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June 7, 2023 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:21:11
Orania: Afrikaner Homeland in South Africa

The head of the Orania Movement explains the challenges and rewards of building a Boer homeland on land no one wanted.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Radio Renaissance.
I'm your host, Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and I'm very pleased to have as my guest on this podcast, Jus Uest Strydom.
His name is spelled J-O-O-S-T-S-T-R-Y-D-O-M, and he is a spokesman for Orania.
That is the Afrikaner Christian community in South Africa set up to preserve the Afrikaner culture and way of life.
U.S.
Freedom is now the head of the Iranian movement, and this is Irania's idea movement, with its focus on explaining Irania to Afrikaners in South Africa and also to the world.
Mr. Strydom is the public relations contact, including with opponents and even enemies of Orania, and his role is to improve relations with everyone, because not being friends doesn't necessarily mean being enemies.
Mr. Streatham holds a bachelor's degree in communications and social anthropology, and he's also studying philosophy, economics, and politics.
And he moved to Irania with his family in 1995 and has always been involved in African activism, politics, and practical solutions.
So welcome, Mr. Streatham, to this podcast.
I'm delighted that you can be with us.
Mr. Taylor, thank you for the opportunity.
It's always lovely to speak about Iran and with the introduction that you just gave, I'm not sure there's much more to say.
That was a very good summary of what the Iranian movement does and why we are here.
I think it's a very good summary.
So thank you for that.
Can you give me just a brief history about the origins of Iran?
Explain Urania.
One would need to explain a bit about South Africa as well and some African history as well.
It's a very complex matter.
It's not as straightforward or as easy to grapple with as a lot of people might think.
And the reason for that is that South Africa is an incredibly complex country.
It's been through different regimes through the ages.
It's it is a country with a lot of different cultures and a lot of different people and a lot of different opinions.
And in this formed a nation of people that originated from Europe.
As primarily for religious reasons, but also mixed with some fortune-seeking and some other things.
So out of a lot of different European nations, primarily the Dutch and the French and the Germans, started a new nation, a new folk here in South Africa, and had very interesting and controversial times.
And through all of that ended at a point after lots of wars and conflict and things that South Africa was formed into one country under British rule in the stage between 1903 and 1910.
And the Afrikaners, I would say, he made the mistake of taking control of that country formed by the British.
And we did that in 1948 and ruled the country as a minority ruler.
Group from then to 1994 when the ANC Under Nelson Mandela to control of South Africa.
So that's a bit of a context of the country and let me just let me just interrupt you if I may Why do you consider it a mistake for the Afrikaners to have taken control of the nation?
I consider it a mistake because I think in the first place it was a mistake to try and group South Africa and The geographical area into South Africa, the state.
I think that Afrikaners would be in a much better position in the way that we lived before all of this, before 1903, when we lost the war against the British.
And if we were just focusing on our own republics, so it's quite a complex past, but basically the Afrikaners had multiple republics, almost something like 20 different republics.
It's just a state form that we like a lot.
We like the republic.
And what happened was that we also like to disagree on things with each other, as you might have noticed.
So Afrikaners started a lot of different republics, but two of them survived.
That was the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic.
And they modernized actually very, very well.
And they had good legal systems, good political systems.
Both of them were building good economies and so on.
And all of that changed when the British consolidated the entire South Africa, which was at that stage the republics of the Afrikaner or the Boer, the English colonies, some traditional groups who had monarchies or nomadic tribes, lots of different peoples.
And the English just flushed everyone together in a country with very strange borders.
And did that for purely economic reasons, as is the thing that empires concern themselves with a lot of times.
And I think the Afrikaner would be better off if we just controlled our own space, our own republic, and not try to control this entire very big country.
South Africa is quite a large country.
I think we would have been better off if we just created a kind of a heimat for ourselves.
I understand.
I understand.
And then you had brought us up to 1994, that very pivotal year.
Yeah.
So what happened is we were against it when the British created one South Africa.
But when we took over and tried to manage this incredibly complex country, And while you're in a strong position where you are in charge and make decisions, it was not an arrangement that could last.
So in the end, when we lost the control of South Africa as a country, that entire idea of a single state just transferred to the current ANC government.
And put us in a lot of problems because the Afrikaner got so reliant on the state and state institutions to look after us.
And we had to very, very drastically make a lot of changes in a very bad position with a lot of opposition.
And it was a very tough, tough time for Afrikaners since since 1994, because we lost not only lost control of everything that we used to control, but also We got into a position where some of those institutions were actively used against us, where things like black economic empowerment actually now actively excludes Afrikaners from the economy, from economic opportunities and things like that.
Does black economic empowerment, does that exclude all whites or Afrikaners especially?
No, black economic empowerment is very much built on the basis of race, so there's no cultural nuance.
It's empowerment of black people and exclusion of white people.
South Africa actually as a country has got 124 laws based on race.
124 close laws based on race.
I'm pretty sure of that specific amount, but it's 120 something laws based on race.
So South Africa, although it, you know, creates this illusion of being the country
that defeated racism with the best constitution in the world
and other stories that is completely untrue, is still one of the countries in the world
with the most laws in our legal system based on race.
So no, it's very, very specifically racial laws and not built on things like culture or other nuances.
But specifically race.
Can you give me some examples of race-based law in South Africa today?
Well, you will have the normal stuff that I think a lot of people in the United States would be aware of as well.
That would be things like diversity quotas in things like universities, for example.
So what you typically have is to go study as a medical doctor or a veterinarian or things like that.
The quotas for race has got a major implication on the on the marks that you need from high school to achieve to
go and study in that specific lines.
So for a doctor, for example, you need way lower high school scores than you would have
needed if you were white.
So that is affirmative action type of policies.
But you also have other things.
One of the most controversial at this stage is obviously the land issues.
So the land issue has been a major issue in South Africa for quite a while now.
But since 2017, I think, there is absolute legal framework that's been created very specifically to remove private land ownership from white people in order to give that to black South Africans and the reasoning behind that is that under the previous regime land were quote-unquote stolen from the native population and that needs to be given back and that's with total disregard for the idea of private property.
It's total disregard of the ways that property was acquired And if this process goes much further, the legal framework in the shape that it was put through Parliament actually implies that any private property can be expropriated without any compensation, specifically focused on targeting whites and giving that to, as the president of the country stated, we will take the land from white people and give it to our people.
