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20100930

Afrikaners must move from the cities

”If the Afrikaner  nation wants to survive, they must create a new cultural heartland – as did the Jews after the European holocaust…

Jaco Kleynhans, ex-chief of communications at the influential Solidarity trade union, recently moved to the Afrikaner-Christian enclave Orania with his family as its new publicist. He writes that ‘the Afrikaner, population 3-million, urgently needs a ‘new cultural headquarters’ which will help them survive as a nation and help them keep intact their traditional way of life. He urges Afrikaners to ‘move out of the cities” where they are struggling to survive as a nation.

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Afrikaners need a central headquarters where they can make certain that their language, culture, traditions and history are protected. And Orania on the very edge of the Great-Karoo desert, is that place, writes Jaco Kleynhans.

Orania visit by Pres Jacob Zuma Sept 21 2010

Picture: SA pres Jacob Zuma recently visited Orania ‘on a state visit to the Afrikaner heartland.’ Next to him is its mayhor Carel Boshoff III… Afrikaners should create their new heartland in Orania if they hope to survive as a nation.

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Kleynhans views Orania as the ‘ future heartland of the Afrikaner nation ” and explains why in an article in Beeld newspaper:

“Six years ago I got to know the American heartland while travelling on an Amtrak-train from New York to Los Angeles. I’d heart a lot about the heartland but got to know it on this journey. I met a rancher in New Mexico who wanted to know whether Gary Player still played golf; and the Amish-lady with her handmade suitcase, handing out home-baked cookies to her fellow-passengers. Whenever the train stopped, whether it was Doge City in Kansas or in Lamar, Colorado, and you walked into a diner, spoke to the station’s workers and was greeted by friendly residents, you know you are in the American heartland, the place where American cultural traditions are kept alive.

“Their big cities however are just like any other Western city – a mixture of people who chase around hunting for their survival or only live for materialism. It’s in the heartland that I got to know the ‘real’ Americans. People who live the American dream, who belief in God, the power of families and who harbour the wonderful belief in honest, hard work.

“By the same token, the Afrikaner’s future survival also does not lay in the big cities of Africa. Even though our majority of people now live in the cities, urban landscapes do not represent the Afrikaner’s heartland. There’s nothing wrong with living in big cities – however every nation needs its own heartland. A place where you can be yourself first, and a world-citizen second.

“A friend recently mentioned at a meeting that what the Afrikaner sorely lacked right now was our own ‘head-office’ – a place where the Afrikaner’s language, culture, traditions and history in Africa can be safeguarded. A place where Afrikaners can be Afrikaners first, South Africans and Africans next.

“A head-office as a place where we can install our monuments, our libraries and musea; where Afrikaners can get together, and occasionally even escape to...

“During the past seven years I lived in Pretoria “… (*the city which was founded by Boer-Afrikaners during their Great Trek north). “As a stranger newly arrived from the Western Cape, I saw the Afrikaner rapidly losing his cultural grip on their capital city. They replaced their traditional commemoration of the Day of the Vow at the Voortrekker Monument with shopping trips to a Menlyn mall. The number of Afrikaner visitors to the history of our people, such as the Kruger House and countless other Afrikaner-monuments, have dropped dramatically. After all, in the city there are so many other things one can do.

And the Afrikaner has to fight for survival against the ANC’s black-economic-empowerment laws, crime, the collapse of municipal services, and the deliberate anglicisation of our universities such as the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa. Where can one still find a shopping centre with Afrikaans signposting? When can the Afrikaner still commemorate our own cultural days in the Jakaranda-city?

Afrikaner-Christian education is threatened by Cosatu call to close all private schools Sept192010

Picture: the Afrikaners are languishing in the cities under the rule of the African National Congress, with their Western cultural- and Protestant-Christian traditions overwhelmed by a vast Bantu-majority. Without a cultural heartland, the Afrikaners as a nation will die within the next generations if they stay in the cities, warns Kleynhans…

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Where is the Afrikaner heartland?

