Hendrik Verwoerd
Hendrik Verwoerd was prime minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966, the architect of apartheid, the psychology professor and editor who as minister of native affairs from 1950 had written its laws. There was the Bantu Authorities Act, the Bantu Education Act of 1953 that took the mission schools from the churches and taught, in his words, that there was no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. There were the pass laws extended to women, the Group Areas removals, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 that turned the reserves into homelands whose people would be citizens of Transkei or Bophuthatswana and foreigners in the country they worked in, which he called separate development and presented to the world as decolonisation. As prime minister he took the country out of the Commonwealth in 1961 rather than accept its members' views. He made it a republic by a whites-only referendum. He answered Sharpeville, where the police killed sixty-nine people at a pass protest in March 1960, with the banning of the ANC and PAC and the state of emergency. He presided over the Rivonia trial that sent Mandela to Robben Island in 1964, while the gold price and the foreign investment made the white economy grow at six per cent a year. He was born in Amsterdam in 1901 and brought to South Africa at two, took a doctorate in psychology at Stellenbosch and studied in Germany in the 1920s. He was professor of sociology at Stellenbosch, and marched against Jewish refugees from Germany in 1936. He edited Die Transvaler as the National Party's voice from 1937, opposing the war. He was made a senator in 1948 and native affairs minister in 1950. He survived a shooting in the head at the Rand show in April 1960 by a farmer. He did not survive the parliamentary messenger Dimitri Tsafendas, who stabbed him four times at his bench in the House of Assembly on 6 September 1966. Tsafendas, declared insane, was held for twenty-eight years, longer than any prisoner of the system Verwoerd had built. The dam, the airport and the town named for him have been renamed. The statue in Bloemfontein was taken down in 2011. The homelands he drew are the map of the country's poverty.
- Lived: 1901 CE – 1966 CE
- Nationality: South African
- Roles: prime minister, politician
