Buying into Kleinfontein : the Financial Implications of Afrikaner Self-Determination

Abstract

In the years approaching President F.W. De Klerk’s announcement in 1990 that South Africa’s policies would be reformed a number of the right wing groups realised that apartheid would come to an end. This dissertation deals with one response, by the Boere-Vryheidsbeweging (Boer Freedom Movement). By setting up a settlement styled as a ‘growth point for Afrikaner self-determination’ in Pretoria’s eastern hinterland, in 1992, the movement hoped to avert what its numbers saw as eventual black majority rule. The aim of this study is to probe what has become of this settlement roughly 20 years after the transition to full democracy in 1994. The following questions were used as a guideline to this end: (i) On what legal basis has the settlement’s property been occupied?; (ii) Who are the people who moved to the settlement over time?; (iii) How have they generated the capital with which to develop the settlement?; (iv) What is the character of their relationship with each other?; and (v) How have they dealt with external authorities such as the state, province and local municipality? The findings of this study show that the settlement of Kleinfontein has been kept as a set of undivided properties and that none of the residents have individual title. They occupy the settlement by internal agreement alone, and there is no acknowledgement by either the state or private institutions of the internal divisions that have been made. Over time, the founders of the settlement managed to attract two categories of people to live there. The first comprised relatively old lower middle-class people who moved in because of the settlement’s affordability and peacefulness. The second consisted of working age middle-class people with professional jobs who moved in for reasons to do with the ideology of Afrikaner self-determination. As the movement of the second category of people into the settlement accelerated, internal disagreements developed between them and the first category of people, and the settlement as a whole eventually became so paralysed by the conflict that few people have chosen to move there since. The disagreements mainly revolved around the fact that the professionals wanted to transform the settlement so that it meets the middle-class standards found in major South African cities. The lack of consensus eventually resulted in several conflicts with the state, placing a question mark over the settlement’s continued existence in post-apartheid South Africa.