The libertarian solution to involuntary apartheid from above left the door open for voluntary racial segregation from below. Ensuring the right to move but not the right to settle—and including the right to expulsion—suggested a way to an enforced re-sorting of the population back to the status quo ante.57 Louw and Kendall illustrated this in the epilogue to their book, which imagined a future thirteen years removed from their own, where their Swiss solution had been realized. They prophesied a variety of coexisting political forms, including a canton called Workers Paradise, where “everyone was issued with a copy of Mao’s little red book” and racial segregation was reinstituted because Black and white leftist radicals “refused to mix with each other socially.”58 Another canton was called Cisbo, for Ciskei Border Region, where everything was deregulated and traditional land privatized, a “mini Monaco” in which pot, prostitution, and pornography were legal. An illustration showed a white man with golf clubs and fishing pole rushing toward Black and white chorus girls as a man in a Mao suit and another in a black bourgeois frock coat wagged their fingers in prudish disapproval.59 A last speculative canton was dubbed Witwaterberg, “South Africa’s radical white separatist canton,” where automation and white labor replaced Black labor altogether and racial covenants ensured that residents remained white only.60

  In the event, it was only the last one that came to be. In 1990, a group known as the Afrikaner Freedom Front bought a patch of land and buildings in central South Africa, evicted its informal mixed-race residents, and opened the white Boer enclave of Orania the following year.61 Designs for the settlement dated back to the early 1980s, when Carel Boshoff, head of the Bureau of Racial Affairs, as well as son-in-law of assassinated apartheid president Hendrik Verwoerd, had pitched the so-called Plan Oranje for the establishment of a white homeland. As Boshoff described it at the time, because “white supremacy” was doomed in the long run in a majority Black environment, the best thing to do was withdraw to a white redoubt while continuing economic relations with the surrounding non-white communities.62 In the 1990s, with Boshoff in residence, Orania took as its logo a small white boy rolling up his sleeves, a gesture signaling a willingness to work—but also, unmistakably, a willingness to fight.

  The area where Orania was located had been settled in the 1830s by the Voortrekkers, Boers who left the British Cape Colony to move into the South African interior. Louw, whose combination of anti-apartheid libertarianism and cultural conservatism confounds the usual political classifications, had long idolized the Voortrekkers, calling the Great Trek “one of the most glorious histories of classical liberalism, of rugged individualism.”63 Kendall and Louw defended the viability of the modern-day white enclave. Before Orania was actually founded, they wrote that “people laugh at the proposal of Afrikaner separatists like Carel Boshoff to establish an independent homeland” in the near-desert. But the lack of natural resources should be no problem, they said. An “Afrikaner homeland” just needed a “low-tax or no-tax policy to attract high-tech, skills-intensive business to the region.”64 The miniature ethnostate need only become a zone.

  Other South African market radicals have embraced the racial experiment of Orania. At the annual meeting of the South African Libertarian Society held there in 2015, Louw jokingly referred to it as an adaptation of the homeland model to create an “Afrikanerstan.”65 For libertarians, the foremost attraction is its structure as a private entity.66 Orania’s leader is the chief executive, and residents are shareholders in the mother company.67 It also issues its own currency, the ora. Another South African libertarian described Orania as “a rare example of a libertarian enclave,” where membership was governed by voluntary contract as a way of achieving freedom from “the tyranny of the majority.”68 The founder of the South African Libertarian Society used the example of Orania in some advice posted online. “Make your own country,” he wrote, “South Africa is vast. Find an attractive piece of land far from the urban centres, ensure it has water, build a fence around it and invite like-minded people to live there with you. Go as far below the radar as you can. Have as little contact with the bureaucracy as possible. Build your own economy and polity. Arm yourselves well.”69