Um, which is, uh, there's no, uh, there's no two ways to understand that.
So that's some examples, but there's an official set of legal narratives in terms of what you can do and where you can get into and so on in terms of race, but also a lot of unofficial things, just with the current government in control, with a communistic background, with a bit of an African populist politic point of view.
There's also an unofficial set of rules, unofficial narrative, which just means that Afrikaners have denied entry into a lot of public spaces in terms of economic and political power.
It's just denied that.
And that's where the entire idea of Orania comes from, you know?
Rather than to try and fight that, rather to try to compete against that, rather than to scream and shout and go to every imaginable court about things like that, we just, we have the point of view that we don't want to take anything away from other people.
We are going to create a reality for ourselves and we're going to create a reality that other people cannot deny us.
If we build it ourselves, very specifically with our own labor and on our own terms, we can get into a position where we can make certain decisions for ourselves.
No, it seems like a very admirable approach.
And it is an approach that more and more racially aware white people are thinking in terms of as well.
Instead of fighting a system that doesn't work, simply disengage and build your own establishment.
Try to succeed on your own terms.
When was Iran originally founded and by whom and under what circumstances?
That's a very interesting question because it doesn't have a very straightforward or simple answer.
Because Urania is a physical establishment.
It came long after the idea was already active in certain Afrikaner intellectual or academic circles of thought.
So the physical establishment of Urania happened in 1991.
And that implies that Urania is actually older than the so-called New South Africa.
So that is something interesting to note.
Secondly, the Urania Idea Organization, which I am employed at, is the Urania Movement, and that was created in 1988.
So that would be three years before Urania was actually physically established.
And then even more so, there was another organization called Sabra.
And Sabra did research as long back as the 1950s.
Very interestingly, Sabra was actually advising the National Party who was in charge of the country back from 1948.
And Sabra actually had a different approach than the National Party.
And they suggested that Afrikaners rather concentrate in one area, concentrate in a specific area, become a demographic majority in that area, And instead of trying to control the entire South African country, instead of trying to make laws regarding everyone, it would be much wiser to just focus on a space for ourselves and build our own institutions and more.
And Sabra's advice was actually not listened to by the national government, and they had to take another route.
And from that route, from the Sabra intellectual framework, came the earliest versions of the Iranian idea.
We said, OK, there is a third position.
So, I see.
So, even in the 1950s there were far-seeing Afrikaners who realized that trying to dominate this entire complicated landmass was likely to fail and that Afrikaners should build something exclusively for themselves.
You know, the idea being that it's unwise to try and control other people's Lives and views and so on.
South Africa is so incredibly diverse that it would be unwise for everyone, much less the very incompetent ANC government.
Not for Afrikaners, not for the British.
No one should try and control everything.
Afrikaners should much rather focus on just creating a space where Afrikaner culture, heritage, religion, things like that is in a majority.
Because it's maybe something, it's maybe a point of view that more conservative people in the United States Have less appreciation for because they maybe haven't experienced it firsthand.
But to be a minority in your own country is a very scary thing, especially in South Africa where Afrikaners is about 2 million people and there's more than 60 million people in the country.
To be a minority that small is both physically dangerous if the mainstream media propagates constantly that you are, you know, the group of people responsible for all that is bad.
Everything that happened in the past that is that is bad.
You're easy identifiable group.
You can be identified on the street by You know by the color of your skin and you've lost all political and economical and military powers We have no power.
You've been previously in charge of the country and you easily identifiable It's not a very good position to be in if you're a small minority and that's actually quite a scary position to be in and that's exactly the position that we are in and And that's why there was a very urgent need to rethink our strategy.
While some Afrikaners chose to integrate into the new system, to become part of the so-called Rainbow Nation, and other Afrikaners chose to immigrate out of South Africa en masse, the people of Orania said, well, we see ourselves as part of this continent as Afrikaners.
Our name, the name of our language and more, came for from being in Africa, we've been here for almost 400 years,
we have the right to be here, but we also see that there's some practical implications
regarding us being here, and there's some danger, and there's 70 murders, not 17,
70 murders per day in South Africa.
So it's a dangerous country.
We are not very much liked here.
We should embrace what I would like to call a third position and create a space where we can control at least some degree of our own fate in our own space.
Yes, quite remarkable and I believe admirable.
And so one of the founders was a fellow named Karl Boshoff, was he not?
And when did the actual physical beginnings of the Iranian settlement begin?
Yes, so Karl Boshoff, he was a professor, a theological professor.
So he had that background, but was also a man that had the Afrikaner cause as a very high priority for himself and involved in politics and activism.
There was a lot of energy regarding what we called back then a folk start.
So a folk state would be the best translation.
I don't really think there's another translation for that.
But there was a lot of energy for that in the late 1980s when Afrikaansers realized that regime change is actually happening and that it's not going to work out very well for us.
And people like Professor Karl Bossoff and a fellow called Dr. Chris Uesta, which was a man very skilled in the social sciences.
But also with a very good understanding of human migration, the two of them and some other members of both Sabra and Afstug realized that the only solution is to seek the demographically least occupied part of South Africa, acquire land there.
And to form a majority there.
So it just so happens that between 1988 and 1991, a small government town that was previously used to house workers who constructed some government infrastructure, dams and the channel system and so on, and which was later totally deserted and became a ghost town.
The state wanted to sell it because no one was interested.
Actually very interesting the state offered it to the military because they said it's such a remote location that the military could have a lot of exercises and things and they would bother no one.
The military wasn't interested and the police and corrective services and so on wasn't interested as well.
So the state decided to sell this little ghost town which was really really nothing more than a temporary housing scheme for workers.
And it was deserted, a ghost town for many years.
And they decided to sell off the land to a local farmer in order to just get rid of it.
They didn't need it anymore.
And Professor Karl Bossoff and Dr. Chris Uester heard of this, and they put in a bid.
And after some troubles, they actually won the town.
They bought the town, very basic infrastructure for just over one million rands.
I'll tell you nowadays that's about the price that a single plot for a house just a small bit of real estate sells for.
So that was actually bought in 1991 and then in absolute faith and with a lot of courage the first 30 pioneer families moved to Iran and the infrastructure was in shambles and they had to start rebuilding.
