White settlement has 'ghost' of a chance

GARIES is one of those little towns in the middle of South Africa’s nowhere region, its name derived from the local tribal word for couch grass, but it could become the focus of an ambitious plan with a blatant racial overtone.

The town, 445km north of Cape Town, straddles the N7 highway to Namibia, has a population of about 1500 and is known among horticultural folk worldwide for its spring flowers and birds.

It has 1200 different plant species, more than 40 per cent of which are unique to the area, providing a magnificent annual display, and 150 bird species.

There’s also the Letterklip, a series of enormous monolithic rocks and now a national monument and other natural attractions, such as the Spoegrivier caves.

It’s also where 71-year-old Adriaan Nieuwoudt is in the process of establishing a whites-only settlement, called Eureka, described as a “security town” where people can “retire, live and work with their own schools, shops and medical services in their own mother language (Afrikaans) and rural culture.”

He is offering a patch of land free to any white South African who wants to help “fight against the uprooting of the white race.”

It follows 460 attacks on white farmers — 64 of them murdered — in 2018.

He says he bought the land with his own money in 2016 and is willing to donate a 1000 sq m plot to “each member of the white race” who registers with the Eureka movement.

Cost of the plot is R1000 (about $100) but there’s no need to pay up front, and it’s on a 99-year lease.

“This plot will stay reserved in your name till the end of days,” he said.

“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.”

There’s more:

“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 birthland.”

Nieuwoudt says Eureka, in an arid part of the country, uses a reverse osmosis system to desalinate groundwater, and eventually seawater.

“It will make a free settlement flourish here,” he said.

Pity then, that Mr Nieuwoudt has a bit of history.

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Back in the 1980s, he raised millions of rand through his “Kubus milk culture” project which turned out to be a classic pyramid scheme, and Nieuwoudt was sequestrated.

And in the 1990s he was found guilty of diamond theft and illegal diamond dealing and sentenced to eight years in jail.

However, he served only a year before being released.

He then returned to his farm near Garies where he came up with his Eureka security town idea.

One critic has stated that “it sounds like a sour milk scheme,” but Nieuwoudt says he has already has 5000 people who’ve signed up.

There are many towns called Eureka around the world, including Eureka City, which sprang up in the Eastern Transvaal in 1885 when gold was discovered at Barberton.

It is now a ghost town, a term some folk think will apply to the Eureka near Garies before it’s even settled.