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New Enemy. Rather than suffer the indignities of equality, thousands of Boers packed their belongings into ox wagons and trekked out of the Cape Colony toward the unknown lands beyond the Drakensberg Mountains. They called themselves voortrekkers, and their journey was long and perilous. To cross the mountain passes, they often had to dismantle the wagons and carry them piece by piece. And in escaping from the British, they ran into a new enemy: the Bantu.
Unlike the Hottentots and Bushmen, the Bantu were a powerful, well-organized society, experienced in the art of warfare. But the whites broke the back of their resistance at the battle of Blood River, and went on to establish their farms in the high veld.
The British were not far behind. Excited by the discovery of diamonds and gold, British prospectors flocked into the new Boer states. Then came Cecil Rhodes and British capital. And, in 1877, the British government revived an old claim to sovereignty over all former residents of the Cape Colony, laid formal claim to the Transvaal. The eventual result was the Boer War, which lasted for three bloody years and put all of South Africa under the Union Jack.
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was in a very real sense a child of the conflict. He was born at the height of the fighting, in a Dutch village near Amsterdam. His grocer father was a member of a committee to help Boer refugees, and so incensed did he become at their tales of British bestiality that in 1903, the year after the war ended, he moved his family to Cape Town and became a missionary in the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1912, the Verwoerds were assigned to Bulawayo, a new British town in Southern Rhodesia, and young Henk was enrolled in a British boys' school. It was his first contact with the rooineks (red necks, an Afrikaner term of derision for the British who burned easily in the hot South African sun), and he hated them.
Henk was a brilliant student, and fired with the zeal of mission: the salvation of South Africa for its rightful owners, the Boers. Turning down a fat scholarship in Britain, he entered Stellenbosch University, the fountainhead of Afrikanerdom, and became South Africa's first Ph.D. in mass psychology. In 1927, he married Elizabeth Schoombee, a petite fellow student at Stellenbosch. In many ways, Betsie Verwoerd is as remarkable as her husband. Holder of an M.A. in education, she has borne him five boys and two girls—and brags that no black ever bathed them or put them to bed.
For a while, Verwoerd was content to stay on at the university, first as a lecturer in applied psychology, then as chairman of the new department of sociology. But gradually he began applying his trade in the politics of the Nationalist Party. In 1933, when Nationalist Prime Minister Barry Hertzog made a pact with the South African Party's pliable Jan Christian Smuts—whom Verwoerd considered a tool of the British—he was so disgusted that he joined Afrikanerdom's ultranationalist secret society, the Broederbond (brotherhood). With a young Transvaal lawyer named Johannes Strijdom, he founded Die Transvaler, an Afrikaans-language newspaper, to put across their message. Verwoerd resigned from Stellenbosch to become the editor.
Cheers for Hitler. With Verwoerd at the helm, Die Transvaler was less of a newspaper than a political broadsheet.