And obviously it was a very slow start, but from 1991 things really, it was the manifestation of an idea that stood for a long time, but then finally someone had the guts to just try something and then Urania started.
So this was land that really nobody wanted.
And if the world media had a different view of things, It sounds as though they would celebrate this acquisition of essentially wasteland and turning it into something productive the way they celebrate what the Jewish pioneers did in Israel, made the desert bloom.
But it sounds, yes, very much like you settled in an area that absolutely no one wanted.
Exactly.
And there's another factor that's in South Africa a big issue.
I believe one of our biggest issues.
And for that reason, it's very, very difficult to object to the moral foundations of Orania.
Exactly.
And there's another factor that's in South Africa, a big issue.
I believe one of our biggest issues, and that is labor.
So going back into history and going back since the very inception of the Cape Dutch
settlements from the Indian East Company in South Africa.
With that happening, a lot of slaves were brought in and later on the locals were used as slaves and after that, labor was institutionalized based on race and so on, colonialism and all the things that we hear so often.
Orania is possibly the only community in South Africa that can truly and ethically and in good faith say that we have broken with the labor practices of the past.
But it's not something you will see in the mainstream media, although we tell it to everyone that would like to hear it or not.
But we tell everyone that the absolute foundation, one of the most the founding principle of Orania is to do something that is in South Africa considered In my opinion, extraordinary and even revolutionary, and that is to do your own work.
In South Africa, really, it was for a long time, there was always, well, it's still the case, even maybe more so now than in the apartheid era, there was always cheap black labor available.
And obviously, The Afrikaner being a very industrial nation at that stage, to some extent, even misused that.
And Urania is a community that say, we broke away from that system.
The fact that in Urania, in very stark contrast, even with modern day South Africa, there is no black laborers to do all the bad menial jobs.
We build our own houses, we clean our own homes.
We don't have servants coming in to scrub our toilets and things like that, which is very much the practice in South Africa.
Everyone with a middle class income can afford to have one or two people, predominantly black people, in their homes or in their gardens to work for them.
And the Urania idea is founded on the idea that we should do our own work.
And I think we're the only community to really break away from that.
So, on the one hand, we have land that we ethically and legally acquired through a transaction that was a legal transaction.
On the other hand, we also have this point of view or this orientation that because of the fact that no one is misused to build Urania, because of the fact that we do all our own work, there's no cheap labor, There's two implications to that.
One is we stay a demographic majority in our own area because we don't have cheap labor to do everything for us which demographically change our area.
On the other hand, we're not misusing anyone and no one can point fingers to Iran and say, well, you are just misusing people to build your own town.
That's not the case.
We're doing it ourselves.
No, it seems absolutely morally unimpeachable.
No one can have any legitimate complaint.
You came to an empty, unwanted area, and you built it all yourselves.
And so what you have is clearly something that you built, and you deserve, and you can run your own affairs.
It seems to me that no one can have any legitimate objection to what you're doing other than the abstract idea that it
is somehow wrong for Afrikaners to live amongst themselves and preserve their own heritage
and culture.
One of the interesting things to that is, you know, it used to be this movement,
this new South Africanism that flooded through the country, this excitement.
I don't know how to compare it to in the US.
terms, but there was this spirit of post-1994, and a lot of Afrikaners participated in that, of finally, you know, everything is right in the world now.
All the unjust things of the past were undone by getting Nelson Mandela as president.
Everyone is safe now.
Everything is just going to be perfect and peachy.
And in that formed this grey South African identity.
So you're not whatever culture you come from.
Your cultural or religious practices just pushed aside.
You're now in the first place as South African.
And the problem with that is a very hard thing to define because South Africa is so diverse.
You hold on to this identity of South Africanism like Like, what could I compare it to now?
It's something that is above all else, but it's not really definable because there's so much differences.
However, also the idea was propagated that we are the rainbow nation.
And I mean, if you look at the rainbow, the idea would be that all the different colors and all the different groups and all the different cultures and religions form one nation.
The problem of that being is that we were never a rainbow, we always were grey, because you were not allowed to be anything other than just a South African.
We are a country with 11 official languages.
Can you believe that we have 11 official languages?
However, you can't, you don't have access to speak Afrikaans in almost any government institutions, any public institutions.
There's just no one to serve you in Afrikaans.
It's one of the official languages, but there's no de facto real recognition for it.
So in this grey identity, you can be anything.
You just can't be anything other than a South African.
You can't be an Afrikaner first.
You can't be a Zulu or a Xhosa first.
You have to be a South African first.
And it was such a grey idea.
And whatever you do that moves out of that kind of master narrative of what's allowed, you get slapped on the wrist.
Especially by the media and by the political institutions.
But they can't really define what you should be.
But the moment you are not that, Well, you know, even observing South Africa from afar, from the United States, as I was doing at the time, I had a terrible sense of foreboding that this cannot work.
And it is a testimony to the naivete of white people.
That Afrikaners, who had spent their entire lives dealing with the reality of race and had been there for generations, were swept up, as you say, in this great optimism that all of a sudden everyone was going to hold hands and sing happy songs together and march into the sunlight.
It is astonishing the way white people can be seized by illusions of this kind.
And it is my understanding that was it not a majority even of the Afrikaners, not just the English, who voted for the new regime?
Yes.
Absolutely.
It was a majority.
And some people couldn't believe it.
They could not believe it.
But it was the case.
I mean, it was Afrikaners, well, at that stage, whites, because it was English and Africans and whoever else was considered white at that stage.
They had the right to vote in favor of or against the idea of going into, you know, negotiations with the ANC.
Yes.
Told people that this was the moral right decision to make and you should make it.
Everyone was heavily sanctioning South Africa because of the later apartheid regime.
So people just wanted something new.
But it would also be incorrect to say that Urania is longing back to the past.
I don't think that's what we're doing.
I surely hope it's not the case.
Urania is embracing a new future.
I like to speak about a third position.
We are not happy with what we have now.
We're not longing back at the past under the National Party.
We're also not looking forward to a future under the ANC.
We are embracing a third position.
We say there's a new option, and we are trying to embrace that.
And that is to create our own space and take on Decisions in that space.
And I think we've had some successes.
We've built schools.
We've built churches.