  Orania has gained traction worldwide. In 2019, Australian Far Right groups were using Orania as a template for creating “Anglo-European enclaves” as bases for a coming race war.70 In the United States, the white nationalist group American Renaissance praised Orania as a place where Afrikaners “could keep white and where they could preserve their language and culture” and “set up a private corporation to run it, with the power to grant residency only to certain approved Afrikaners.”71

  A clear advantage of this cantonization scheme was that it could permit the persistence of patterns of racialized economic power without the stigma of formal apartheid.72 A voluntary racial segregation from below would not be troubled by the same problems of legitimacy as the top-down separatist state. The post–Jim Crow United States offered a great precedent—a country where segregation happened through the market rather than overt state intervention.73 According to the libertarian model, racial separation and racial inequality created by the push and pull of economic forces posed no threat to the principles of the free market. Citizen-customers would vote with their feet and sort out the population organically. If the outcome was a balance of economic power that looked much like it had at the outset, then so be it. In a polity reconceived as a constellation of zones, redistribution was no longer part of government’s role.

  3.

  On February 11, 1990, footage of Nelson Mandela walking out of the front gates of Victor Verster Prison after twenty-seven years of incarceration appeared on television screens across the world. There were isolated looting and riots around the country, prompting the notoriously brutal South African police force to fire into crowds, killing many. When Mandela spoke from a balcony in Cape Town partially covered with a red Soviet flag, people pressing in and lifted up on shoulders and arms to see him, his message was clear and unambiguous: “Universal suffrage on a common voters roll in a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa is the only way to peace and racial harmony.”74 The next month, the Ciskei government of Lennox Sebe was overthrown in a coup, with a crowd chanting, “Viva ANC! Viva the South African Communist Party!” Sebe himself was not present. During a previous coup attempt, he had been courting investors in Israel, where he twinned Ciskei’s capital city with the West Bank settlement of Ariel.75 This time he was in the homeland of the zone: Hong Kong.76

  The events of the early 1990s looked like a refutation of the canton schemes and their fantasy of fragmentation.77 There would be no drastic redrawing of the maps. The inherited borders of the South African state remained as they were, and the artificial homelands rejoined the unitary nation in 1994. When Mandela won in a free and fair election, he spoke of South Africa as a “rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”78 Historians mark the election as the twentieth century’s last act of decolonization, proof that empire had passed from the world stage in a triumph of the nation-state.79 But there were signs that the dream of the zone was not going quietly. In 1979, the Far Eastern Economic Review had reported that free trade zones, “artificially inseminated and easily transplantable into any developing nation … have spread across the Third World like a test tube baby boom.”80 What had happened in the hinterland of the Eastern Cape, with its clusters of sweatshops, was very modern and, in some ways, the future. In 1986, there were only 176 zones globally. By 2018, there were 5,400.81

  The libertarian Bantustans were perhaps not so anomalous as they seemed. National containers were permeable after independence. Flows of labor and money into and out of countries changed the conditions of the possible and placed constraints on the hopes of unimpeded sovereignty that accompanied the vibrant colors of a new flag gliding up the pole.82 The limits of national sovereignty can be illustrated by comparing the pseudo-independent Ciskei to its neighbor, the actual self-governing state of Lesotho, just a few hundred miles to its north.

  I have a personal connection with Lesotho. My family came to the landlocked country in 1985, when I was six years old: my father was joining the Lesotho Flying Doctor Service, riding a Cessna into the mountains to service clinics unreachable by roads. We came via Bloemfontein, South Africa, lugging our ten big black suitcases, including forty-eight tins of smoked salmon we had been given by Kwakwaka’wakh fishermen friends on our departure from our last home, on a small island off Vancouver Island. Lesotho is a rugged country, in gray and tan and a little green, high above sea level, bisected north–south by mountain ranges with most of the population living along the western edge. Gaining independence from the British Empire in 1964 as an enclave in the middle of apartheid South Africa, Lesotho hosted many expatriate arrivals besides my family—Peace Corps volunteers, engineers, teachers, and geologists. Alongside the children of the postcolonial elites, my childhood best friends were Indian, Israeli, and American.

