When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first black president of South Africa on May 10, 1994, the world watched with awe as the brutal system of racial segregation known as apartheid seemed to finally crumble.
But if you were to walk 20 minutes east of South Africa’s capital Pretoria, past a high fence, you’ll find a secluded, 8.6km² community where every one of its 1500 residents is white.
Founded in 1990, the secretive enclave of Kleinfontein is manned by white security guards and presents itself as a counter-model to the challenges facing the democratic South Africa, plagued by notoriously high crime rates.
Residents of Kleinfontein are strictly Afrikaner – an ethnic group descended from the Boers (‘farmers’), the predominantly Dutch settlers – but also French and Germans – who immigrated to the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, before the advent of British rule in 1806.
The community argues that as Afrikaners, they are an oppressed and endangered minority in a country where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party gives preferential treatment to the black population.
Three decades after apartheid, the average white household in South Africa still holds 20 times more wealth than the average black household, and white people, who make up less than 10 percent of the population, own nearly three-quarters of the country’s private land.
But Dannie de Beer, the vice chairman of Kleinfontein’s board of directors, insists white farmers are ‘unwanted’ in the country and are facing a ‘travesty that is just as bad as apartheid’.
Echoing the recent sentiments of U.S. President Donald Trump, who made the contested claim that there was a ‘genocide’ against white South Africans, De Beer told the Daily Mail that white farmers are ‘persecuted’.
Kleinfontein resident Phillip Brits and his dog Milo pose for a photograph at their home on September 19, 2025
A resident shoots at a target with a pellet gun during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
Residents take part in a rope pulling game during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
Trump’s claim has been widely discredited, with a South African court dismissing the idea of a ‘white genocide’ in the country as ‘clearly imagined and not real’.
Nevertheless, De Beer believes he and other Afrikaners are in a ‘battle for survival’.
‘They are being murdered on the farms. I have personal experience of being held at gunpoint. Violence in South Africa is completely out of control,’ he says.
In contrast, in the 30 years of life at Kleinfontein, he says there’s never been an example of a violent crime.
For De Beer, a positive of Kleinfontein is its cultural monotony and homogeneity.
‘Only Afrikaans is spoken in the community and as a Christian community Sunday is respected as a day of worship.
‘This means that all the complexities of different languages and religions are automatically absent,’ he says.
He’s neighbours with people like Dries Oncke and his wife, Annatjie, who arrived after burglars broke into their home in a nearby town. ‘It was black persons,’ Annatjie, 49, who works as a maid and nanny, told the Guardian.
Teaching student Sune Jansen van Rensburg, whose brother-in-law grew up in the small enclave, moved in three years ago with her parents following a ‘traumatic’ break-in attempt at their previous house in Pretoria.
‘If my child walks around my home, I want them to interact with people with the same values and way they see the world,’ the 21-year-old told AFP.
De Beer has been involved in the rural settlement since he was a student in the University of Pretoria, when in 1988 he helped out with initial construction. In 2000, he built his first house, and in 2015 he built his second.
He lives in a community of doctors, scientists, engineers and farmers who have collectively opted out of mainstream society in favour of the secluded enclave.
‘We see the refugees from South Africa,’ he says, referring to the Afrikaners who have travelled to the states following Trump’s controversial signing of an executive order in February, giving them refugee status.
‘The Afrikaner farmers are being persecuted on their farms, and luckily the Trump administration has broken the silence about a travesty that is just as bad as apartheid.’
By May, the first 59 Afrikaners had arrived on American soil, having been given priority over other refugees from Afghanistan who had their Temporary Protected Status removed by the Trump administration.
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, but the overwhelming majority of victims are black. Police recorded 26,232 murders nationwide in 2024, with 44 linked to farming communities. Eight of those victims were farmers.
And between January and March this year, five out of the six people killed on farms were black and one was white, South African Police Minister Senzo Mchunu said.
Even so, De Beer insists Afrikaners are a disenfranchised and vulnerable minority, who lose out on jobs because they’re white living under a black-led government.
‘Discrimination in South Africa is rough. If you’re not a majority black-owned company, you cannot do work, you cannot get a job.
‘We’re in a country that tramples on minority rights. Survival of the Afrikaner is of tantamount importance.
‘Why would the world take notice of apartheid, tolerate it for 40 years, condemn it, then approve of a majority black government that does exactly the same in reverse?’
Dannie de Beer, Kleinfontein community deputy president, poses for a photograph in front of a mural of Paul Kruger, the first elected President of the Transvaal Republic in 1883, in Kleinfontein on September 19, 2025
A resident shoots at a target with a pellet gun during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
Jan Groenewald (L), one of Kleinfontein’s founding members, poses for a photograph in his studay at his home in Kleinfontein on September 19, 2025
Residents of Kleinfontein – meaning ‘little fountain’ – represent only a tiny fraction of Afrikaners, who can be estimated at around 2.6 million of South Africa’s 62 million inhabitants in 2022, based on census data from that year.
For De Beer, the Protestant Christian community where he lives and farms is about preserving ‘Afrikaner people as a cultural community’.
The settlement abides by a totally different calendar to the rest of South Africa, with certain events given special importance such as the Day of the Vow, when a small force of Voortrekkers (Dutch immigrants) defeated a Zulu force on December 16, 1838, during the Battle of Blood River.