We created a local economy.
We're busy working on energy independence because of the rolling blackouts.
I don't know how many people in the U.S.
actually know how bad the power situation is in South Africa, but there's some days that we don't have electricity for up to 12 hours a day.
So it's a horrible situation.
And we're working to energy independence.
I do want to hear all about how Arrania works, the successes or the failures, and what your plans are for the future.
But before we get into that, I do want to ask a historical question.
And I followed the whole idea of, I suppose it was called Grand Apartheid, the homelands, Beaufort-Totswana and Transkei and Siskei, and the idea seemed to be at one time that South Africa was going to be these racially separated states.
Of course, the white dominated areas were going to have black people into, as you say, scrub the toilets and clean the houses and do the grunt work.
But there was some plan to break the country up into areas that would be homelands for different tribes and perhaps a homeland for the white tribe as well.
Do you think That if the grand apartheid and the homeland scheme had been something that was considerably more generous, because I remember looking at a map of the homelands and thinking, these things are tiny.
You've got, as I say, Bof Totswana, not much there, all these little bits sprinkled here
and there.
If it had, if the lines had been drawn with more generosity, and the whites had been willing
to do their own manual labor, do you think there was ever any possibility of a grand
apartheid being successful?
That's a very tough question to answer, because there's a lot of nuance to it.
But I do think the way that it was implemented in the end, and maybe the early way that it
was offered by the likes of the early creators of the ideas, two different things.
And that got even more complicated with some of the even further back history in regards to the British rule in South Africa, which is also a very complicated thing.
And there's a very interesting book on that. It's called Apartheid, Britain's Bastard Child,
which is a good read. And people interested in South Africa should read that. But it comes down
to the fact that a lot of those problems started with labor, and as well as the fact that the way
society was organized after the Anglo-Boer War, which ended in 1902, the second Anglo-Boer War.
We won the first one, the British won the second one, and then South Africa totally changed.
And even in that, there were some mistakes made.
In terms of the way that the country was set up and so on.
I think the best way that South Africa was ever divided into different pieces was before the war.
And that was with the republics, the Afrikaner or Boer Republics, which was, you know, the orange free state, Transvaal.
The English had control of the Cape in that stage.
There was still a lot of Afrikaners living in the Cape.
And then you had your Zulu and Xhosa kingdoms, you had nomadic peoples living in other spaces and so on.
So that was kind of the landmass, the land area of what's now considered South Africa was shared up and divided, but in a way that it was not necessarily, you know, divided by one central power.
It was not, you know, some central government that says, OK, you can take this, you can take that, you will have that, and so on.
But rather the effect or the conclusion of many years of negotiation, of war, of conflict, Of transactions, different things that happened, which is much more natural than a central government deciding who should get what.
So there was actually multilateral negotiations between the Afrikaner and different black tribes in South Africa.
Land was definitely bought, land was exchanged.
There's, you know, multiple contracts that still exist from that time.
The Afrikaners actually went to war a few times to recover things like stolen cattle that different traditional tribes stole from one another and there was actually land that was given to the Afrikaner because of that.
So there's a very long and complicated history which is now simplified.
I think that's one of the most dangerous things that's happening internationally now is that history is simplified in the worst possible manner.
Leading to a point where there's no space for nuance.
There's only wrong and right and that is defined by the ruling class.
So rather than a central government deciding who gets what, I think there was a better arrangement and that was an arrangement between local communities.
different peoples had different pieces of land.
It was a very natural arrangement.
And the Afrikaner had two republics, which performed very good, very well.
And we were very happy in those.
But yeah, we have made a terrible mistake and that was to discover gold.
That didn't turn out all that well for us.
Yes, yes.
The British decided that they wanted the gold, and then everything followed from that discovery.
Yes.
Well, tell me a little bit about how Orania works today.
How many people are living there now?
I understand you have a waiting list for more people who want to move in.
Do you have a housing shortage?
How does the economy work?
Please tell us how it runs.
Yeah, I'm going to give you a bit of a more nuanced approach than just a sentence or two.
I think that's maybe something that the listeners might be interested to while, you know, in more mainstream type of media, we try to explain it much more simply.
I'm going to try and work in a bit of nuance.
So what happened is that the town itself was acquired in 1991.
And as these things work, we needed a legal entity because we're still in the system, the South African system.
We needed a legal entity to start this establishment.
And what we decided was the best way to do so was to was to buy the land by means of a company.
So we created a company called Orania Besteersdienst, Orania Management Services, which bought the town and the town was then divided into shares.
So people could buy a share, which would be a plot of land.
There was a disconnection now.
Can you still hear me?
Yes, yes, I can hear you.
Oh, so sorry, my computer said disconnect.
So, we bought it in terms of a company.
That company has shareholders and a shareholder is any person that lives in the main community and every plot of land is defined as a share.
So, that was the way that it was established.
It's the best legal entity that we could think of at that stage 30 years ago.
Now, after that, more land was acquired.
But not very centralized.
So people broadly associating with Urania moving here wanting to be part but without there's not enough land for everyone.
So people started buying more and more surrounding farms for example.
And setting up new entities as sister entities to the original company.
And in those sister entities, there's different setups.
So, one would be a company, one would be a trust, one would be a normal landowner title act based, title deed based land setup and so on.
So, there's lots of different ways to approach that.
More than that, there's also different leadership structures in Oranje.
So, as I wrote to you earlier, there's many different ways that leadership in Oranje is handled.
We have some people that's democratically elected.
We have some people that's appointed by different institutions in the town.
And then we have all these landowner groups.
Goodness gracious!
Are all of these entities at least contiguous?
Do they all touch each other?
One sort of all part of the same land area?
Absolutely, yes.
So they're all neighboring.
They're all neighboring each other.
And that brings a very natural way of managing things.
Because what happens is that Certain people, for example, who want better service delivery goes to the area where there's more options in terms of service delivery, but a bit more municipal style taxes.
People who want more absolute freedom buy a plot of land in some of the areas that's more, that's got less levies and taxes, but where there's no service delivery, that everything that you do is off-grid and so on.
So you have that different sets of choices.
And people very naturally flow to where they come.
So what unifies them?
There's a few things.
Firstly, is the political representation.
They are all seen as Iranians and they are all, you know, under the same political umbrella.
