There might be somebody that approaches the community of colour saying: “I speak fluent Afrikaans, I’m an absolute devout Christian, I identify with the Afrikaner cause, I hate what the ANC is doing to the Afrikaners, and I despise farm murders”.

‘That might happen,’ he says doubtfully. 

At Kleinfontein’s entrance stands a great grey bust dedicated to Hendrik Verwoerd, the Dutch-born sixth prime minister of South Africa nicknamed the ‘father of apartheid’ for his entrenchment of draconian anti-black racial policies into law.

There are strict entrance criteria determining who can join Kleinfontein, with rigorous screenings and interviews being a prerequisite for residency.

Two questions – among many others testing an applicants’ linguistic, cultural, and religious fit – will always be asked: ‘Are you ready for Kleinfontein? And is Kleinfontein ready for you?’

When screening prospective applicants, De Beer says he looks for Christians whose families speak fluent Afrikaans, and who are willing to ‘conform’ to the community.

‘So, if in your application to live in Kleinfontein, you answer that you refuse to learn Afrikaans, you don’t speak Afrikaans, and you’re a devout Muslim, or a devout Hindu, or any of the other faiths, the chances are that you won’t fit into the community,’ he says, noting that there are no mosques in the enclave, ‘and I doubt there ever will be’.

Insisting the entrance requirements are about ‘culture, not race’, he declares that a ‘lily-white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed German’, who practiced Islam and refused to learn Afrikaans, would not have a successful application.

De Beer insists that those arguing his community is a ‘racial enclave’ are spreading malicious falsehoods, but his words are at odds with Jan Groenewald – one of the community’s founders – who told AFP that to apply for membership ‘you must look like a Boer Afrikaner’.

Afrikaner-led governments presided over the brutal race-based apartheid system that oppressed South Africa’s black majority until 1994.

In the 1980s, during the violent last years of apartheid, Groenewald was second-in-command of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, AWB), a neo-Nazi group that committed several deadly attacks on black South Africans.

He claims he now rejects the political violence and murders and left the group in 1989, albeit without renouncing the idea of an independent Afrikaner state.

The founders bought the land that would become Kleinfontein in 1990, four years before the country’s first democratic elections. The area has ‘a historical value’ as it was the site of a battle against British troops in 1900, Groenewald said.

‘If you occupy land in great numbers, there’s no way that you can force those people out,’ he added.