On a recent Saturday, hundreds of blonde children faced off in games of tug-of-war and sack races as the community’s residents marked a harvest celebration. Many were dressed in typical khaki clothes.
On October 10, they’ll celebrate the birthday of Paul Kruger, the Afrikaner president of the gold-rich Transvaal – the independent Boer republic, before it was annexed by the British empire.
‘That is our history,’ De Beer says. ‘The Mandela history is not that much the Afrikaner history. The ANC revolution is also not Afrikaner history. The Afrikaner history starts with settlers from Europe, France, Belgium, Holland, in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape.’
In the community’s midst, you’ll find a shopping centre, a bank, a pre-school and a reservoir – normal features of any town, but what makes Kleinfontein uncanny is you’ll only see white faces.
De Beer rejects any suggestion that the rural settlement is governed by white-supremacist racial ideology; instead, Kleinfontein is about preserving ‘Afrikaner people as a cultural community’, he argues.
In the same breath, however, he notes that Kleinfontein is about preserving Afrikaner people as an ‘ethnic community’ – that is, a people descended from white European settlers.
In a nation of 51.5 million black people, only white people live within its high walls. When asked whether a person of colour might ever be permitted to enter, he says:
‘It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s not possible for me to exclude that possibility, whether it be next year or whether it be in five years from now.’
‘There might be somebody that approaches the community of colour saying: “I speak fluent Afrikaans, I’m an absolute devout Christian, I identify with the Afrikaner cause, I hate what the ANC is doing to the Afrikaners, and I despise farm murders.”
‘That might happen,’ he says doubtfully.
Residents take part in a rope pulling game during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
Sune Jansen van Rensburg, a young Kleinfontein resident, poses for a photograph in a garden in Kleinfontein on September 19, 2025
Children take part in a sack race during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
This aerial view shows houses in Kleinfontein on September 19, 2025
At Kleinfontein’s entrance stands a great grey bust dedicated to Hendrik Verwoerd, the Dutch-born sixth prime minister of South Africa nicknamed the ‘father of apartheid’ for his entrenchment of draconian anti-black racial policies into law.
There are strict entrance criteria determining who can join Kleinfontein, with rigorous screenings and interviews being a prerequisite for residency.
Two questions – among many others testing an applicants’ linguistic, cultural, and religious fit – will always be asked: ‘Are you ready for Kleinfontein? And is Kleinfontein ready for you?’
When screening prospective applicants, De Beer says he looks for Christians whose families speak fluent Afrikaans, and who are willing to ‘conform’ to the community.
‘So, if in your application to live in Kleinfontein, you answer that you refuse to learn Afrikaans, you don’t speak Afrikaans, and you’re a devout Muslim, or a devout Hindu, or any of the other faiths, the chances are that you won’t fit into the community,’ he says, noting that there are no mosques in the enclave, ‘and I doubt there ever will be’.
Insisting the entrance requirements are about ‘culture, not race’, he declares that a ‘lily-white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed German’, who practiced Islam and refused to learn Afrikaans, would not have a successful application.
De Beer insists that those arguing his community is a ‘racial enclave’ are spreading malicious falsehoods, but his words are at odds with Jan Groenewald – one of the community’s founders – who told AFP that to apply for membership ‘you must look like a Boer Afrikaner’.
Afrikaner-led governments presided over the brutal race-based apartheid system that oppressed South Africa’s black majority until 1994.
In the 1980s, during the violent last years of apartheid, Groenewald was second-in-command of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, AWB), a neo-nazi group that committed several deadly attacks on black South Africans.
Residents take part in a blindfolded potato race during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
A general view of the statue of Hendrik Verwoerd, who served as Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966 and commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid, at a garden in Kleinfontein on September 19, 2025
Roemane Beyers (L) and her husband Driaan Beyers (R) pose for a photograph during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
Residents listen to the rules of a game during the Oesfees (Harvest Festival) in Kleinfontein on September 13, 2025
He claims he now rejects the political violence and murders and left the group in 1989, albeit without renouncing the idea of an independent Afrikaner state.
The founders bought the land that would become Kleinfontein in 1990, four years before the country’s first democratic elections. The area has ‘a historical value’ as it was the site of a battle against British troops in 1900, Groenewald said.
‘If you occupy land in great numbers, there’s no way that you can force those people out,’ he added.
But Kleinfontein finds itself in an existential situation with the local authorities, and its future remains uncertain.
In 2024, the Gauteng High Court ruled that the community was an illegal settlement and accused it of not respecting zoning regulations. According to local media, the 1500 civilians are residing on land zoned for agricultural use and not residential use, and they haven’t submitted the necessary building applications.
The municipality argues that residents should be paying rates 300 times greater than they are, in a move De Beer has branded politically-motivated ‘punitive taxation’.
‘Next year is election year, the ANC have to show that they are strong and that they accommodate the radical left,’ he told AFP.
In May, activists from Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), South Africa’s opposition party, staged a march outside the settlement with signs saying: ‘It’s time for change now!’
The protestors accused the enclave of practicing racial segregation and economic exclusion, and handed over a memorandum of demands including equal rights for black South Africans in the settlement.
While some 31 years have passed since apartheid ended, it is clear racial tensions in the nation still run high. Only time will tell whether Mandela’s vision for a ‘Rainbow Nation’ will come to pass, or crumble into more sequestered neighbourhoods where the walls are too high to peer over.
Read more on Daily Mail Online
