(3 of 10)
If international pressure was intended to moderate the policies of the National Party and weaken its hold on South Africa, it has seemingly had the opposite effect. One South African poll suggests that the Nationalists will nearly double the vote they normally get from English-speaking whites. Even opposition leaders have joined with the government in speaking out against foreign influence on the country's domestic affairs. Colin Eglin, leader of the Progressive Federal Party, sounded almost as angry as Vorster when he denounced President Carter's firm policy toward South Africa as "appalling."
Thus foreign pressure is not in contention in the election campaign. What is at stake, ultimately, is whether the government will be able to carry on with the Afrikaners' grand scheme of apartheid—also known as "separate development" and more recently as "plural democracy." The purpose of apartheid is the preservation of the language, culture and political power of the Afrikaners—the unique white tribe on a continent of black tribes. Unlike the white settlers of Rhodesia or the French pieds-noirs of Algeria, the Afrikaners have no ties to a European motherland. After more than three centuries in South Africa, they have as much right to claim it as their true home as Canadians have to claim Ontario. That fact was recognized by black African leaders at the Lusaka conference of 1969, which acknowledged that the 4.3 million South African whites (equivalent to the population of Finland) were not colonialists.
In their mores and lifestyle, the Afrikaners—particularly in the countryside—are as authentically tribal in outlook as Zulus living in a homeland kraal. Afrikaner society is a rigid one, held together by language (Dutch-based), faith (a fundamentalist form of Calvinism) and a sense of special mission created by their hard history. Even in the large cities, Afrikaners tend to mix uneasily with English-speaking whites. In the country, they are a law and a people unto themselves. The family structure is strong and disciplined; Afrikaner youth are far less likely than their Anglo counterparts to smoke or drink. Sunday is the Lord's day; sports, cinema and TV are forsworn for lengthy sermons of a dominee at the local church. The Afrikaner can, and usually does, treat his black workers with kindness. Yet there is never a sense that the black is, or even could be, his equal; in the common view, the black is a child of God who needs to be guided to civilization by the one who knows the way—the Afrikaner.
Vorster is a product of this society as well as its chief. One of 14 children, he was born in Jamestown, in the northeastern part of the Cape province. His father was a sheep farmer. Vorster attended the University of Stellenbosch, a bastion of Afrikaner nationalism, on a scholarship. He studied psychology and law and joined the junior wing of the National Party. In the early years of World War II he helped found the Flaming Ox-Wagon, a militantly anti-British, pro-German nationalist movement. Vorster was arrested by the pro-British government in 1942 and spent 14 months in an internment camp.