Secondly, all are protected by the same security setup that we have.
Thirdly, Thirdly is the fact that all the people and all the different land-owning entities go through the same process, the right-to-residency process, which is compulsory.
There's both a right-to-residency process and a basic orientation the moment that you have gone through the right-of-residency process.
You have to go through that two-day orientation as well, and there's some tests involved and things like that, making sure that the new people aren't a risk for Rania in any way, shape or form.
So that is the unifying factors.
So that's at least a baseline, a very important baseline.
All of the people in the different land-owning entities are also under the legal framework.
We have what we call Urania Rechtsspraak, which I'm not sure how to really translate it, but would be our local legal system.
So it's something that is acknowledged by South African law, where we can handle local civil disputes, where we can even handle things that we consider as criminal activity.
And the kind of highest form of punishment that the community has is to remove someone's right to residency.
So if you come into Rania and you make yourself guilty of, you steal something or so, We can remove your right to residency or if you bring drugs into the community Which we have a zero-tolerance policy for we can simply take your your right to live here or to put your Foot on or on our soil away and you're not allowed anymore.
Has that ever been necessary?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yes, so you especially as we're honest and economy is growing. Some people come here not for the
Iranian idea but rather to run away from some other issues that they committed
elsewhere and we have a good vetting process in regards to especially criminal
activity but sometimes someone slips through or whatever and you need to
have the teeth to handle that in the end of the day.
So the way that we handle it is not by having taxpayers pay to, you know, put them in prison and things like that, but much rather to just tell them they're not welcome here anymore.
Well, and I gather that when they enter the Orania community, Absolutely.
No, absolutely.
bound to submit to that kind of decision making.
So they cannot appeal this to a South African court.
This is a cut and dried contract and Orani has the right to expel people who misbehave.
Absolutely.
No, absolutely.
That is, we have that right.
Some people who've been the, who felt the sharp end of that actually, in something that
I would consider almost treason, took us to the South African Human Rights Commission
and said that what we're doing was illegal.
And we were tested in that.
And we were found that we have not.
Broken any laws and there's nothing illegal to what we did and and it was tested and it was we passed the test so that person's He could not he could not return.
It's just a simple fact of life and we are very strict things like like people trying to Bring in drugs or use drugs.
And so we find that out they they have a trial but the odds are very very high that they will permanently Lose their right to Libya You know, that seems like such a wonderful solution.
That is the way the ancient Greeks dealt with certain criminals.
They ostracized them, just sent them away, and they couldn't come back.
There are so many people in various municipalities in the United States that we wish we could treat in the same way, but instead we have to pay to put them in prison.
Presumably rehabilitate them.
No, the ability to simply send someone away.
That seems like absolutely ideal solution to the kind of problems that could arise in any community, I suppose.
Yeah.
Yeah, we don't.
You do not have the right any longer to be our problem.
Go be your own problem on your own fast somewhere else.
We don't.
Physically, we don't have the resources.
All the time, all the energy to spend on people who are actively putting us in a worse situation, we already have enough challenges to rise to.
And no one has the right to our resources and to, you know, to try and misuse that.
So, you're not our problem anymore.
That's as simple as it is.
That's wonderful.
Well, tell me about the economic base of Orania.
So, obviously, the main concern was to move to an area where we can be a demographic majority.
And that implies that you move to an area where very little is happening.
Obviously, the most economically active areas are the highest populated areas.
So with that advantage of becoming a majority in own area comes the disadvantage of having almost no economic resources or activity going on in the area that you settled.
That is quite challenging.
So, very interestingly, in the very early years of Orania, I think it might have been the area in South Africa per square mile or per square kilometer that had the highest qualifications with the lowest incomes.
Because the people that came here were absolutely academics, you know, people who were thinking people.
Thinking people who, you know, on an ideological level bought into the Urania idea, and they left high-paying jobs as professionals, that would be doctors, academics, lawyers, you know, things like that, and they left high-paying jobs to settle here, and suddenly they had a lot of work to do, but very little payment for that work.
So, it started a very challenging pioneer phase of Urania.
I think that's the toughest part, is the pioneer phase in any community.
And that started there.
And, you know...
We just started building things and trying to construct things and get things off the ground.
It took quite a while.
But in the past 10 years, it happened twice.
So it was every five years.
So 10 years ago to five years ago, Uranium's population doubled from 800 to almost 1600.
And then it doubled again.
So that gives you an indication that the economy is growing.
We have something like, for the past three years, between 25 and 27 percent growth in new businesses.
So a lot of people in Iran are actually very entrepreneurial.
They start businesses and they try out ideas.
Some ideas fail, some work, some people start over, but a lot of entrepreneurs.
Secondly, Excuse me, would these be entrepreneurial ideas that by means of internet, for example, get revenue from outside?
Because I would think there's a limited demand for entrepreneurial activity strictly within Irania.
That actually only started in the past five years, I would say, really, internet.
We were a bit late on that train.
So the local economy looks something like this.
The top four economic sectors are first service delivery, then retail and trade, then construction, and then tourism.
So tourism actually plays a big role in fourth place, but construction is becoming quite powerful because of the fact that Urania has been growing in population from 2016 to 2019, annually 10% every year.
It's really a fast population growth.
From 2020, we broke all conceivable records by growing 16.5%.
And I think that had something to do with obviously with COVID and, you know, the tyrannical lockdowns that South Africa had.
Crazy lockdowns that we had.
A lot of Afrikaners just felt they had enough.
You know, the military was deployed in South Africa.
It was a total circus.
And a lot of Afrikaners just felt they had enough combined with the fact that a lot of people realized
in 2020 that jobs that used to be office jobs can actually be done online.
So that sector also grown.
grown.
And we're seeing some people, for example, IT and programmers and things like that, working for different companies around the world, including the US, living in Oranje, Afrikaners.
We have some people who moved here, but that's quite a small amount, but some people who moved here with moving their wife and kids here, but still working in the city, for example, maybe two weeks a month or things like that.
But primarily the most people by far are locally employed.
Local businesses, construction, things like that.
I see, I see.
Well, that's great.
There is some agriculture as well, is there not?
Yeah, we do have agricultural activity as well.
Something that I think we can expand on a bit because the main production here in the area made possible by the fact that the Orange River was made, you know, a sustainable river, it used to be seasonal, is actually large plantations of maize and wheat.
