No place for heroes in the story of Verwoerd, Tsafendas
apartheid with the inhumane single-mindedness of a racial zealot. He declared war on urban areas where Africans resided, calling them “black spots” that had to be eradicated.
The human cost was immense. Thriving racially integrated communities were destroyed. Sophiatown in Johannesburg was bulldozed and its black residents were forcibly moved to Soweto. A new white suburb called Triomf was built on the remains of their homes.
Worse than the scars on the physical landscape were the effects on the education of African children, which continue to be felt today. For it was Verwoerd who drove the policy of Bantu Education, officially in force from 1954 to 1980, which wrested control of education from the missionaries and handed it to a government whose view was encapsulated by its ideological and intellectual dynamo.
“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?” said Verwoerd.
This discrimination was taken to a new level with the segregation of universities in 1959, when the apartheid government also took over the University College of Fort Hare to force its integration into a separate and unequal system of racially based universities, a discriminatory legacy with which our country continues to struggle.
Verwoerd was the “father” of the homelands, and his malevolent role there is well documented by Randolph Vigne.
In his book Liberals Against Apartheid Vigne describes the gerrymandering and thuggery in denying King Sabata Dalindyebo’s faction victory in the Transkei Bunga elections of 1963, when Verwoerd used the tribal chiefs — as pusillanimous to the authority of the government purse then as now — to outvote Dalindyebo in favour of a paid government stooge.
Bannings and prison sentences were common under Verwoerd. He was prime minister when the ANC and PAC were banned, and when detention without trial was legalised.
That the economy flourished under his premiership (posting growth second in the world to Japan’s) and that the lives of white South Africans improved, is in large measure attributable to the jackboot being on the necks of black, coloured and Indian South Africans. History shows the wheel turns against such corrupted governments — then as it does now.
Verwoerd pursued every dissenting voice. Liberal Party parliamentary leader Margaret Ballinger recounts in her memoir From Union to Apartheid how Verwoerd and his henchmen made her husband William’s life hell as they hounded him from parliament and positions of influence in their efforts to end calls by liberals for the improvement of the living conditions of the African poor.
Yet today, there are efforts by some to sanitise Verwoerd’s sordid legacy. No less a person than the greatest living Afrikaner historian, the internationally acclaimed Hermann Giliomee, provides a grim example of revisionist historical sanitation in Politicsweb this week, setting up straw men and shooting them down, the first three paragraphs of which read: “When one thinks of Hendrik Verwoerd, who was assassinated 50 years ago, one thinks immediately about the issue of guilt. There exists a rare consensus in our politics today that South Africa is not a happy, prosperous society today because of Verwoerd.
“In the book The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, the function of singling out a guilty one is neatly delineated. A character poses the question: ‘Isn’t the whole question of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals.’
“Today Hendrik Verwoerd is above all the individual singled out for all the disasters and calamities that South Africa has experienced since 1966.”
Giliomee then recalls a gemütliche weekend spent with the Verwoerd family in 1960, before setting forth on the latest apartheid crusade under the banner that the policy has been maligned.
It is a crusade that besmirches Giliomee’s great legacy and provides much intellectual cover for the more nationalistically dumb and tone-deaf of AfriForum’s many actions.
One cannot but agree with the comment of another excellent historian (who asked not to be named). Although generally sympathetic to Giliomee’s earlier work, the historian remarked this week: “I think the piece is in keeping with his recent reflections on apartheid — but I do think it is bizarre. The arguments around collective and individual responsibility aren’t particularly well made, and he seems to be in awe of Verwoerd’s persuasive and ‘dominant’ personality — which colours, or stains, his overall assessment of the man within the context of his time.”
Stronger new facts around Verwoerd and Tsafendas also continue to emerge. Most fascinating among these is the recent discovery by University of Pretoria academic Jackie Grobler — from among the Lyndon Baines Johnson papers at the University of Texas in Austin — that Tsafendas was briefly a member of Robert Kennedy’s staff when he was US attorneygeneral in the ’60s.
Ulric Haynes, a member of the White House staff, recalls the
Giliomee seems to be in awe of Verwoerd’s persuasive and ‘dominant’ personality, which colours, or stains, his assessment
detail in a file among the Johnson papers. Haynes wrote in a 1966 note to the White House chief of staff that Tsafendas had briefly been a member of Kennedy’s staff. However, it is not clear if Kennedy actually ever met him or was aware of the connection when the news of Verwoerd’s death became known. The White House staff felt it would serve no purpose to inform the South African embassy in Washington of the connection, since it could only have negative repercussions.
This no doubt interesting new factoid feeds neatly into the conspiracy theories of South African right-wingers, many of whom still believe there was a plot by, among others, the Americans, the communists, the Africanists and the Illuminati to get rid of Verwoerd.
Such theories rank right down there with those of historical opportunists who now want to reconstruct the mentally unstable Tsafendas as a hero.
Between such narratives historians must find their way to the truth about two very fallible men — one of whom killed a prime minister and another who mutilated a country — whose paths crossed briefly, bloodily and fatefully on Tuesday September 6 1966.