Kajsa Norman

20 years after the fall of apartheid the white Afrikaner minority fears cultural extinction. How far are they prepared to go to survive as a people?

Bridge Over Blood River is a haunting and subversive evocation of South Africa’s racial politics and provides some unsettling answers. Along the Orange River in South Africa, there lies the breakaway republic of Orania, where a thousand Afrikaners are working to construct a white-African utopia.

Citing their desire to preserve their language and traditions, they have sequestered themselves in an isolated part of the arid Karoo region. Here, they can still dictate the rules and create a homeland with its own flag, currency and ideology. Kajsa Norman traces the war for control of South Africa, its people, and its history, from the Battle of Blood River in 1838, through the brutality of apartheid, to Orania today.
Weaving between the past and the present, Bridge Over Blood River highlights how years of fear, nationalism, and social engineering have left the modern Afrikaner struggling for identity and relevance.

Kajsa Norman is a London-based investigative journalist and author. She has published books on Cuba, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Venezuela. Her books explore how people and power structures act and react in extreme, politically charged environments, such as dictatorships and conflict zones.