Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd

Prime minister of South Africa (1958-1966)

• Born: September 8, 1901
• Birthplace: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• Died: September 6, 1966
• Place of death: Cape Town, South Africa

Cause of notoriety: Verwoerd, as editor of the Afrikaner newspaper Die Transvaler, took a pro-Nazi position during World War II. Later, as prime minister of the National Party government, he energetically implemented apartheid and Bantustan policies, pulling South Africa out of the British Commonwealth in the face of mounting international criticism.

Active: 1958-1966

Locale: Union of South Africa (now Republic of South Africa)

Early Life

The son of Dutch Reformed Church evangelist and businessman Wilhelmus Johannes Verwoerd and his wife, Anje Strik, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (HEHN-drihk frehnsh fehr-VEWRT) was taken from the Netherlands to join the Afrikaner community in South Africa at the age of two. He proved to be exceptionally gifted academically, rising rapidly through the University of Stellenbosch, which he entered in 1919. He eventully earned a B.A. degree in 1921, a master’s degree in 1922, and a doctorate in psychology and philosophy in 1924. The following year, he took postdoctoral courses in Germany following an offer to study at Oxford—he had an aversion to British education and institutions. While in Germany, Verwoerd attended universities at Hamburg, Leipzig, and Berlin and likely made contact with supporters of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement during this period. Nazi ideology may have influenced Verwoerd’s later thinking on racial policy in South Africa. At Hamburg, he married Betsie Shoeman, an Afrikaner student whom he had met years earlier at Stellenbosch.

Political Career

Returning to South Africa in 1927, Verwoerd joined the faculty at the University of Stellenbosch, where his rise again proved meteoric. He was appointed to the chair of applied psychology and eventually assumed a professorship in sociology and social work. When Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany began to apply for asylum in South Africa, Verwoerd conspicuously spearheaded a protest among certain university faculty members to oppose their admittance into the country.

Verwoerd left academia in 1937 to become founder and chief editor of the Afrikaner newspaper Die Transvaler. Verwoerd’s publication became noteworthy for its extreme views on race, and it also became an organ for white supremacy, consistently espousing anti-Semitic, anti-British, and pro-Nazi ideas. Verwoerd came afoul of the authorities for his opposition to South Africa’s entry into World War II on the Allied side. Politically, he became increasingly identified with the more fanatically racist elements within Daniel François Malan’s mainly Afrikaner National Party.

Though he lost the race for a seat in the South African legislative assembly during the 1948 elections, Malan’s party swept into power, and Verwoerd was appointed to the Senate. He received the cabinet post of minister for native affairs and began planning and pressing for a “Bantustan” policy through the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952. Under this arrangement, Black Africans were to be moved out of urban areas and into specially assigned tribal “homelands,” or “Bantustans,” where they would develop independently of the white population in South Africa and eventually be granted separate statehood. Verwoerd became even more influential under the ministry of Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, who succeeded Malan, serving from 1954 to 1958.

Upon Strijdom’s death in 1958, Verwoerd became prime minister and zealously promoted his ideas on apartheid and Bantustan creation. On January 20, 1960, annoyed by British criticism of apartheid, Verwoerd announced a referendum on the question of the Union of South Africa becoming a republic and severing its ties with the British Commonwealth. On March 21, 1960, at Sharpeville, a crowd protesting apartheid was fired on by police; sixty-nine people were killed. The Sharpeville Massacre, while triggering a wave of international condemnation, only served to make Verwoerd adhere to his course all the more rigidly. On April 16, 1960, in Johannesburg, a farmer named David Pratt fired two shots in Verwoerd’s face. The prime minister recovered and survived this assassination attempt.

On October 5, 1960, a well-managed referendum made South Africa a republic. This was officially proclaimed on May 31, 1961, and Verwoerd announced the expected break with the Commonwealth. Increasing internal protests were met with more vigorous countermeasures; among those arrested and eventually sentenced to life imprisonment during the crackdown was African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who would not be released until 1990.

Long before that, however, Verwoerd fell victim to a second assassination attempt. On September 6, 1966, at the legislative assembly room in Cape Town, a demented parliamentary messenger named Dimitri Tsafendas, claiming to be acting on the commands of a large tapeworm in his stomach, stabbed the prime minister to death while he sat waiting to make a speech.

Impact

If Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd did not originate apartheid in South Africa, he nonetheless wholeheartedly endorsed it and gave it an edge and an inflexibility that would spawn international isolation for his nation. He also helped usher in a long and vicious spiral of protest and repression that would not subside until the release of Nelson Mandela and his subsequent election to the South African presidency in 1994.

Bibliography

Clark, Nancy L., and William H. Worger. South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. Attributes to Verwoerd the sharpest definition and the most rigorous legal application of the apartheid doctine.

Denoon, Donald, with Balam Nyeko and J. B. Webster. Southern Africa Since 1800. New York: Praeger, 1973. This study takes in a broad perspective and somewhat downplays the significance of apartheid, and thus the importance of Verwoerd’s ministry, in the larger context.

Lacour-Gayet, Robert. A History of South Africa. Translated by Stephen Hardman. London: Cassell, 1977. An unconventional characterization of Verwoerd, who seems to be depicted more as a misdirected idealist than as a doctrinaire racist.

Sparks, Allister. The Mind of South Africa. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990. Details apartheid’s historical and intellectual basis and its conflict with the rising movements for decolonialization and racial equality.

Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Contains a very detailed but quite comprehensible description of the Bantustan policy and the rationale put forward by Verwoerd and his party in their support of this particular initiative.