HIS: This Day in History: 1966 – Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, is stabbed to death in Cape Town, South Africa during a parliamentary meeting.
HIS: This Day in History: 1966 – Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, is stabbed to death in Cape Town, South Africa during a parliamentary meeting.
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (8 September 1901 – 6 September 1966), also commonly referred to as Dr. Verwoerd, was a South African politician, a scholar of applied psychology and sociology, and a journalist. Verwoerd played an instrumental role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies as Minister of Native Affairs (1950–1958) and then prime minister (1958–1966). Furthermore, he played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership. He was the Union of South Africa's last prime minister, from 1958 to 1961, when he proclaimed the founding of the Republic of South Africa, remaining its prime minister until his assassination in 1966.
Verwoerd was an authoritarian, socially conservative leader and an Afrikaner nationalist. He was a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond, an exclusively white and Calvinist secret society dedicated to Afrikaner interests, and like many members of the organization had verbally supported Germany during World War II. Broederbond members like Verwoerd would assume high positions in government upon the Nationalist electoral victory in 1948 and come to wield a profound influence on public and civil society throughout the apartheid era.
Verwoerd's desire to ensure white, and especially Afrikaner dominance in South Africa, to the exclusion of the country's nonwhite majority, was a major aspect of his support for a republic (though removing the British monarchy was long a nationalist aspiration anyway). To that same end, Verwoerd greatly expanded apartheid. He branded the system a policy of "good-neighbourliness", stating different races and cultures could reach their full potential only if they lived and developed apart from each other, avoiding potential clashes. This system however saw the complete disfranchisement of the nonwhite population.
Verwoerd repressed opposition to apartheid during his premiership. He ordered the detention and imprisonment of tens of thousands of people and the exile of further thousands, while greatly empowering, modernizing, and enlarging the police and the military. He banned black organizations such as the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, and it was under him that future president Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for life for sabotage. Verwoerd's South Africa had one of the highest prison populations in the world and saw a large number of executions and floggings. By the mid-1960s his government to a large degree had put down internal civil resistance using far-reaching legislative power, psychological intimidation, and the relentless efforts of the government's security forces.
Apartheid as a program began in 1948 with D. F. Malan's premiership, but it was Verwoerd's large role in its formulation and his efforts to place it on a firmer legal and theoretical footing, including his opposition to even the limited form of integration known as baasskap, that have led him to be dubbed the "Architect of Apartheid". His actions prompted the passing of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1761, condemning apartheid, and ultimately leading to South Africa's international isolation and economic sanctions. On 6 September 1966, Verwoerd was stabbed several times by parliamentary aide Dimitri Tsafendas. He died shortly after, and Tsafendas was jailed until his death in 1999.
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