THE ACCIDENTAL ARYAN
Morbid genius or political crank who left an awful legacy? But Hendrik Verwoerd also had a ’lighter side’, writes
HENDRIK Frensch Verwoerd, who was born in the Netherlands on September 8 1901 and killed in Cape Town two days before his 65th birthday, was arguably a man of great intellect and foresight; but also a man, like most geniuses, full of contradictions.
But what many have never fully appreciated about the man was his great sense of humour. Missing his birthday by two days is just the touchstone of morbid genius.
Couldn’t he just hang in there, reach 65 — which is the retirement age of mere mortals — and get his birthday gifts? What? Another safari suit? A long-service clock? A litre of Brylcreem or whatever it is they gave to a white man who, at 65, still boasted a head of full hair? Or maybe he was dying to avoid yet another badly baked birthday melktert from Tant Betsie’s oven? Not easy to fathom.
What is even more remarkable — and darkly humorous — is that on April 9 1960 Verwoerd had gone to Milner Park, Johannesburg, to mark the jubilee of the Union of South Africa.
It was just after he’d delivered his opening address that David Pratt, a rich English businessman and farmer, pumped two bullets into the prime minister, one penetrating his right cheek, and the second going through his ear.
Verwoerd survived the attempt. Then, on September 6 1966, in the safety of parliamentary chambers, he was knifed to death by Dimitri Tsafendas, a messenger.
The first irony is the very fact that it took a knife to do a job that had defied two bullets. The second irony is that Tsafendas, a coloured, had gotten the job by pretending to be white — because, in terms of Job Reservation Act, the job in parliament was reserved for whites.
Stories have been written about how Tsafendas, born in Maputo of a Greek father and African mother, had burst the balloons of other Verwoerdhaters when he revealed that his act had nothing to do with politics, but everything to do DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON: Verwoerd’s body is carried from parliament in Cape Town in 1966 after the stabbing attack by Dimitri Tsafendas with an order from a tapeworm. Tempting though it is to follow the surreal thread of the story, we shall resist the urge.
We want to stay with the facts.
The facts show us that, though his life betrayed a lot of humour, Verwoerd and the work he performed while in office were no laughing matter.
Verwoerd was 26 when he was made professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University. Clearly an intelligent man, he has erroneously been called the architect of all racial oppression in South Africa. An illfitting epitaph if you ask me. It wasn’t Verwoerd who masterminded the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 which changed the landscape of South Africa.
These laws condemned the black majority to live in native reserves, which constituted 13% of the land. It wasn’t Verwoerd who came up with the pass laws. It wasn’t him who took migrant labour to perverse levels, breaking families in the process — it was the British. ’MENTALLY UNSTABLE’: Dimitri Tsafendas was found unfit to stand trial after killing Verwoerd POWER MUTI: The inyanga Khotso Sethuntsa
What Verwoerd did was not only to perfect the perversion that had been imposed upon South Africa by the British — but to dress it in academic clothes. Apartheid simply meant “separate but equal development”, in his lexicon.
Segregation had thus far been imposed only in major matters, such as separate schools. Local society, rather than the law, had been depended upon to enforce most separation; under Verwoerd, segregation became all pervasive.
The blacks had to be content in their “tribal homelands” where they would develop at their own pace and avoid being alarmed by the whites, who were hurtling ahead so fast in terms of civilisation that it would only psychologically harm the blacks to be in close contact with them. That was his theory, anyway.
Verwoerd’s initial focus was, of course, to establish Afrikanerdom as the fulcrum for white hegemony. Originally guided by Hitler’s notion of the Aryan race, Verwoerd later reluctantly accepted Greeks, Portuguese and Jews as whites. Strength in numbers.
One of his memorable laws, as minister of native affairs, was the Population Registration Act of 1950. Under this law strange things happened.
As Joseph Lelyveld, the erstwhile editor of the New York Times, wrote in his brilliant book Move Your Shadow: “In my first year back in South Africa, 558 coloureds became whites, 15 whites became coloureds, eight Chinese became whites, seven whites became Chinese, 40 Indians became coloureds, 20 coloureds became Indians, 79 Africans became coloureds, and eight coloureds became Africans. The spirit of this grotesque selfparody, which results from the deliberations of an official body known as the Race Classification Board, is obviously closer to Grand Guignol than the Nuremberg Laws; in other words, it’s sadistic farce. ‘Look, man, it’s all a game, it’s all a big joke,’ I was assured once by a Cape Town coloured who had managed to get himself reclassified as a white, a transformation sometimes described in Afrikaans by the term verblankingsproses.”
In 1959, Verwoerd passed the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, which laid the cornerstone for the classification of black South Africans into eight ethnic groups with associated homelands. Thanks to this law, millions of black South Africans were dispossessed of their lands, and would keep being shunted from pillar to post over the years.
In his continued display of humour, in the same year he passed the Extension of University Education Act — which put an end to black students attending white universities and created separate tertiary STRANGE DAYS: Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd may not have initiated segregation but he consolidated it institutions for the different races.
In his justification of separate schools and education systems, Verwoerd once argued: “There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour . . . What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.”
Black people, according to him, were incapable of reaching certain levels of intellectual maturity. An assertion which became interesting when it came to light that when he was not in church he was consulting a famous black inyanga, Khotso Sethuntsa, who had 23 wives.
The story of the multimillionaire inyanga’s relationship with Verwoerd was spoken of openly in black South Africa.
But in white South Africa it was only in recent times — especially with the 2007 publication of the well-researched, and academically astute book The Extraordinary Khotso: Millionaire Medicine Man from Lusikisiki by Felicity Wood and Michael Lewis — that the dark side of Verwoerd came to light.
Khotso delighted in the purchase, every year, of a new Cadillac at the Kokstad Agricultural Show. Because he did not trust banks, he brought the money in cash.
In her notes for the book, Wood writes: “Modern Afrikaner leaders, including JG Strijdom and HF Verwoerd, visited Khotso — for his medicines for political power, it was said. Verwoerd visited him just before the 1948 elections and many believed the Nationalists swept to victory because they had Khotso’s medicine.”
So as we mark the 50th anniversary of Verwoerd’s demise this week, as we contemplate hordes of black people with little or no education, as we wake up to an increasingly violent country, as we count the financial cost to the economy of disease born out of ignorance and poverty, we should shudder at the legacy of this man with such a warped sense of humour.
Verwoerd was indeed Tarantino before Tarantino was Tarantino. Except Tarantino didn’t leave any real corpses and the ghosts of human beings.
Fred Khumalo’s new book, ‘#ZuptasMustFall and Other Rants’, is now available at bookstores