PRETORIA – The Afrikaner-only settlement of Kleinfontein is embroiled in a heated legal dispute with municipal authorities who consider the community illegal and are demanding residents pay property rates 300 times higher than current levels due to zoning regulation violations.
According to Kleinfontein’s deputy president Dannie de Beer, the city argues that the gated community of approximately 1 500 white Afrikaners does not comply with municipal zoning laws, creating an administrative crisis that threatens the enclave’s existence.
“The punitive taxation is politically motivated,” de Beer claims, suggesting the dispute is timed strategically ahead of the 2026 municipal elections. “Next year is election year, the ANC have to show that they are strong and that they accommodate the radical left.”
The municipality did not respond to requests for comment regarding the zoning allegations.
Located 20 minutes east of Pretoria, Kleinfontein operates as a postcard from South Africa’s apartheid past. The community requires rigorous screenings and motivational interviews for prospective residents, selecting members based on ethnic, linguistic and religious criteria.
“To apply for membership you must look like a Boer (farmer) Afrikaner,” said Jan Groenewald, one of the community’s founders, though he insists race is not officially used as a membership basis.
The legal challenge comes at a sensitive time as Pretoria seeks to counter Washington’s claims of persecution against white South Africans.
Groenewald’s background adds complexity to the dispute. In the 1980s, during apartheid’s violent final years, he served as second-in-command of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), a neo-Nazi group that committed deadly attacks on black South Africans. He claims to have rejected political violence and left the group in 1989, though he hasn’t abandoned aspirations for an independent Afrikaner state.
The community purchased the land in 1990, four years before South Africa’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.
At Kleinfontein’s entrance stands a bust of Hendrick Verwoerd, the former Prime Minister considered apartheid’s architect.
Guarded by white security guards and self-sufficient, Kleinfontein likes to present itself as a counter-model to the challenges facing the democratic South Africa, plagued by extreme inequality and high crime rates.
On a recent Saturday visit, hundreds of blond children faced off in games of tug-of-war and sack races as Kleinfontein’s residents – many dressed in typical khaki clothes – marked a harvest celebration.
The settlement, which has fluctuated between 1 500 and 1 700 residents, faces internal challenges alongside the municipal dispute. One woman is suing the community for R 2.18 million, unable to sell her inherited property due to what her lawyer calls their “narrow definition of Afrikaner people.”
Residents like 21-year-old Sune Jansen van Rensburg, who moved in three years ago following a break-in attempt in Pretoria, defend the community’s exclusivity. “If my child walks around my home, I want them to interact with people with the same values and way they see the world,” she said.
Today’s residents represent merely a fraction of South Africa’s estimated 2.6 million Afrikaners among the country’s 62 million inhabitants, according to 2022 census data.
“Maybe we haven’t developed as quickly as the rest of the world,” admits Rian Genis, who chairs Kleinfontein’s board of directors. “But we like things to be as they were.”
The zoning dispute threatens to force fundamental changes on a community that has deliberately remained frozen in South Africa’s controversial past.
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