Seldom if ever had a new state come into being with less enthusiasm or more foreboding. As Republic Day began, cold, drenching rain poured down on Pretoria's windswept streets, reducing the joyous church bells to sodden thumps and the cannon booms to distant plops. A quarter of a million people had been expected to jam the city for the big celebration, but only 25.000 showed up in time for the speeches. Braving the elements. 6-ft. 7-in. Charles ("Blackie") Swart stepped forward solemnly to take the oath as the nation's first President. It was, he intoned, "a sacred moment in the history of our fatherland.'' In the Afrikaners' eyes, the Boer War was finally won after six bitter decades; no longer would South Africa pay fealty to an alien English-speaking monarch in London.
Millions of other South Africans—the English-speaking whites, the blacks, the coloreds and the Indians—could only watch in bitter resignation or sullen silence. In English-speaking Natal, clumps of whites gathered at cocktail parties to defiantly toast the Queen. In Port Elizabeth, an anonymous artist painted a huge Union Jack on the street. Liberals pointed out that only a bare majority of the white population (the only ones allowed to vote) had voted for the republic—850,458 people out of South Africa's total 15,841,128 population.
But the much-heralded three-day general strike, called by the leaders of South Africa's 10,807,809 blacks to protest any change in the nation's status, was a flop. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the man who had forged the republic and would be its boss, had canceled all police leaves, called up 5,000 armed reservists of the Citizen Force, and ordered the arrest of thousands of potential native troublemakers. As Republic Day approached, police in armored cars rumbled menacingly through native townships. At night, helicopters with searchlights hovered overhead on the lookout for illegal gatherings.
Many of the black leaders, including Nelson Mandela, 42, head of the underground movement, managed to escape the police pickup vans. But as the police had hoped, the leaders were forced into such deep concealment that they lost touch with their black following. Thus, when the strike deadline arrived, confused native office boys, waiters and messengers went to their jobs on schedule almost everywhere. One-third of Johannesburg's black work force stayed at home the first day, halting grocers' deliveries and causing white restaurant managers to suffer the indignity of washing their own dishes; but by next morning virtually all the absentees had drifted back to work.
South Africa's non-whites could only hope that influence from abroad might some day force Verwoerd to moderate his apartheid rules. Leaving the British Commonwealth already had sorely wounded the economy; outside investment had virtually ceased, and foreign currency reserves were dangerously low. As Cape Town's pro-government Die Burger had frankly put it. South Africa now was "the polecat of the world."