Rapid Rise Of Verwoerd

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29177, 11 April 1960, Page 15

Rapid Rise Of Verwoerd

LONDON, April 9. Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, aged 58, chief architect of South Africa’s apartheid race segregation policy, rose from psychology professor to Prime Minister of the Union within 10 years of entering Parliament. Bora in Amsterdam of Dutch parents, he became an ardent Nationalist from his school days in South Africa.

He studied at Stellenbosch University and in Germany, at Leipzig, Hamburg and Berlin, before returning as psychology lecturer at Stellenbosch in 1924. He is more than six feet tall and is a rapid and impatient speaker. Dr. Verwoerd first became politically prominent as the editor of “Die Transvaler," which he helped to launch in 1937. The Judge in an unsuccessful libel suit he brought in 1943 held he had knowingly supported the Nazi cause in his newspaper. Elected a Senator in 1948. he became Minister for Native Affairs in 1950, and fostered the successive apartheid laws while improving social services for the Africans. He was chosen Prime Minister by the Nationalist Party in September, 1958, after the death of Mr Johannes Strijdom.

Dr. Verwoerd has been described as creator and chief apostle' of apartheid. Since his university days ±e has believed firmly in separation of white and native.

He came into the limelight in South Africa in 1936 when he joined with five other Stellenbosch University professors in objecting to South Africa receiving a shipload of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s regime.

Dr. Verwoerd built up “Die Transvaler” as a powerful Nationalist newspaper after his appointment as editor. He was the brain behind the Nationalist effort to obtain a firm foothold on the Witwatersrand, recognised as the key political situation in South Africa.

In the National Party Itself. Dr. Verwoerd was appointed successively to the party’s Rand advisory council, its head executive in the Transvaal, and the Federal council and the Dagestuur, or inner executive council. He sought to enter Parliament in the 1948 election but was defeated by his United Party opponent. He was, the same year, appointed to the Senate and soon became the Nationalist whip. Two years later, he joined Dr Malan’s Cabinet as Minister of Native Affairs and became one of the few Senators to have held Cabinet rank.

In his new ministerial post he implemented the Nationalist policy of apartheid—a policy which, he said, would protect white rights and opportunities in white areas, and native rights and opportunities in native areas. The ultimate goal, he said at the time, would be comolete separation of white and black on a territorial basis.