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To most Afrikaners—and to many British South Africans as well—Verwoerd was much more than their Prime Minister. In a very real sense, he was the great white father of the nation and everything it believed in. In 1960, as he lay in a hospital bed recovering from the first effort to kill him, Verwoerd told his wife: "I heard the shots and then I realized that I could still think, and I knew that I had been spared to complete my life's work." Ever since, the Afrikaner volk has regarded his recovery as proof that God had chosen Verwoerd as his divine instrument to forge the South African nation.
Give & Take. And forge he did. He transformed South Africa's traditional but largely informal white baasskap (bossdom) into the rigid apartheid laws that classified and separated the races, in the process stripping the nonwhites of rights basic to all in most countries. At the same time, however, Verwoerd believed that apartheid could last only if the whites gave as well as took. He spent millions of dollars on housing and education to improve the condition of his 12.5 million Africans, could truthfully say that they were the best-paid and best-fed blacks on the continent.
His policies, of course, were abhorrent to the rest of the world, but Verwoerd proved a skilled enough diplomat to hold the rest of the world at bay. He repeatedly chipped away at the antagonism of Africa's young black nations by offering them favorable trade terms and technical assistance. Four days before his death he had set a precedent by receiving Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan of tiny Basutoland, the first black African chief of government ever to make an official visit to South Africa.
Nevertheless, there was little mourning in Black Africa last week. Prime Minister Jonathan barely managed, by a vote of 29 to 28, to get a motion of condolence through Basutoland's Assembly. Laughter broke out in the Zambian legislature when the assassination was announced. Ethiopia's Foreign Minister called Verwoerd's death "the natural result of apartheid, which breeds blind hate and evil."
The Heirs. The government reaffirmed its faith in apartheid even before Verwoerd's blood had been cleaned off the floor of Parliament. If anything, the oppression of apartheid seems likely to be screwed on even tighter by the successor who will be chosen by the National Party this week. One possible heir is urbane Finance Minister Eben Donges, 68, who as the senior member of Verwoerd's Cabinet became Acting Prime Minister upon his death. Another is Transport Minister Barend Jacobus ("Ben") Schoeman, 61, a pug-nosed former labor leader who dropped out of school at 16. Most likely to continue Verwoerd's grand schemes would be Defense Minister Pieter Willem Botha, 51, who, although inexperienced and relatively unknown, has become a leading theoretician of apartheid. Another candidate is Education Minister Jan de Klerk, 63, a party wheel horse with a powerful following in the Transvaal.