Report from South Africa fanatic IN THE SADDLE
Fairbairn, James
Report from South Africa fanatic IN THE SADDLE by JAMES FAIRBAIRN Johannesburg In electing Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd as their leader this fall, South Africa's Nationalists have given supreme...
...After further study at German universities, he became, at 28, Stel-lenbosch's first professor of applied psychology...
...The Transvaler became a British-and Jew-baiting hate-sheet—and a great success...
...The cost of these "colleges" is to be borne by the Africans themselves...
...Incredible as it may sound, Verwoerd is genuinely convinced that he is doing all this for the Africans' own good...
...He has put more African children than ever before into schools—but they are "Bantu Education" schools, which Father Huddlestone rightly called Education for Servitude...
...In a country of racial and political extremism, Verwoerd has risen meteorically by being an unwavering arch-extremist...
...the endemically over-populated and famine stricken rural "native reserves...
...Three years later he became professor of sociology and social work as well, and it was this job which brought him face to face with "poor whites"—those members of the "master" race who couldn't make a living...
...During the war, in 1942, a Supreme Court judgment found that Verwoerd "did support Nazi propaganda and did make his newspaper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa...
...In the process of building his "black empire," Verwoerd has smashed the power of local authorities and made cities like Johannesburg jump to his bidding...
...So virulent is Verwoerd's hatred of everything British that his Transvaler completely ignored the visit of King George and Queen Elizabeth to South Africa in 1947...
...A year later Verwoerd gave up academic life to become the first editor of the Transvaler, the mouthpiece of the Transvaal Nationalist Party...
...The one and only reference to their presence in a country of their Commonwealth was a single sentence saying that "the presence of certain visitors will cause some dislocation of traffic today...
...In his latest achievement, he is about to bar non-whites from universities, forcing them to go instead to tribal "colleges" supervised by his Native Affairs Department...
...He has also taken every power except that of summary execution over Africans in their "own" reserves, as he has over those Africans in the towns...
...Although 60 to 80 per cent of them already subsist below the level of the bread-line in urban areas, Verwoerd is currently increasing per capita taxes by 75 per cent for men and extending them to women...
...He had no journalistic experience whatever, but he made up for that with the strength and extremity of his convictions...
...Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd as their leader this fall, South Africa's Nationalists have given supreme power to the most dangerous of all political types: a fanatic...
...He also made it a powerful weapon in the bitter internecine fight against those Nationalist Afrikaners who were prepared to give equal rights to English-speaking white South Africans...
...He calls this "guiding Africans towards independence," though...
...Malan in 1948, and in 1950 was appointed minister of native affairs...
...What he saw confirmed Verwoerd in his belief that the black man must have no part, other than as a transient laborer, in the white man's world...
...Verwoerd began by visiting Johannesburg's suppurating African slums —an unprecedented action for a Cabinet minister—and also visited JAMES FAIRBAIRN is the South African correspondent of Reynolds News, ton-don, and a regular contributor to The New Statesman...
...He has robbed Africans of the right to habeas corpus and the pitifully few other civil rights they had: expropriated their freehold urban properties and separated thousands of families in order to make their menfolk rootless menials, tolerated only for as long as their labor is needed...
...But Verwoerd's primary obsession is with race and color...
...To exclude the black man from the white world, he has tightened the hated "pass" laws and extended them to women...
...Having lost a parliamentary election, he was given a seat in the Senate by Dr...
...Most of them were Afrikaners, and from this time stems Verwoerd's conviction that, to the white man, the black presents not only a problem but also a terrible temptation to abandon the virtues of a self-reliant Puritanism...
...And, in the Africans' "own" reserves, Verwoerd has spent a little money on improvements—and smashed those tribes who refused to accept his stooge-chief "Bantu Authorities...
...His thoroughness and perseverance are rightly legendary, and he is a courageous and energetic man...
...Verwoerd is bitterly anti-British, anti-Semitic, and autocratic—yet he is a highly intelligent and educated man...
...In return, he would be allowed to develop in his "own" areas—under Verwoerd's direction...
...He has got many slums cleared—but rehoused Africans live in hourly fear of expulsion...
...He set to work with frightening energy and efficiency to impose his vision of apartheid on the country...
...In 1936 he and five other Stellen-bosch professors launched a public campaign against the admission to South Africa of Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany, giving as their reason the fear of their students that they would be "swamped" in their professions...
...His doctorate—in psychology— was earned at an early age at Stellen-bosch, the Yale of Afrikaner Nationalism...
Vol. 22 • December 1958 • No. 12
