Verwoerd

Architect of Apartheid

Henry Kenney

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781868427161
• eBook ISBN: 9781868427178
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On 6 September 1966, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated in Parliament by a deranged parliamentary messenger. The architect of apartheid was dead, sending shockwaves throughout South Africa and the world.

Today, half a century later, the effects of Verwoerd's grand ambition linger on, and it is vitally important to reappraise the lasting impact – both physical and psychological – of the institutionalised racial inequality that he so industriously inculcated.

In Verwoerd: Architect of Apartheid, Henry Kenney interprets Verwoerd in the context of his times, explaining the man and assessing his role in shaping South Africa's history. Originally published in 1980, Kenney's incisive study examines the rationale behind the policy of apartheid and probes the ideas of its chief architect and ideologue. Writing more than a decade after Verwoerd's assassination, Kenney skilfully distances himself from his subject and offers a dispassionate insight into the peculiar workings of the apartheid system. This is a fascinating study of a man who identified obsessively with the Afrikaner people, while aware that his foreign birth set him apart.

This new edition contains an introduction by David Welsh, Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch, providing valuable political background and updating the book for a contemporary generation. This republication will satisfy an enduring interest in, and fascination with, the man responsible for, among other things, the policy of Bantu education, the creation of a Republic and the mad calculus of "separate development".

1 Formation of a Nationalist

Verwoerd was an outsider, a man who could never wear his Afrikaner nationalism lightly. The Afrikaners have had their fair share of strong leaders, dedicated, frequently humourless, invariably God-fearing but none with quite as intense a sense of mission as this immigrant from the Netherlands. His parents came to South Africa when he was still a very young child. He grew up as an Afrikaner, to all intents and purposes he was an Afrikaner, but one thing was lacking: he was not born an Afrikaner. It would not have mattered so much if Verwoerd had an ordinary, humdrum career, but he became a politician, partly because he genuinely wanted to further the interest of the Afrikaner people, partly because he simply wanted to reach what Disraeli called the “top of the greasy pole”. In the white-hot atmosphere of Afrikaner nationalism, with its frequent invocations of the glorious past of the Voortrekkers and of Paul Kruger, origins became important. It was at the very least reassuring to know that one’s forefathers had participated, however modestly, in building the Afrikaner heritage. Verwoerd could make no such claim. Not one of his ancestors was an Afrikaner. In his chosen career he could not but be acutely aware of his liability. He took the way typical of a convert: he set himself to be an Afrikaner of Afrikaners. When he entered public life Verwoerd soon became known as an unrelenting exponent of Afrikaner isolationism, the enemy of all those willing to think of a broader South African white nation. One of his associates of those days wrote: “He was nearly fanatical about Afrikaans institutions and delighted in proving his loyalty to them.”1

But being a foreigner in such a situation can be a paradoxical advantage, for reasons which go to the very heart of nationalism. Certain objective characteristics are supposed to define a nation, such as language, race or religion, but in practice, as Kedourie has written in his classic study of the nationalist phenomenon, “there is no convincing reason why the fact that people speak the same language or belong to the same race should, by itself, entitle them to enjoy a government exclusively their own. For such a claim to be convincing, it must also be proved that similarity in one respect absolutely overrides differences in other respects.” Kedourie concludes therefore that, “Even if the existence of nations can be deduced from the principle of diversity, it still cannot be deduced what particular nations exist and what their precise limits are. What remains is to fall back on the will of the individual who, in pursuit of self-determination, wills himself as the member of a nation.”2 In other words, the element of consciousness is decisive. The subjective aspect has primacy. The nation is something that must be willed.

It is here that the foreigner who identifies with a “nation” has an advantage. He does so by deliberate choice; he does not take his membership for granted as if he were born to it. He wills his nationalism. In this conscious act of willing the foreign-born nationalist becomes superior to the indigenous type. He can be a more articulate and passionate exponent of his adopted faith than those who are to their nationalism born.

Verwoerd never spoke about it, but he must have known that he was an Afrikaner with a difference. His ancestors had not suffered in the cause of Afrikaner freedom as he had no doubt those of his fellow-nationalists had done. In this respect his nationalism was an artificial growth, which had to be constantly willed if it were to endure. And Verwoerd, as South Africans of all varieties were to learn, had a most formidable will. Paradoxically, his foreign birth qualified him in a unique way to become the most stubborn and unyielding Afrikaner leader of his time.

He came to South Africa with his parents when he was only two years old. The Netherlands at the turn of the century, odd as it seems today, fully shared in the general European sympathy for the Boers then undergoing final defeat at the hands of the British in what seemed a classic example of an imperialist war. Verwoerd’s parents identified particularly intensely with the sufferings of the Afrikaners. Their emotional involvement with the Boer cause was heightened when Paul Kruger visited Amsterdam in December 1900 at the start of his exile, to unprecedented public acclaim. The elder Verwoerd, Wilhelm Johannes, had another reason for coming to South Africa. For a long time he had cherished a frustrated desire to be a missionary; now, in the closing phases of the Boer War, he finally decided to realise his ambition.

