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Half a million South Africans (including Cape Province's 50,000 haif-caste voters) voted against Malan, only 400,000 for him. But South Africa's electoral laws, like Georgia's, are loaded in favor of rural constituencies, where Afrikaners predominate. Result: the Malanites squeaked into power by 70 seats to 65. "South Africa," exulted Malan, "is once again ours."
News of Malan's victory sent gold shares plummeting on London's stock exchange. In the Afrikaner countryside, it sent Boer hooligans on a looting spree directed at Jewish stores. To Daniel François Malan, the new Prime Minister, it was a signal from heaven to build in South Africa the New Jerusalem. He enlisted as architects a 14-man cabinet, which included not one representative of the English-speaking population.
Ten of the new ministers, like Malan himself, belonged to the Afrikaner Broederbond, a fanatic secret society which Smuts had once banned as subversive. Included too, as the 18th (unofficial) member, was the Prime Minister's closest adviser, Mistress Maria Ann Sophia Malan, his plump, splendidly corseted second wife, whom he married in 1937. A seasoned politician ("I ate and drank politics from the time I could toddle"), 49-year-old Mistress Malan acts as secretary, housekeeper, chauffeur and nursemaid to her aging, ailing and absent-minded husband. She holds his hand at public functions, mops his brow when he sweats over meals. Every morning she summarizes the news for him as they sit at breakfast.
With Maria at his side, and a host of political predikants of the Dutch Reformed Church to supply biblical authority for whatever he did, Prime Minister Malan set about fulfilling his election promise to "keep the Kaffir in his place." Malan's solution: apartheid (pronounced apart-hate), an Afrikaans word meaning literally "apartness." Apartheid, ideally, is supposed to segregate white & black into separate territories where each can develop independently of the other.* "Far from it that the Word of God demands equality," said a Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in April 1951, "it is scriptural principle that there should be a definite authoritarian relationship . . . between man & wife, employer & worker, authority and subject . . . The Christian calling lies in acceptance of the place which God has given."
Total apartheid, as the churchmen defined it, is, Malan admits, "a visionary ideal." It cannot work for the simple reason that the white man cannot afford to let it work. White South Africa's economy would collapse overnight if it were deprived of cheap black labor.