Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was a South African professor, editor, and statesman who served as the sixth Prime Minister of South Africa. He transformed apartheid into an effective instrument for the entrenchment of white domination.
Background
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was born on September 8, 1901 near Amsterdam. He was the second child of Anje Strik and Wilhelmus Johannes Verwoerd, a shopkeeper and a deeply religious man who decided to move to South Africa in 1903 because of his sympathy towards the Afrikaner nation after the South African War. The Verwoerd family settled in Wynberg, Cape Town for ten years, after which they moved to Bulawayo, Rhodesia where the elder Verwoerd became an assistant evangelist in the Dutch Reformed Church. After four years they returned to South Africa and settled in Brandfort, in the Orange Free State.
Education
Young Hendrik proved himself to be an able student at the Lutheran School in Wynberg and the Wynberg High School for Boys. In Rhodesia Verwoerd attended Milton High School where he did so well that he was awarded the Beit Scholarship. After refusing this because of his family’s move back to South Africa, he took the matric exam and came first in the Free State and fifth in South Africa.
After his schooling, he proceeded to study theology at the University of Stellenbosch, later changing to psychology and philosophy. He was awarded a masters and a doctorate in philosophy, both cum laude, and turned down an Abe Bailey scholarship to Oxford University, England, opting to continue his studies in psychology in Germany. Verwoerd left for Germany in 1925, and stayed there during 1926, studying at the Universities of Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig.
Career
A brilliant scholar at the University of Stellenbosch, Verwoerd was appointed professor of applied psychology there in 1927. In 1933 he changed to the chair of sociology and social work. During the Depression years he became active in social work among poor White South Africans. He devoted much attention to welfare work and was often consulted by welfare organisations, while he served on numerous committees. His efforts in the field of national welfare drew him into politics and in 1936 he was offered the first editorship of ‘Die Transvaler’, a position which he took up in 1937, with the added responsibility of helping to rebuild the National Party (NP) in the Transvaal.
Like most Afrikaner nationalists, Verwoerd opposed South Africa's involvement in World War II. The prowar press charged that he had made Die Transvaler an instrument of Nazi propaganda. He sued the Johannesburg Star for making these allegations. Giving judgment against him on July 13, 1943, the presiding judge observed, "He did support Nazi propaganda, he did make his paper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it. " Following the war his republican sentiments again manifested themselves in 1947 when he issued instructions to his newspaper staff that they were to ignore the British royal family’s visit to South Africa that year.
The 1948 general elections, which brought Malan to power and in which Verwoerd contested and lost the Alberton seat, were a triumph for Die Broederbond. With its leaders heading the government, it could impose its policies on the Africans and the whites. After the elections Verwoerd left Die Transvaler to take the seat Malan offered him in the Senate.
Verwoerd became minister of native affairs in 1950. An insensitive advocate of segregation, he wasted little time in "solving" the color problem. He abolished the institutions Hertzog had set up for the representation of the Africans and planned to slowly transform the black reservations into autonomous states (Bantustans) which would federate with South Africa. Year after year he placed before Parliament legislation to bring every aspect of the Africans' life under his control and enforce the segregation of African linguistic groups from one another.
Verwoerd developed a system designed to keep the African the intellectual inferior of the white man. All African men and women were fingerprinted and forced to carry a pass containing intimate personal details. Wholesale removals of Africans from land they owned in so-called white areas followed.
Rebellions broke out in some rural reservations, and strikes and riots occurred in the main industrial areas. Verwoerd's answers to these were bans, banishments, arrests, and the enactment of increasingly harsh laws. On March 21, 1960 Mangaliso Sobukwe, president of the Pan-African Congress (PAC), called the Africans out in a nationwide protest against the Pass Laws. The police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators at Sharpeville, killing 83 and wounding 365. A state of emergency was declared, and the African National Congress (ANC) and the PAC were banned.
J. G. Strijdom, the prime minister, died in 1958, and Verwoerd succeeded him. On April 9, 1960 David Beresford Pratt fired two bullets into Verwoerd's head. He recovered to proclaim South Africa a republic outside the Commonwealth on May 31, 1961. Demetrio Tsafendas, a purportedly "mentally unbalanced" government employee of Greek descent, stabbed and killed Verwoerd on his bench in the House of Assembly on September 6, 1966.
Politics
Verwoerd was a staunch republican and befriended Nationalist leader J. G. Strijdom. He also declared himself strongly in favour of racial segregation by attacking the United Party’s policy of 'pampering, levelling and living together'.
