Orania, South Africa - Life Apart

ORANIA, NORTH WEST CAPE PROVINCE, SOUTH AFRICA, JULY 2010: Andre Coetzee and his family at daily prayer around the family table in Orania, South Africa, July 18, 2010. Coetzee is a member of the ultra conservative "Verbontenes Volk Church" and has strongly held beliefs on the place of the Afrikaner in South African society. He and his wife have built a successful hotel and spa business in Orania from the ground up and express a strong desire to be in charge of their own destiny. They claim they are not racists but simply wish to live in a community which expresses their own value systems of religious conservatism and Afrikaner tradition. Orania is a privately owned South African town located along the Orange River in the Northern Cape Province. Orania is a former government-workers village originally bought by a group of Afrikaners in 1991 from the South African government with the intention of creating a pure Afrikaner community, which would function as a stronghold for conservative Afrikaner cultural and religious values. The community sees themselves as independent from the rest of South Africa, with a goal of a self-determining Afrikaner homeland. All work in Orania is done by white Afrikaners. They do not see themselves as right-wing, but are very concerned with their ultra-conservative cultural and religious integrity and independence. They welcome anyone who shares those values and as a result are one-hundred-percent white in ethnicity. There has been a steady rise in population numbers for Orania, due to a feeling of disenfranchisement of white South Africans amid the Black Empowerment policies of the ANC government, as well as high crime statistics that are driving whites to seek shelter in perceived safer communities. Despite the separatist sentiment that characterizes Orania, there have typically been good relations between Orania and the SA government. (Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images Reportage)