"Hoor, hoor [Hear, hear]!" shouted the square-jawed Afrikaner farmers and their dutiful wives, as one speaker after another referred to the guest of honor as "a gladiator," "a saint" and "a savior." Dour and unsmiling, he sat stolidly, barely nodding his acknowledgment of the eulogies. When at last he took the platform, surrounded by the orange, white and blue posters of the National Party, which has ruled South Africa for 29 years, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, 61, could almost have been stepping to a throne.
After the wild applause there was sudden silence: a pause of anticipation, and die volk were not disappointed. Within a minute the Prime Minister had gained the first murmurs of acclaim; within five minutes he had brought the crowd to its feet. When he wanted to drive home a point, it was not a jab but a double uppercut as he thrust both fists in the air. And when he wanted the world to listen—as he did last week—John Vorster switched from Afrikaans to deliberate and slightly accented English.
"There are those in the world outside," he thundered in this speech to his constituents in the Transvaal town of Heidelberg, "who believe they can bring South Africa to its knees [long pause] with a mandatory arms boycott [pause]. I tell them [long pause]they have another guess coming." The audience went wild. A National Party worker, standing 6 ft. 6 in. in his bush boots, pounded the shoulder of the spectator next to him. "Man," he shouted, "this is the man! This is the Churchill of the platteland!"
The audience was composed almost exclusively of members of the worried, defiant, 2.6 million-strong "white tribe" of Africa, whose Dutch forefathers first landed in Cape Town in 1652. More than any other man since their legendary 19th century Boer chieftain, "Oom Paul" Kruger, Vorster is their accepted leader. Said a party worker at last week's rally: "The people of this constituency have followed Mr. Vorster's career and been loyal to him in his worst and his best times. This time it has never been better."
Never better for Vorster's Nationalists, that is; the political arm of the Afrikaners held 123 of the 171 seats in the previous Parliament, and it stands to gain as many as 15 more in the national election on Nov. 30. The opposition parties that traditionally held the loyalty of South Africa's English-speaking whites are in disarray. As has happened so often in their tortured history, the Afrikaners once again are responding to threats from without and within by going into the laager (literally, camp)—an expression from the days of the voortrekkers, South Africa's Boer pioneers, who would drive their ox wagons into a circle to fight off Zulu or Xhosa attackers. Vorster's campaign slogan is the same today as it was in the last election, in 1974: "He made South Africa safe. Keep it that way." That rallying cry, which is also the central theme of Afrikaner history, is one of self-preservation, and it has always worked.