  Lesotho was an object of special attention in the era of international development. The country was an ideal space, of a manageable size and serving as a potential showcase of postcolonial Black rule right in the middle of a pariah state. It seemed like the opposite of the zone. It was an aspiring national economy, striving for growth and modernization. Experts and funders ought to have been able to make things happen here, even if nowhere else. But it turned out they could not make them happen here either.

  There is a famous book about the effort to “develop” Lesotho, The Anti-Politics Machine, which I later found out was being researched and written when we were there. Its author, the American anthropologist James Ferguson, concludes that the error of the platoons of experts was in seeing Lesotho as the self-contained islet it appeared to be on the color-coded map. In fact, the border had little meaning when the work was beyond it.83 Men went back and forth across the line to work in South African gold and diamond mines, coming back with wages in cash. Some would end up in fights; part of my father’s job was stitching up injuries from knobkerries, the stout round-headed clubs that men often carried under the heavy wool blankets that protected them from the mountain country’s cold nights.

  Lesotho was a pool of surplus labor for the needs of the apartheid state. The borders also meant little to the South African Defense Forces, who slipped into Lesotho to assassinate opponents of the regime taking refuge there. On occasion, we could hear the helicopters and gunshots. I heard the sound of a coup—people marching along the main road to the border, the Kingsway—while I watched the luckdragons and rock biters of The Never-Ending Story on VHS at a friend’s house. The lesson of Lesotho was that no nation is an island, and development made little sense if you pretended it was. Even if the borders were officially recognized, and independence was genuine, in contrast to the pseudo-nations of the Bantustans, there were ways that the state remained a zone in the era of globalization. Political autonomy meant nothing without the economic means of survival.84

  4.

  South Africa has had a second life in science fiction as a vision of politics beyond and after the democratic nation-state. In Masande Ntshanga’s 2019 speculative novel Triangulum, set largely in Ciskei, the protagonist’s parents have moved to the Bantustan to work in Sebe’s government. A project that sounds like it could have been designed by Louw turns townships into “self-contained, privately owned zones with standardized populations of 200,000 and streamlined economic functions, including energy production, recycling, manufacturing, and urban farming.”85 A high-rise “Revolution Tower,” the tallest on the continent, stands in Johannesburg, built by a foreign corporation to signal to investors that the climate is fine. Watching a debate on television, the narrator sees a sociologist denounce “the zones as a new form of apartheid,” while a community organizer responds with resignation that “people needed to eat.” “The usual,” the narrator remarks, and she changes the channel.86

  Ntshanga expressed the pessimism of a quarter century of actually existing postapartheid, in which the state had its agency constrained by the need to attract overseas capital and betrayed too many promises. Another novelist, closer in time to Mandela’s balcony speech, took the canton model to a more radical conclusion. In two novels from the early 1990s, the American author Neal Stephenson conjured up a world very much like the libertarian fantasy. In his 1992 Snow Crash, the “New South Africa Franchulate” is an “apartheid burbclave,” a fictional version of the real-life Orania: privately owned, privately governed.87 He expanded on the vision in his next novel, The Diamond Age, which featured an Orania-like “clave” of Boers—“stocky blonds in suits or the most conservative sorts of dresses, usually with half a dozen kids in tow.” Among the future cantons that Kendall and Louw predicted was “Maoville”; Stephenson offered a more baroque “Sendero Clave,” named after the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), Peru’s Communist guerrilla movement. It stands “four stories high and two blocks long, one solid giant mediatron” showing Mao Zedong “waving to an unseen multitude” alongside the Peruvian revolutionary leader.88

  Stephenson animated Louw and Kendall’s cantons. Among his most evocative ideas was that of the phyle, taken from the ancient Greek word for “tribe” or “clan.” The Diamond Age features phyles based on lineage but also “synthetic” ones, “tribes that people just made up out of thin air.”89 However artificial, these phyles became real through legal agreement and cohabitation, shared ritual and codes of conduct. This openness was made possible by the footloose investor capital of manufacturers scouring the world for low wages and government giveaways. Container ships and telecommunications made it as easy to set up in the rural Eastern Cape as in Youngstown or Sunderland—and much cheaper. The end of a world divided into two blocs or three worlds made more visible a shattered world, a fragmented political imagination.