He arrived with his wife and two sons at the Cape in November 1903. The younger child had been born on 8 September 1901 in Amsterdam and had been baptised Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. They settled in the Cape Town suburb of Wynberg, where Wilhelm Verwoerd soon succeeded as a building contractor and was able to provide for his family in reasonable comfort. In his spare time he also did missionary work amongst the large Coloured community of the Cape, thus partially satisfying his religious aspirations. In 1910 he qualified as a lay missionary. But if the Verwoerds wished to identify themselves with the Afrikaner people, they must have been disappointed during these early years. Few Afrikaners with strong nationalist views and sympathies were to be found in Cape Town, while English was the language spoken by most whites, including the descendants of many of the old Dutch patrician families. In the aftermath of the Boer War the Afrikaners appeared to be both defeated and demoralised. There were signs of recovery, which at the Cape manifested themselves in cultural rather than in political terms, centring especially around the growth of Afrikaans instead of Dutch as the medium of expression. But in the very English Wynberg these indications of revival could not have been very noticeable.

Inevitably therefore the early education of the youngest Verwoerd was wholly in English. Apparently it did not handicap him in any way. At Wynberg High School for Boys, to which he went in 1913 after completing junior school, his results were outstanding. During the one year he was there, he was placed second in the three examinations he wrote, yielding first place to the only other Afrikaans boy in his class, I.D. du Plessis, later the well-known Afrikaans poet and writer.

Outside school he was known for his energy, which seemed inexhaustible. This super-abundance of energy was to remain an outstanding feature of his whole life, leaving its distinctive mark on all his activities as a politician.

Although he had prospered materially, Wilhelm Verwoerd had still not satisfied his missionary yearnings. So when he received a call from the Dutch Reformed congregation in Bulawayo to assist in missionary work, he closed his business and left with his family for Rhodesia. In this British colony Afrikaners lived in an environment even less congenial for their national aspirations than that at the Cape. English was the only legal language and was spoken by the vast majority of whites, whose attachment to the imperial connection was intense. Not doubt the small number of Afrikaners felt themselves an embattled minority; some took the easy way out by assimilating with the dominant English. Not so the Verwoerds, whose identification with the Afrikaners remained unshaken. It was certainly strengthened by their close association with the Dutch Reformed Church, which has traditionally played a vital role in heightening the Afrikaner’s sense of belonging to a distinct community with its own God-given purposes.

If anything it appears that the Verwoerds’ consciousness of involvement with the Afrikaner destiny was sharpened by their Rhodesian experience, despite, or perhaps partly due to, the fact that their arrival coincided with the outbreak of the First World War, when pro-imperial and pro-British sentiments were at their most ardent.

Hendrik Verwoerd inevitably went to another English-language school, Milton Boys’ High in Bulawayo. The contrast between his own sentiments and those of his fellow pupils and the teachers was marked and led to many unpleasant experiences. His biographer, G.D. Scholtz, records that at Milton he acquired a lifelong aversion to the playing or singing of the British national anthem, an ordeal to which he was subjected every day at school.3 In spite of the depressing environment Verwoerd once again proved a brilliant pupil, easily overcoming the considerable problems of adapting to a new and different syllabus. The Verwoerds were in Rhodesia for only a few years. In 1917 they left for the Orange Free State where the elder Verwoerd was to sell Bibles and religious texts.

For the future Prime Minister his Rhodesian experience seems to have been mainly significant for having strengthened his existing beliefs. To the imperial-minded white Rhodesians he had been an Afrikaner like other Afrikaners, to be treated accordingly. His foreign birth cut no ice with them. What mattered was that he differed from them on the things that mattered: language, religious affiliation and love of the home country, Britain. Many factors went into the making of Verwoerd the hardline nationalist, but it is reasonably certain that his years in Rhodesia contributed much to his adult conviction that Afrikaners and English did not and should not mix, that the Afrikaners had a unique identity which could only be saved from dilution by insistence on strict limits to contact with other groups.

In the Free State town of Brandfort the Verwoerds for the first time lived in a mainly Afrikaans environment, where memories of the Boer War and of the 1914 rebellion against Louis Botha’s pro-British government were still fresh. All the evidence tells us that Hendrik Verwoerd thrived in these new surroundings. He was a good sportsman and was popular at school. Once again there is the by now familiar story of his scholastic brilliance despite the necessity yet again to adapt to a different syllabus. Although he too became ill during the 1918 influenza epidemic, he wrote his matriculation examination the following January. This he passed not merely with distinction, but top of the list in the Free Sate.

