South Africa: The Great White Laager

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Violently racist, it demanded laws to protect the unskilled and often illiterate Afrikaner laborers against the "indignity" of working alongside blacks, hammered home the theme that Strijdom was the only man who could save South Africa from the swart gevaar (black peril). So anti-British was the paper that it cheered Hitler and protested South Africa's participation in World War II. The only mention it made of the visit of King George VI in 1947 was a note warning its readers to avoid certain Johannesburg streets, which would be jammed with traffic because "some foreign visitors" were in town.

Working together, with Strijdom as the leader and Verwoerd the brain and propagandist, the two men slowly rebuilt the Nationalist Party in their own image. In 1948, the Nationalists surged back into power, and Verwoerd became Minister of Native Affairs. It was just the place for him, and he used it to transform South Africa.

Chain of Laws. There were plenty of white-supremacy laws already on the books when the Nationalists took office. Africans had long been denied the right to vote, compete for white jobs, live in white residential areas or buy property from whites. They could still marry whites, but extramarital intercourse between the races "was a criminal offense. But, discriminatory as they were, the laws that Verwoerd and his breeders inherited were nothing compared with the dozens of sweeping new laws they have passed since 1948.

A basic first step was the Population Registration Act, which officially classified every South African by race so that the regime would know whom to discriminate against. In every town where there were dark whites and light Coloreds, government boards met for years trying vainly to categorize them all, in some families decided that one brother was white and the others Colored. ("We may make a few mistakes," admitted one arbiter of the races.)

Even before registration was completed, the regime started building a chain of race laws with resounding names. There were, for example, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the Immorality Amendment Act, the Separate Representation of Voters Act, the Bantu Authorities Act, the Group Areas Acts, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, the Native Labor Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Church Clause, the Twelve-Day Detention Clause, the 90-Day Detention Clause, and the 180-Day Detention Clause.

No. 1 & No. 2. Apartheid (pronounced apart-ate) is an Afrikaans word meaning separation. It is a political dogma based on the fear—not entirely unjustified—that South Africa's 12 million blacks will overwhelm its 3.4 million whites, and it is enforced only through massive and brutal police powers. But to Verwoerd, it is not simply a tool to keep the black man in his place. He sees it as a creative policy intended to allow the Bantu to develop as a true African instead of becoming an imitation white man. "Separation does not envision oppression," he proclaims.

Keystone of the whole structure is partition of South Africa into white and black states. In Verwoerd's grand scheme, the African tribal reserves will be turned into eight separate "Bantustans," which will eventually be granted full independence as nations. "In the homelands the Bantu is No. 1 and the white man No. 2,"