  In the 1990s, market radicals pursued a pixelated geography resembling Stephenson’s dystopia, with ongoing processes of secession producing ever more polities as products, extending Milton and Rose Friedman’s freedom to choose into new forms of elective filiation. After the Cold War’s end, libertarians embraced the vision of a world where the right of secession was unlimited. As the journalist Tom Bethell put it: “There are about 160 countries in the world today. Since the Berlin Wall came down, I have frequently found myself thinking: Why not many more? Why not 500 countries?”90

  5

  The Wonderful Death of a State

  UN member states and the decade they joined

  ROKE / WIKIMEDIA

  It is not easy to start a new state. The earth’s surface is already divided up. A new state implies territory taken from an existing one. For good reason, states prefer this not to happen. Not wanting their own borders challenged, states defend international law that sets them in stone. Even during decolonization in Africa and Asia, the often-arbitrary outlines of colonies usually retained their shape as new nations. Demands from minorities seeking self-determination were ignored or suppressed, and the international community agreed. Cartography was destiny.1

  In the 1990s, these assumptions collapsed. The dissolution of the Soviet bloc yielded a raft of new and reestablished nations, scrambling the contours of Europe.2 The red mass of the USSR on the map at my middle school sprouted a bloom of new republics at its edges; the oblong of Yugoslavia was in pieces by the time I left high school. Czechoslovakia underwent mitosis. The breakup of socialist Europe seemed to open Pandora’s box. The spirit of nation making was afoot. New movements agitated for their own right to secede: Catalans in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, Tamils in Sri Lanka. In my own country, the province of Quebec came within a percentage point of voting to leave Canada.

  When I was fifteen, my family was living in Vanuatu, a tiny island nation between Fiji and Australia. The Chinese and the Americans jockeyed for influence there, donating Toyota trucks to local health projects and building infrastructure. This was not so much humanitarianism as a testament to what a seat in the United Nations meant. Vanuatu was a nation of under two hundred thousand people and only a few thousand square miles, and had only been independent since 1980—but it had the same vote in the General Assembly as a world superpower.3 Japan lobbied tiny Pacific nations for their support to continue commercial whaling, China to build support for its material and strategic interests. In the 1990s, the UN granted seats to tiny nations long excluded: Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, and Liechtenstein.

  Most people saw this wave of nations through the lens of politics—some worried about resurgent “neo-nationalism.” Market radicals saw it through the lens of capitalism—and were happy with what they saw. Each state spawned by secession was a new jurisdiction, a start-up territory that might offer itself as a refuge for flight capital or a site of unregulated business or research. Micronations were zones, bound spaces of legal difference small enough to stage economic experiments. They were also phyles—voluntary gatherings of like-minded residents. Secession was a way to subdivide the earth and bring new territories into the bustling marketplace of global competition. Neo-nationalism could be the harbinger of a coming golden age of social sorting defined by ever-shrinking jurisdictions.

  In the United States, two groups formed an alliance in response to this moment of geopolitical churn: market radicals seeking passage to a capitalist polity beyond democracy and neo-Confederates seeking to resurrect the Old South. As in Leon Louw and Frances Kendall’s blueprints for South Africa, they wove together principles of decentralized capitalist competition and racial homogeneity. This right-wing alliance dreamed of Bantustans of choice—Grand Apartheid from below. Though their immediate goal failed, their vision of laissez-faire segregation lived on. For them, secession was the path to a world that was socially divided but economically integrated—separate but global.