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After the war Vorster practiced law, dabbled in politics and in 1953 was elected to parliament from the Nigel constituency in the Transvaal, which he has represented ever since. He was named Minister of Justice in Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's Cabinet in 1961 and succeeded his old Stellenbosch teacher as Prime Minister when Verwoerd was assassinated by a demented clerk five years later. Hard-working and singleminded, he personifies the stubborn resolution of the white tribe today.
It is one of the great ironies of South Africa that the Afrikaner, now seen as a pitiless persecutor of a black majority, has a history of struggle against oppression. During the 17th and 18th centuries, while the Cape colony was under the control of the Dutch East India Company, the earlier settlers, who by now included German immigrants and French Huguenots seeking religious freedom, were the first to suffer. They were denied land rights and subjected to fines for such offenses as allowing their cattle to stray.
The British, who seized the colony in 1795, were equally harsh overlords who regarded the Afrikaners as obstinate and inferior. Afrikaners were excluded from jury service because of their language, forced to accept English-speaking ministers in their churches and tormented by courts that encouraged black servants to give evidence against their masters.
In the mid-1830s thousands of settlers fled British rule by migrating into the interior in ox-drawn wagons. There were bitter fights between the voortrekkers and black tribes migrating from the north in search of fresh grazing land. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 led to an invasion of white English-speaking settlers—and eventually to Afrikaner defeat in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.
Isolated in the heartland of the Dark Continent, the Afrikaners were relatively untouched by the liberalizing forces that swept Europe and America in the 19th century. Nor were their ranks infused with the new blood of Dutch immigrants from what had long ceased to be a homeland across the seas. After the Boer War, the Afrikaners were second-class citizens in what they regarded as their only country. Their solution was to take refuge in and inspiration from their churches and societies—notably the mysterious Broederbond—which knit the community together, and to wait for a time when political power could be theirs.
That day came in 1948 when, in an upset victory, their National Party, led by Daniel Malan, defeated the United Party founded by Jan Smuts. Although the basis of national separation of the races in South Africa dates back to 1909, when the British withdrew the rights of non-whites to sit in parliament, the new government moved inexorably to spread and enforce apartheid.