Beyond the Bulldozer: Why Intentional Communities Have a Place in South Africa
The great misunderstanding lies in a simple, profound motto: Being for one’s own does not mean that one is against the other.
The calls are as predictable as they are visceral. In recent discourse, prominent voices, from the EFF and figures like Carl Niehaus, have declared that Afrikaner-centric towns like Orania and Kleinfontein have “no right to exist” in the New South Africa.
The rhetoric is stark: these communities are racist anachronisms, shadows of Apartheid that must be “bulldozed off the map” and “eliminated permanently”.
This sentiment is tied to a push to amend the Constitution, specifically to remove Article 235, which recognizes the right of cultural communities to self-determination (Parliamentary debate, May 9, 2025).
The accusation is heavy: the Afrikaner is the unrepentant culprit, and these towns are monuments to that sin. Given our country’s brutal history of forced segregation, this suspicion is understandable. Any gathering of Afrikaners seeking exclusivity is immediately and often reflexively, interpreted as a desire to reinstate white supremacy.
But what if this interpretation, however emotionally resonant, does not reflect the full story? What if we are misdiagnosing the situation?
The critics of Orania are quick to label it a racist project, yet they seldom engage with the global, historical concept that underpins it: that of the concept of the “intentional community.”
Throughout the world and across history, groups of different hues and persuasions have voluntarily separated themselves from the mainstream to protect a specific set of values. The Amish in the United States, is perhaps one of the most well-known examples – they live apart not out of hatred for their neighbours, but to shield their religious, non-technical way of life from the erosion of modern secularism. The historical Kibbutzim in Israel were founded on a powerful ideological (and initially, socialist) commitment, binding a community together to revive a language and build a state. Indigenous peoples worldwide seek autonomy and land rights to safeguard ancestral traditions and languages threatened with extinction.
We do not typically demand the Amish be “bulldozed” for rejecting globalization, nor do we deny indigenous groups the right to preserve their heritage. We recognize these as legitimate expressions of cultural diversity and freedom of association.
Why, then, is the Afrikaner case considered fundamentally different?
The obvious answer is Apartheid. The Afrikaner was the oppressor, and the state did use cultural identity as a weapon for racial subjugation. But we must be precise. The evil of Apartheid was not voluntary association; it was forced segregation, backed by the jackboot of the state. It was the state classifying individuals by race and dictating where they could live, work, and love.
An intentional community like Orania does the opposite. It is a private, voluntary project. It uses no state power to force anyone in or out. It is an act of association, not a decree of segregation. Its residents are subscribing to a cultural and linguistic project: To create one small space in a country of 11 official languages where their own, Afrikaans, remains the undisputed language of education, commerce, and public life.
This is where the critics’ arguments reveal a dangerous irony. To demand that the state step in, amend the Constitution, and “bulldoze” a community based on its cultural identity is to replicate the very top-down, state-driven intolerance that defined Apartheid – only the target has changed.
The framers of our Constitution understood this peril. Article 235 was not a mistake, nor was it just a concession to the old regime. It was an act based on insight, a core component of a pluralistic society. It provides a “safety valve” that assures all minorities, be they Afrikaner, Venda, Griqua, or Zulu, that the new democratic majority will not simply assimilate and erase them.
The great misunderstanding lies in a simple, profound motto: Being for one’s own does not mean that one is against the other.
A community that rallies to preserve the Afrikaans language is not inherently attacking isiZulu. A group that wishes to protect its specific cultural heritage (its erfenis) is not, by that act alone, declaring war on the heritage of others. In a truly confident, multicultural South Africa, the flourishing of one culture should not be seen as a threat to another.
If the “New South Africa” means a homogenous pot where all distinct cultural identities must be amalgamated into a homogenous mass in service of a single, state-approved national identity, then it has failed the promise of the “Rainbow Nation.” A rainbow is, by definition, a spectrum of distinct and different, colours, blending in side-by-side at the edges.
Instead of demanding the bulldozer, perhaps we should see these communities as a test of our own democratic maturity. They challenge us to distinguish between the poison of state-enforced racism and the legitimate right of a people to associate freely and preserve the things they hold dear.
Charl Heydenrych is a retired human resources practitioner and a libertarian.
Yebo!
Yes, as Trevor Watkins the originator of the Harm Consent Rule, says, an excellent article. Inasmuch as libertarians/individualists and any genuine free market supporter would have been anti Apartheid, which was an ethnofascist violent ideology suppressing the free market, so too they are against any violence such as that proposed by Malema towards intentional communities.