Absolutely.
So that's produced here, and I think there's still economic opportunity in working that, in refining that, and making products from that, you know, the second ladder.
You know, not production, but refining that and working it.
There's some opportunity, but also, different Iranian farmers have planted about 16,000 picanut trees.
Oh, pecan, pecan.
I see, yes.
Yeah, that's great.
It's something that's also grown in the US, right?
So there's a lot of that in South America and in Australia as well.
And there's a major export market for that, especially to the East.
So a lot of the, even the small farmers used to directly export to China, but nowadays it's just easier to sell to some South African agricultural co-ops and they resell and export it.
But I think the most of the pecanuts that's produced here is going to the east.
So that's also some of the economic things that's happening there.
We also have people that have, you know, tunnels that grow the young pecan trees and resell it to farmers around the country and things like that.
So that's also something very nice.
I see.
Now, I understand that Christianity is an important part of Orania.
Do all Oranians must be professing Christians or is that an option?
What is the role of Christianity?
Yeah, so the way I explain that is we institutionalized our faith as the basis for our existence, for the existence of our community and so on.
However, we are not in a position where we have, what can I call it?
I almost want to say Taliban-like or ISIS-like religious police that patrols the streets and makes sure that you don't sin, right?
So we have the point of view that we have certain things that we do not accept in our community.
We have certain things that's institutionalized.
But we don't have religious beliefs that force you to do things.
We can't look into your heart.
So when applying to Orania, people sign the Constitution of Orania that very clearly states that we are a confessing Christian community in no uncertain terms and that the public order in Orania is arranged in a fashion where Christianity is viewed as our religion and that is non-negotiable.
However, If a person lies on that form, you won't really know that.
If a person doesn't really believe, there's no way to look into his heart.
And that's not something that we're trying to do.
But there's no uncertainty that we as a community, even as people who sin and do make mistakes and things like that, but undeniably so, We are a Christian community, and we also leave space for different denominations, so people can decide to which specific church group they want to subscribe to, and there are different options, from more charismatic options even, to, you know, Afrikaners are primarily, I think, reformed people, so the reformed type of churches are quite dominant.
But there's no obligatory church attendance, for example.
No, there are not.
No, it is something that we ask in our Right to Residency process, but we're not going to go knock on your door on a Sunday morning if you aren't in church.
So we expect, we see that as the responsibility of the churches themselves.
And not of government, if I can put it in that fashion.
We would like to encourage the churches to make sure people attend, to make sure there's a community of support in the churches, to make sure that, you know, people are empowered by, you know, by the faith and by, you know, the different nuances and the ways of thinking and the good theological background.
But we see that as the responsibility of the churches to make sure of that themselves,
not of, you know, local government institutions.
Does Orania observe the Sabbath? Are stores closed, for example?
Absolutely. Absolutely. We observe the Lord's Day. We celebrate that. And the stores close.
these...
Even the restaurants close on a Sunday.
The only thing that you will find open for about three hours or so is the local fueling station, the petrol station.
We have a small shop where basic necessities can be found.
And one restaurant that opens just four guests in the hotel and so on but it's something that we are actually quite serious of And that is actually something that is an example of something that's institutionalized on Municipal government level so that is not really something that we force people, but we set up a We set up, you know, the municipal way of doing things in such a fashion that that is the way to do it.
And what's more is that we take, for example, Urania.
Let me give this example.
Urania is undoubtedly an Afrikaans community.
We're an Afrikaans community.
The language that we speak, official language in all meetings, all schools, all things like that is Afrikaans.
So if someone tries to open a business solely operating in English,
we would obviously have some questions.
And while there's no Rania law that says you're not allowed to do that,
we would ask someone who comes to register his business as an English business, okay, why are you doing this?
Um...
Are you really here because you support the Afrikaner cause?
What is the reason?
Just as we would do if someone started a business with a Chinese name, for example, or a Zulu name, or whatever.
And that's kind of the same arrangement with the Sabbath.
I think there's nowhere in our constitution clearly written that it's illegal to do this or that, but the community is going to have some questions.
And I think the most powerful force on the government institutions, if I can call it government, the local government institutions that force people to do things, much rather is the community that keep one another accountable and keep newcomers accountable, especially in regards to things like our labor arrangements, that we do not use outside labor, foreign labor, cheap black labor, but rather use internal Afrikaner labor.
So that is something that you have to be very strict on, but the strictest ones are the community, not the government institutions.
Same thing with different other arrangements.
We have a very passionate community, and while that can be sometimes difficult to navigate if you want to make certain local government decisions, and the community is a lot of hard-headed people, It's a very, very powerful thing in terms of the other arrangements in Urania where the community are the ones that keeps one another accountable, where it's the community that keeps newcomers accountable and makes sure things work a certain way.
For example, if someone tried to trick our right to residency process, And they try to trick us and put us in a situation that we don't want to be or whatever very populist Things regarding that and we don't have I mean, we're not totally free.
So we still under South African law So if the government forces us to do certain things and make certain decisions, it's one thing to pass the administrative Local government process of living here.
It's another thing to be accepted by the community and And the community or just a group of people, I mean, that
can't really be regulated.
The community can accept you or they don't necessarily accept you.
And that is a very, very important and powerful thing.
Yes, I can imagine.
And so it becomes self-perpetuating in that respect.
If certain attitudes and institutions and expectations are established, then only people who meet those attitudes and expectations will want to be there, presumably.
Exactly, exactly.
And feel welcome.
I mean, the entire idea, to some extent, is to create a place where Afrikaners feel welcome on their own accord.
So, you know, it's up to the community to make people feel welcome or not.
And it's not even something that the local government can decide, the community decides it.
And they have the right to do so.
Well, tell me, what sort of entertainment is popular?
Do people dance?
I don't know.
What do people do for fun in Irania?
Sports?
Yeah, what do people do for fun in Irania?
They have meetings.
Our national sport is having meetings about just about everything.
So, loads and loads of meetings.
No, on a more serious note, there's a lot of entertainment options.
Very, very diverse.
Sport, running, hunting, anything regarding the outdoors.
We have art clubs, book clubs.
We have nice little pubs.
We have dances that we do.
We have a yearly carnival that we do.