Verwoerd decided to study Theology at Stellenbosch University. There were at the time only 600 students at this new university, which had only recently developed out of the old Victoria College, but Stellenbosch had for many years been the intellectual centre of the Afrikaners. In the late nineteenth century it had been one of the principal nurseries of the taal or language movement. It was logical that the university should become one of the main intellectual strongholds of Afrikaner nationalism. But as yet, in 1919, this nationalism was largely still an upper-class phenomenon, so much so that when Dr. D.F. Malan in 1921 pleaded at Stellenbosch for the use of Afrikaans, he had to do so in High Dutch.

When Verwoerd arrived at Stellenbosch, nationalism had taken root, but its growth had been slow, with few signs of the vigour that was later to be so impressive. The Afrikaners had already by the 1880s acquired the consciousness of being a distinct people, but they still lacked those decisive experiences which were to transform their nationalism into a movement intent on political power. These experiences only came with the Boer War* and the 1914 rebellion against South African participation in the Great War. Nationalist feeling was immeasurably strengthened by defeat in the Boer War and the subsequent attempts by the British, as the Afrikaners thought, to deprive them of their identity as a distinct people. The humiliation of defeat gave the Afrikaners throughout South Africa, and not merely those in the former Boer republics, a sense of cohesion, as well as a strong incentive to find symbols affirming their national worth. The main focus of this revived nationalism was the Afrikaans language. Its status was in fact ambiguous, as Afrikaans was the spoken language, while Dutch continued to be language of education. Yet it hardly mattered which language was preferred by individual Afrikaners, for the primacy of English was affirmed by the reconstruction regimes in the former republics after 1902.

The post-Boer War sense of grievance was accentuated by the insistence of Generals Botha and Smuts on participating in “Britain’s War” in 1914, as well as by their refusal to use the opportunity now offered them tore-establish republican independence. The Rebellion of that year, and its failure, became a potent symbol in the mythology essential to every nationalism. At the time it powerfully stimulated the growth of General Hertzog’s newly formed National Party, as was reflected by its showing in the general election in 1915.

At the same time Afrikaner nationalism was acquiring a more marked racial connotation because of the Poor White problem. Black poverty had always been an accepted feature of the South African way of life, but white indigence was a different proposition altogether. Shockingly, since the late nineteenth century, it had been on the increase. By the end of the Great War so many whites, of whom most were Afrikaners, could be described as Poor Whites that the phenomenon could no longer be ignored. Wide income differences had begun to emerge among Afrikaners as more and more found it virtually impossible to make a living from the land. It was due to many causes, such as unproductive farming methods on a soil unable to support a dense population, and the Afrikaner’s traditional law of succession, which led to the sub-division of the soil amongst all the heirs, no matter how uneconomical the resulting farming lots may then be. Whatever the causes, the results were disturbing to all right-minded Afrikaners. What was originally a rural problem now became an urban one as well. Thousands of unskilled Afrikaners streamed to the towns and cities in mostly futile attempts to better themselves. They faced one immense obstacle: the competition of even cheaper labour, that of still poorer blacks willing to accept wages which undercut theirs. So there was no solution to the Poor White problem in South Africa’s urban areas, while each day Afrikaner poverty was becoming more visible. It was now that Afrikaner nationalism began to acquire a distinct racial dimension which had previously not been overt. Afrikaner leaders began to see with new urgency the need to save white people from having to do “kaffir work”.

This was the background against which Verwoerd went to Stellenbosch University. His years at this institution, both as student and teacher, were to be decisive in shaping his intellectual outlook. It was at Stellenbosch that there were close and intimate relationships with students whose parents and grandparents had been injured, in reality or in the imagination, by the British. It was at Stellenbosch that he first became aware of white poverty when, as a theology student, he went with other students to hold religious services for whites living in Cape Town’s slums. It was also at Stellenbosch that the fate of the Poor Whites was indivisibly linked with the fate of the Afrikaner people.

As was only to be expected, Verwoerd was prominent in student affairs. He was a brilliant student with a powerful personality. He became chairman of the Students’ Representative Council in 1923, and was a conspicuous performer in the University’s debating societies. At this early stage Verwoerd was already involved with the stock in trade of nationalism. As S.R.C. chairman he tried unsuccessfully to have Afrikaans used, along with Dutch, at church services in Stellenbosch. But he had more success when he persuaded the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra to cease playing “God Save the King” at the end of each of its performances in Stellenbosch.

Student politics did not interfere with his studies. Ve...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction to the 2016 edition
• Introduction
• 1 Formation of a Nationalist
• 2 The Years in Journalism
• 3 The Unfolding of a Pattern
• 4 Tomlinson and Bantu Education
• 5 Control and Response
• 6 A New Prime Minister
• 7 A Change of Course
• 8 The Start of a Remarkable Year
• 9 Sharpeville
• 10 The Republic
• 11 Prosperity and Dissent
• 12 Bantustans and Capitalism
• 13 Maker of Foreign Policy
• 14 Apotheosis
• References
• Photo section
• About the Book
• Imprint Page