Kimberley- Forget about Orania - a new “whites-only” settlement is rising in the Northern Cape and its founder is promising a free 1 000 square metre piece of land to any (white) South African who wants to help “fight against the uprooting of the white race”.
The settlement, named “Eureka”, is situated outside Garies in the Northern Cape. Its founder, Adriaan Alettus Nieuwoudt, describes himself as the official co-ordinator of the Eureka Movement of South Africa.
Eureka is described as a “security town” where people can “securely retire, live and work with their own schools, shops and medical services in their own mother language (Afrikaans) and rural culture”.
According to Nieuwoudt, he bought the piece of land (now known as Eureka) “with his own money, during 2016”. He promised on Tuesday to donate a 1 000 square metre plot in Eureka to “each member of the uprooted white race who registered with the Eureka movement”.
“This plot will stay reserved in your name till the end of days. Whether you use it or not, it remains your own place in the land of your birth and is transferable to your heirs. When you start building on the plot, you have to carry building costs, but until then we cost each other nothing,” a statement by Nieuwoudt reads.
“Eureka is a serious attempt to re-establish our white people in safety. Here we empower the entire white race to independently, for yourself, with our own means, in our own fatherland, build a future. We have already waited too long. No one may prevent us from doing so. In this way we can again let the white race, without bloodshed, acquire a piece of their birth land.”
Nieuwoudt further explains that Eureka uses reverse osmosis pumps to desalinate groundwater, and eventually seawater.
“This will make a free settlement flourish here,” Nieuwoudt says.
He said that the “movement” had registered 5 000 members by Tuesday.
However, not all comments on the “Garies eerste EUREKA! Veiligheids dorp” Facebook page were positive.
“It is a kite that will dive - the black government will see to that,” Henk Swanepoel said.
Paula Stephanie Rocher Marais stated that “it sounds like a sour milk scheme”, apparently referring to Nieuwoudt, who is also
, the notorious rotten milk pyramid scheme that took South Africa by storm in the early 1980s.
Back in the 1980s, Nieuwoudt raised millions of rand through his “milk culture” project and thousands of South Africans fell for it, furiously buying the mixture of cheese and milk culture from Nieuwoudt, “growing” it in glasses and then drying it into a powder to re-sell to Nieuwoudt and recruiting others to do the same, in a classic pyramid scheme.
At the time, Nieuwoudt claimed that he needed vast quantities of the dried powder to develop a skin cream product. However, there never was such a product and investigators found that the milk culture was simply a cover for a pyramid scheme. Tons of dried milk culture was found rotting in a shed.
The pyramid scheme finally collapsed and Nieuwoudt was sequestrated. He was found guilty of diamond theft and illegal diamond dealing in the 1990s and sentenced to eight years in jail.
He served only a year before being released and returned to his farm Rondawel (now Eureka) near Garies in Namaqualand.