Boshoff's last wish for Orania

ORANIA founder Carel Boshoff has died at his home at the age of 83

"Orania lost a father figure with the death of Professor Carel Boshoff," said Jaco Kleynhans, chief executive officer of the Orania Movement.

Kleynhans said Boshoff had been seriously ill with cancer over the past year and his health deteriorated drastically last month.

He said Orania would go from strength to strength after Boshoff's death.

"Prof Carel was a father figure in our community, but sometimes it is required from the children to further develop what their father has started," Kleynhans said. "That was also his last wish to us."

A former chairperson of the Broederbond, Boshoff was a pioneer of the idea of an independent Afrikaner homeland.

Born in Nylstroom in the then Transvaal on November 9 1927, he studied at the University of Pretoria, where he obtained a theology degree in 1951.

He worked for 10 years as a Dutch Reformed Church missionary in Lebowa and Soweto, during which time he completed an MA.

In 1967 he returned to the University of Pretoria to lecture in theology, and in 1968 he was awarded a doctorate in divinity.

He later became dean of the faculty and professor in missionary science.

In 1972 he was appointed chairperson of the South African Bureau for Racial Affairs (Sabra), a conservative think tank on race relations.

In the early 70s Boshoff, as Sabra chairperson, wanted the scrapping of Section 10 rights that allowed a small proportion of black people to live permanently in urban areas in "white" South Africa.

He said there was no foundation for the claim that apartheid was immoral.

He warned that if the trends in growth of the number of blacks in white SA were not reversed, and at least 10million people resettled in the homelands over the following decade, "there cannot be any question of the survival of the white people in South Africa".

Boshoff maintained a separate white state was the only way to preserve white self-determination, and ruled out a common economy with other "black" states.

In 1980 he succeeded Gerrit Viljoen as chairperson of the influential Afrikaner secret society the Broederbond, but resigned from the body in 1983 in a dispute over his rejection of the government's plans for the tricameral constitution.

The following year he co-founded and became chairperson of the ultra-conservative Afrikaner Volkswag, which for a while served as the "cultural wing" of the Conservative Party.

He was a leading figure in the organisation of the far right's financially disastrous "alternative" Groot Trek centenary celebrations in 1988.

Boshoff resigned his chair in theology in 1988 in order to devote himself to saving the Afrikanervolk, and became full-time executive officer of the Afrikaner-vryheidstigting (Avstig), established to promote the idea of an Afrikanervolkstaat.

He stepped down as national leader of the Voortrekkers, the Afrikaner equivalent to the Boy Scouts, in 1989 after a controversy over his continuing role in the body, and warned that the movement would cease to exist if it opened its membership to all races.

In February that year he announced the proposed borders of the volkstaat, which included southern Namibia and a large portion of the arid northwestern Cape and Karoo.

Asked why he chose this relatively desolate area, he said disarmingly: "Because nobody wants it".

In 1990 Boshoff held talks with members of the ANC, and in 1992 formally entered negotiations by submitting a report to a Codesa working group on behalf of Avstig.