Editorial: Self-determination – or extinction?

It boggles the mind that, in this day and age, there are still people who believe racial and religious superiority have any kind of place in a democratic South Africa.

Take the group behind a new, Orania-like settlement that is being planned for the Willowmore area of the Eastern Cape.

Anyone can come along – only you must be white, can’t have black friends and have to live according to Christian principles.

No, this isn’t a question of racism, they say, rather one of culture.

The group’s spokesman cites “white genocide” in South Africa as part justification for the project – and one wonders what this illusion that whites are systematically being wiped out is based on, exactly.

Quite simply, this is paranoid, blinkered thinking at its worst.

And if these people are looking at Orania as any kind of inspiration for their project they had better look again.

Anyone who has been to the small, whites-only Northern Cape town lately will know that its population of just over 1 000 Afrikaners is a far cry from the 60 000 residents its late founding father, Carel Boshoff, imagined it would have by the mid-2000s.

No one is clamouring to be a part of this community.

Orania is no success story at all; it is a barren dust-land with an ageing population stuck in a time warp while clinging to the illusion of so-called “self-determination”.

People like the ones now weighing up a lily-white lifestyle on the outskirts of Willowmore cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that countless white South Africans have embraced this country in all its rich and beautiful diversity – and have built fruitful, happy lives here.

The rest of us have, by living democracy first hand for the past 22 years, largely got over our most fundamental race issues.

At the same time no one is saying that racism has been eradicated – far from it.

Indeed much inequality still exists and this is manifesting itself in situations such as the ones currently raging on our campuses.

But, while they know the rainbow nation will never be perfect, many are still here, trying in their own, small ways to make it so for all South Africans.