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But during this era of reconciliation there arose an underground movement that preached Afrikaner solidarity and resistance to both British and blacks. Its driving force was the Broederbond (the Brotherhood), a secret society founded in 1918 to get better jobs for Afrikaners, many of them victims of economic hard times, and to promote the use of Afrikaans, a hybrid variant of Dutch that became a written language only in the middle of the 19th century. Today, though not listed in any telephone book, the Broederbond has 12,000 members in more than 800 cells, including President Botha (Member 4,487) and most other Afrikaner leaders of both church and state.
One of the Broederbond's most zealous racists, Daniel Malan, founded the present-day National Party in 1934 and finally achieved the Afrikaners' revenge in the election of 1948. He defeated Smuts and the British influence under a new slogan: apartheid. It was not really new, of course. The South Africa Act of 1909, passed by the British Parliament, had barred blacks from sitting in the legislature. The Natives Land Acts of 1913 had established a few black "reserves" and claimed the remaining 85% of the nation for whites. Interracial sex was proscribed as far back as 1902.
But these were fairly primitive efforts in asserting white power. The apartheid of Malan's Afrikaner Nationalists represented an all encompassing ideology, a vision of how life should be organized. One of their first measures, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, did just what it promised. But exactly who belonged to which race? The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided elaborate definitions and regulations, and even now about 1,000 people every year apply to get reclassified from one race to another. That same year the Group Areas Act empowered the government to uproot thousands of people and move them elsewhere. In Cape Town's District Six, for example, some 70,000 coloreds were removed from their bustling and vibrant neighborhood and shipped to a housing project outside town so that their old homes could be razed and replaced with white businesses and high-rises. Many whites boycotted this scheme, however, and the razed area remains a series of vacant lots.
By 1965 apartheid had become so obsessively established that a white taxi driver refused to let a blind white girl and her colored nurse ride together in his cab; that white and colored children were forbidden to appear together in a Red Cross pageant; that Cabinet ministers refused to attend any receptions where blacks or coloreds might be present; that the Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach was denied permission to bring his Vietnamese wife into the country to meet his parents; that a black workman could hold two wires for a white electrician but was not allowed to join them together.
Presiding over this state of folly was one of Malan's most dogmatic successors, Hendrik Verwoerd. In a radio broadcast, Verwoerd declared, "The policy of separate development ((apartheid)) is designed for happiness, security and stability . . . for the Bantu as well as the whites." Said Andries Treurnicht, onetime chairman of the Broederbond and subsequently founder of the breakaway Conservative Party: "We believe that justice is best attained by way of differentiation or separate development."