We have music festivals.
We have a lot of sporting events.
And there's a lot of things that, there's a very high level of expected volunteering in Iran, yeah.
So, and that's also the people that, you know, are accepted or, you know, pulled into the community the most, it's the people who are involved by the most things.
So, whether that be volunteering at your kid's school, at the local bank, at some political institution, Some sporting institutions the amount of hours of volunteering that goes into Irania That's the thing that really keeps us going, you know, and and and and and with that in mind I mean, there's so many people that have their own businesses and people give so much of their own time To volunteer for things whether that be security there's so so many different volunteer security groups and and
water rescue groups and emergency medical care groups and you know working
on the bank, serving on the board of directors, serving the school, serving the
Chamber of Commerce. There's so so many things that people are involved with. If
you just have a weekend for yourself, you know, most people just want to do their
work at home in their off time because there's really really a lot of public
hours that's kind of expected of everyone.
Well, that must be very fulfilling, though, for people who are committed to Orania and they spend this volunteer time doing things that they know are valuable for the community and that the community appreciates.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
There's a lot of strong opinions.
Afrikaners are very opinionated people and we sometimes, you know, get in quite heated debates about how things should be done.
But in the end, I think we always figure it out and we always get to a position where we set up an arrangement that works for everyone.
That was actually one of the very interesting things.
A French general served with the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War.
And he was totally blown away by the way that the Boer and the Afrikaaner went to war against
the British.
He could not believe it.
He wrote about it, and he said he could not believe his eyes.
What would happen is the officers and the men would all get together, and they would
plan the coming battle and get into heated arguments with one another.
And the officers would try to persuade the men of following a certain strategy.
And then everyone would get angry at one another, and it's just a big mess.
And then everyone would ride away on their horses and go look at the battlefield and
come back again and then have some more debate.
And then finally, the officers managed to persuade the men to follow the strategy, and
then they go and they… Sometimes win, sometimes lose or whatever but a very
A very, a culture of participation.
And that's one thing of the Afrikaner people, you know.
We are not, we are not really people that would fare very well under a monarch or something like that.
We like to have our say in things.
We like to participate.
We like to, you know, be part of the final plan that our thing should play out.
So there's a lot of that in Iran as well.
But that's a good thing.
People participate, they take things very serious and then participate in various ways and come up with solutions.
It's a very creative, although challenging, type of way to handle things.
So a lot of community related things handled in a way where the entire community have kind of Go into a long debate and make a lot of decisions and then refine it and refine it and refine it.
But there's a lot of participation.
It's really nice to see.
Well, we're coming towards the end of our allotted time here, but you did say something that surprised me a little bit.
And that was that tourism is an important source of income.
How does tourism work and who are the tourists and why do they come?
Oh, well, that's very, very diverse.
So what I think the main source of tourism is two things.
Afrikaners coming here out of curiosity and Afrikaners coming here for the 20th or 30th or 100th time visiting Rwanda to stay here because it's a nice and peaceful place to spend, for example, your summer holidays.
You know, to just be in Urania where it's safe, where, you know, there's a lot of activities going on.
So there's a lot of people that have this commitment that visit Urania yearly or twice a year and they spend 2-3 weeks here.
I see.
Very much that.
And then a lot of curious people.
The Urania Movement actually have a service where we take people on a tour of the town.
Something that we do for free.
Funded by all our supporters or members to donate to the Iranian movement.
So we have a little bus that takes people around so So last year, I think we took 3,500 people on tours and you can work that back to you know today's Excluding Sundays, so there's a lot of visitors and I think Maybe a third of people visiting Irania actually goes on the tour so you can think that there's a lot of people just visiting Irania, but then you have two other things as well and a lot of international people just interested in seeing
Iran.
We have a lot of international visitors and then a lot of media.
As I said to you earlier in private conversation that last month we had in a two week frame about,
we had seven international media groups of which five was here simultaneously.
So obviously that's also considered tourism to an extent, for example British television
was here with a group of seven journalists.
So I mean, and they stayed here for, in total they stayed here for 10 days
with two reconnaissance visits before that.
And that's actually a lot of meals eaten, fuel thrown into the vehicles, nights at the hotel and so on.
So you have a hotel and restaurants even operating for limited hours on Sunday for hungry tourists.
Yeah, we do have that.
We actually have a lot of guesthouses and bed and breakfasts and things like that because of the fact that there's economic opportunity.
People absolutely use that.
Yes.
Well, for that purpose, I suppose there's no real vetting than if pretty much anyone can show up at a guesthouse.
That is indeed possible.
There's a few things, but Urania has never been shy to welcome visitors here.
The thing that keeps us an Afrikaner community The thing that keeps us the way that we are and protects us in terms of our culture and the fact that it's African living here is our labor policy.
That is the most important thing.
Now, you can also imagine that not Anyone would like to visit an Afrikaner cultural community, but we have a good track record that show that we handle guests that is different from ourselves in a hospitable manner.
We can be very hospitable people, but people should have respect for the community as is.
But obviously, Urania is not your typical destination for people who Drastically disagree with our position politically.
Obviously if you disagree with Urania, you're not going to come and spend, you know, your holidays here.
It's just it's in a very natural way.
That is just the way that it happened because Afrikaners like to visit Urania and and people who disagree with the Urania idea don't want to visit Urania.
So it's you know, it's just the way that it played out.
So, I suppose if a black American or somebody from Zambia wanted to visit and take a look around, there's nothing stopping him?
There's nothing stopping them.
To tell you the truth, we had a group of black people from the United States just about a month ago.
I think they described themselves as black separatists, and they just arrived here.
Awesome!
And I actually, I saw the people and I, you know, in front of my office and I greeted them and I explained some of the things regarding Urania to them and they were happy and they were on their merry way again.
They made a YouTube video about it all and later they had a post-Urania visit discussion about it as well.
So, Rania is not a gated community.
Rania is kept safe by, firstly, our labour policy, and secondly, the fact that we are absolutely in the middle of nowhere.
You have to drive quite far to get here.
So, we have a very good general, and that's general distance.
So, that also helps to keep us safe.
But you have a very vigilant community as well, so if someone comes into Oranje, wherever that may be, you can know that could be another Afrikaner for that matter.
If someone comes into our community to make trouble, the community is going to pick up on that very fast.
