Impossible to gloss over the grim realities

ON September 6 1966, a knife wielded by Mozambican immigrant Dimitri Tsafendas ended the life of the Dutch immigrant Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, who had climbed the greasy pole of politics to become prime minister of South Africa, where his legacy of Bantustans and Bantu education lives on 50 years after his violent death.

In assessing the massive effect Verwoerd had on South Africa, one would do well to steer clear of efforts to lionise either of the main actors in that violent drama on the floor of parliament’s Old Assembly.

All credible research shows Tsafendas to have been a mentally troubled drifter whose past almost caused a diplomatic incident between the US and South Africa, while current efforts to sanitise the legacy of Verwoerd must pale into welldeserved insignificance when confronted by the ongoing damage wrought by his racist policies.

Verwoerd was born in Amsterdam on September 8 1901. In 1903, his parents moved to South Africa, settling in the Free State town of Brandfort after a stint as missionaries in what was then Rhodesia.

Verwoerd read psychology and philosophy at Stellenbosch, where he excelled academically, and turned down a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in favour of studying in Germany, where Nazism was on the rise.

On returning to South Africa, he became involved in combating endemic white poverty and was asked to edit Die Transvaler, the National Party newspaper in Johannesburg.

As its editor he achieved notoriety among many and won the adulation of others as a nationalist demagogue who railed against black, English and Jewish influences on Afrikanerdom. In 1947, for example, he chose to ignore the British royal family’s visit to South Africa — the biggest money-spinner of the year for local newspapers — in his efforts to preserve the ideological purity of Die Transvaler.

In 1948, he was elected to parliament and in 1950 became minister of native affairs, in which post he implemented Continued on Page 12