“It’s clear: the Afrikaner as a small, scattered nation will soon melt away and languish in the cities,” he writes.The Jews only became certain about the survival of their nation once they had set up an independent place of their own. Today Jews live all over the world but they have tied an umbilical cord between their Faith and their mother Israel. “

“Where is the mother where Afrikaner can attach their umbilical cord? The Afrikaner needs a new head office – and what better place than South Africa’s heartland. Nearly smack-dab in the centre of the country, on the edge of the Greater-Karoo desert, lies Orania, where Afrikaners have built up a small foothold of their own over the past 20 years.

Anti-Afrikaner propaganda machine lies about Orania:

“Unfortunately, the anti-Afrikaner propaganda machine quickly branded Orania as a ‘white’ and even as a ‘racist’ enclave where hard-core Afrikaners ‘tried to continue the apartheid system’. People clearly misunderstood Orania when it was first founded.

  • “Firstly, it’s not an ‘enclave’. There are no high walls around Orania which seperate residents from the outside world. Orania is a place where people are received as visitors with open arms – and especially Afrikaners who want to strengthen their cultural ties as Afrikaners.
  • “Orania also is a place where the reality of South Africa’s cultural diversity was accepted long before 1994 – and where active cooperation between various races aren’t seen as a stumbling block – but as a necessity.

There are Xhosa and Zulu heartlands – why not an Afrikaner heartland?

Afrikaners and Zulus If Zulus can maintain their culture in their own heartland why not the Afrikaner in Orania Kleinhans writes: “A senior ANC-member recently said that he often returns to the East-Cape ‘just to be able to speak Xhosa again, and to practice his cultural traditions.’ President Jacob Zuma, who also recently visited Orania, also is seen to do exactly the same thing when he visits his Zulu-heartland village of Nkandla”. (picture above)

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Kleinhans concludes: “With the Zulus in KwaZulu-Natal and the Xhosas in the Eastern Cape clearly having a cultural heartland of their own, why can’t the Afrikaner also have his own place? My family and I moved to Orania a month ago. We want to work on the dream to create a place for the Afrikaner – our own badly-needed ‘head-office’….” http://www.beeld.com/In-Diepte/Nuus/Afrikaners-se-heil-le-nie-in-stede-nie-20100922

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Orania and Kleinfontein: the future of Boer/Afrikaner survival:

    UNPO map of unrepresented Nations and Peoples includes the Afrikaner AFRIKANERS JOINED UNREPRESENTED NATIONS AND PEOPLES’ ORGANISATION IN THE HAGUE TO GIVE THEM INTERNATIONAL PLATFORMS AS AN ETHNIC-MINORITY

    The Boers/Afrikaners all hope that private sonamed ‘white’ towns like Orania in the North-Cape, and Kleinfontein, 30 km east of Pretoria, will serve as ‘cultural seeds’ for a future homeland which can protect their unique language, religion cultural and ethnic-heritage on the southern African continent. Today, 300 residents live in Kleinfontein and some 800 in Orania. Afrikaner-residents there are concentrated on self-labour: they do all their own work, run their own schools and municipal services and take care of the Afrikaner old and the poor. Permanent homes are mushrooming in both towns. But when asked how long it will take to grow into a homeland, Kleinfontein town board member Jan Groenewald admits “not in my lifetime.”  Since the end of apartheid in 1994, many hundreds of thousands of the 3-million often well-educated Afrikaners have fallen on hard times because the ANC government has made laws barring their access to the job market. On the edge of some major SA towns, squatter camps of homeless Afrikaners spread like Okie camps in 1930’s California. In 2001, Solidarity trade union’s Helping Hand charity counted 120 camps and by the end of 2009 this had grown to 430 camps for destitute internal Afrikaner refugees - housing some 800,000 empoverished, homeless and unemployable Boers and Afrikaners countrywide. To represent their unique minority internationally, the Afrikaner has also joined UNPO – as indeed did another small SA ethnic-group, the  Venda (Vhavenda) (map above). http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2009/11/future-of-boer-and-orania.html

Xhosa and Pondo heartland:

Zulu heartland: