Having covered the Free State Project in a previous episode, a political migration undertaken by American libertarians, we will continue this theme by looking at the town of Orania in South Africa, which is a project of Boer Nationalists. This settlement is controversial both in South Africa and in the world, and like our video on the Southern US we will be clear to delineate problems with Boer Nationalism when it comes into conflict with liberalism. However, as a peaceful political movement, Orania still offers much in the way of education for libertarians.

The part of Africa to later become the Republic of South Africa was sparsely populated by hunter gatherer tribes in the 1650s when Dutch traders set up Cape Town as a permanent outpost. While slavery was an important part of the Dutch trade (controlled by the Dutch East Indies company), these slaves were imported from West Africa and Indonesia while the hunter gatherer Khoisans and other tribes had a mostly peaceful relationship with the Dutch, proving wage labor for farms. Independent Dutch farmers that found Company rule too stifling became Trekboers, nomadic pastoralists that moved deeper into the interior outside of any European rule starting in the 1680s. By the late 18th century the liberal revolutions in France and America had inspired the Cape middle class along with the Trekboers to overthrow the Dutch East Indies company in 1795 and establish independent republics while the Dutch State was distracted with Napoleon.

Napoleon’s victory over the Netherlands caused the British to invade Cape Town in 1795 and in 1815 Cape Colony was officially part of the British Empire. Relations between the British and the Dutch settlers (known by then colloquially as “Boers”) were heavily strained due to a number of differences between the two, not the least being British anti-slavery policies. In 1834 slavery was abolished in Cape Colony, and this drove thousands of Boers to make what is known as the Great Trek in 1836 away from British control and to make polities of their own in the Northeast of the current borders of South Africa. They were joined by so called Griqua who were a mixed race population descended from both Dutch settlers and Khoe speaking indigenous people, forming “Griqua states” on the borders of the new Boer Republics, the largest and most important being the Transvaal Republic, founded in 1852. While African workers were still denied civil rights and ill-treated, chattel slavery’s abolition had ultimately not been reversed by the Boers, and instead blacks were subjected to mandatory “apprenticeships” until their early 20s and indentured servitude.

The Great Trek and the Boer Republics came into contact with the expansionist and powerful Zulu Empire, fighting their first skirmishes in 1837. While the Boers were able to defeat the Zulu in battle many times, they were attacked from the rear by the British, who annexed the small Natal Republic in 1843. As all three civilizations converged, a three way series of conflicts erupted during the mid-19th century. After the 1866 discovery of diamonds in Northeast South Africa, the British were dead set on eventually annexing the independent Boer Republics, and this only intensified after the “Scramble for Africa” went into overdrive. In 1880, right after the British had finally subdued the Zulus, the First Boer War began. In the short but decisive war, the British were soundly defeated by the citizen militia of the South African Republic, one of the few definitive British military defeats in the modern age. However, this was short lived, as the British prepared for another, longer and bloodier war.

In 1899, longstanding tensions over the civil rights of “uitlanders” (foreign, mostly British workers who came to make money in the gold and diamond mines of the S.A.R.) exploded in the Second Boer War. While the Boers were again wily guerilla opponents, the British used systemic attacks on the Boer way of life, including the establishment of giant concentration camps for Boer prisoners and civilians which led to the deaths of thousands of helpless people. The UK spent huge sums of money and more soldiers than had died in any single war 1815-1914 to force the surrender of the Boers in 1902. The defeated Boers were incorporated into what in 1910 became the Dominion of South Africa, a self governing country. By then, Cape Colony had been flooded with English speakers, and the Afrikaners (Dutch speakers) became one of two major constituencies in the country, with Commonwealth friendly parties like the United Party arrayed against the Boer Nationalist National Party. Under British rule, indentured servitude had been abolished and Africans had little to no civil rights, but were at least free to own themselves. After almost a half century of political intrigue between the two factions, the Nationals in 1948 came out on top and governed the country until the end of the system they imposed upon their assumption of power, Apartheid.

Apartheid, or “separateness” was a set of racial policies which restricted the employment, civil, travel and other rights of non-whites in South Africa. By this time South Africa had a significant population of black migrant workers which had come to the country during the first half of the 20th century, along with a lower middle class of Indian and Chinese workers. Apartheid divided the country into “national homes” wherein every race was to have specific parts of the country to themselves. Naturally, the ruling whites were to have the best land, the sole right to vote for federal elections and largely not be subject to the laws that were constructed. International outcry gradually intensified as the rest of the continent of Africa was decolonized, while the “Union” maintained forcible minority rule and fought African rights groups like the African National Congress. The ANC was founded and backed by communists and communist states, and is not a faultless organization, but it gained much of its support from people from all races who were horrified by the oppressive state of their government. When the United States finally imposed sanctions on the isolated South Africa in 1986 moderates within the National Party started thinking about transition plans.

In 1990, the ANC leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and after the Prime Minister de Klerk introduced liberal democratic reforms he led the African National Congress to victory in 1994 and became the PM of South Africa. It would be nice to say that this was the introduction to a blooming, liberal multi-cultural society but ANC run South Africa (the only party to govern since then) has been a tragic story of corruption, incompetence, and ethnic strife.

As the Afrikaners saw their political control of the entire country slipping away in the 90s, the founders of the Orania project saw a “Volkstaat” (a people’s or “racial state”) as a solution, a small but wholly Boer country without the risk of demographic displacement. While the Volkstaat was vigorously opposed by the South African government both before and after democracy was imposed, Orania itself was not attacked, and Nelson Mandela himself visited the town in 1995. The government of South Africa continues to say the settlement, all White, is legitimate. Indeed, libertarians have basically nothing to say against Orania either, as it is currently simply a settlement with a discriminatory clause for buying property. The grand dream of the Volkstaat can be conditionally supported if it does not involve the mass deportation or disenfranchisement of non-Afrikaners.

Orania and Boer Nationalism is is more politically controversial than left wing national liberation movements we have supported in the past, but fair minded libertarians should say that left and right wing nationalists are basically wrong in the same ways, but Pan-secession means accepting that both should be allowed to be wrong. The sins of Boers of the past do not belong to the Boers of today, and there are hundreds of reasons for them to not want to associate with the state-socialist failure that is modern South Africa. So long live Orania! And may 1000 flowers bloom!