Yes, I imagine.
It's a vigilant community and they will not let the people be bullied or the safety of Oranje be put into risk.
It's just the way it is.
Well, with all of this media, I suppose it's difficult for you to really follow up on what the ultimate report or the broadcast is.
But do you have any actual positive coverage?
Would any, any British media, for example, or French media actually understand and admire and respect what you're trying to do?
No, no British or French media would do that.
Actually, I have a saying that I've been saying for a long time, and that is I would rather entertain a black journalist from an African country than a white European journalist.
And there's a very simple reason for that.
White European journalists, they come here to project on Urania, I don't know, maybe the things they feel bad about, colonialism or something.
They want to project it on us.
And distance themselves from it by making it our fault or something like that.
While black journalists from African countries do not necessarily agree with us.
However, they understand tribalism in their own countries better.
They understand Africa better.
And they have some extent of understanding for Rania because of that.
But let me tell you, white European journalists are probably the thing furthest from from from Iran.
They have no understanding for it.
If it's a if it's a Dutch, German, English or France journalist, I immediately know it's going to be a horrible story about Iran.
And you can go check that out.
There's actually a business owner in Iran who put up a major Sign outside of his business, which is a restaurant and a small pub and so on nice place He put up a sign that said it's in four European languages I think Dutch and German and French and English in maybe five or whatever But but it's a big sign that says white European journalists.
Please leave your prejudice at the door and So, it's sending a very clear message to them.
So, no, we don't get any positive coverage from mainstream media.
We do, however, from time to time get, obviously, alternative media, things like podcasters and YouTubers, which gives you much more room to explain the nuances of Urania, things like our own labor.
Things that we can clearly state, we have no ambitions to rule over South Africa.
We just don't have that ambition.
We have to, we want to make decisions for ourselves.
While a lot of the mainstream media just kind of have this point of view that we want to bring back apartheid.
We want to rule, Africans want to rule over South Africa again.
And this is the last bastion of There's horrible white supremacist people who just want longing back to apartheid and so on.
So you never get the space to explain that nuances on mainstream media.
It's just normally a lot of attacks, a lot of really something I would actually consider unethical kind of backstabbing.
And they play nice beforehand and then the teeth comes out.
Well, you get a much more honest approach from black journalists, you know, coming from African countries.
They ask the questions that they want to know straightforward.
And they ask you, what's your answer to this?
What's your answer to that?
And, you know, they don't necessarily agree or call Iran the best thing that ever happened or whatever, but at least they experience them as much more honest and much more understanding.
This doesn't surprise me at all.
My experience is very similar.
strong contrast with white European journalists.
This doesn't surprise me at all.
My experience is very similar.
If I have an opportunity to explain my views about race to a black person, black people
have a racial consciousness and they understand this.
As you say, Africans understand tribalism in the United States.
Black people understand that different races have different approaches to things.
It's white people who, as you say, have an absolutely fixed idea.
You want to bring back apartheid.
You want to oppress black people.
It's the same approach they would take to me.
Oh, you want to reinstitute slavery or some crazy thing.
No, it's, I'm not at all surprised that that be the case, but I am.
Yes, go ahead.
Sorry for interrupting you.
I just want to add on that point that, you know, this weekend I had a, I had a, you know, a interview on a very prominent South African mainstream media source.
And, you know, the presenter got angrier and angrier with me and he's kind of, his trump card in the end was, So, you know, do you just want to be in control of the country to oppress black people again?
And I honestly think he thought that I was going to say that, you know, if Afrikaners are in control of this country again, things will be better or something like that.
And I just said, no, we don't want to be in control of the country.
We want to be in control of ourselves and our own area.
And, you know, the rest of the people in this country can decide just how they want to arrange their things and their government and whatever, as long as we have the right to make some decisions in regards to ourselves.
And he was, I think, But taken aback by that reply.
He honestly never thought anything else of us than to assume we just want to be in control of everyone again and there's no space for anything else.
And he just assumed that is what we want and that is what we believe without ever asking.
And that is actually a very sorry state of affairs because journalists should be asking questions, not making assumptions.
But that is an era that's long gone, I guess.
Well, it certainly is long gone in the area of anything that departs from the current orthodoxy about multiracialism and we're all supposed to live together and tolerance and diversity and this is the greatest thing that's ever happened.
As soon as you point out something obvious that does not conform with that, they have all of these instant prejudices that cloud their brains.
It's an embarrassment, really.
But, no, well, I must say this has certainly for me been a fascinating conversation, and I hope I have covered all the areas that my listeners will want me to have covered, but I'm sure I will not have done so.
Do you have any particular aspect of Aranya that you would like to add that you don't think we've covered sufficiently before we sign off here?
Well, I would like to say this.
You know, it's so nice to engage in such a lot of diverse things about the history, about the future, about what we want, about what we're doing and so on.
there's also a lot of things that one could discuss in terms of just simple
things that Urania managed to succeed in, of which we are quite proud. And I think
which is a source of hope for a lot of people around the world, which is so
confronted with losing all the time, you know. It feels like this, there's a
man who recently told me his entire adult life, he just felt like he was
losing all the time, you know, in terms of the Afrikaner people. Always taking one
more step back, one more step back, losing more ground.
And in Urania, it's the first time that he ever felt like he was winning something again.
And we're not winning by taking anything away from other people.
It's just, I want to put this reminder out there that Urania, although small, although really small, although, you know, still in its children's shoes, Is to some extent a success.
Have beautiful success stories of community, of education, of shared effort.
And people should not become, they should not lose hope.
We are in a troubling time.
We are being tested internationally.
We are in a bad situation.
But what a wonderful opportunity to build something, to do great things.
And people should not be hopeless and should not shy away.
We should rise to the challenge and we should build something that can be preserved.
And that's worth preserving.
That is a wonderful and beautiful sentiment.
So, we will end on that note.
Just, no, I'm sorry, I'm going to mispronounce your name again.
I will pronounce it for the listeners.
It's Juist.
So, J-O-U-I-S-T, Juist Strijdom.
It's Dutch in origin, but it's been Afrikaans in the past 400 years.
Well, thank you so much.
It has been a great pleasure to speak to you and we will hope to do this again someday.
I'm very much obliged to you.
Thank you.
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