John Vorster
John Vorster was prime minister of South Africa from 1966 to 1978 and state president for eight months after, the justice minister who had built the security state, the ninety-day detention without trial of 1963, the Bureau of State Security, BOSS, of 1969, the Terrorism Act and the police that used them. As prime minister he ran apartheid at its most confident and its most prosperous. The economy grew on gold at thirty-five and then eight hundred dollars an ounce. The homelands were made independent, Transkei in 1976 and Bophuthatswana in 1977, recognised by nobody. There was the outward policy of détente with black Africa that took him to Malawi and the Ivory Coast and to a meeting with Kaunda on the Victoria Falls bridge in 1975, and the invasion of Angola that year that South African armour took to within a hundred miles of Luanda before the Cubans and the Americans' withdrawal of support turned it back. There was the pressure on Ian Smith to negotiate in Rhodesia. There was Soweto, 16 June 1976, when the police fired on schoolchildren marching against Afrikaans in the classroom and the year of rising that followed killed some six hundred and sent a generation into exile and the ANC's camps. Steve Biko died in police custody in September 1977, and the justice minister said it left him cold. He was born in Jamestown in the Cape in 1915, the fifteenth child of a sheep farmer, and studied law at Stellenbosch. He was a general in the pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag and was interned by Smuts's government for two years in 1942-44, which was his credential with the party's right. He entered parliament in 1953. He fell to the information scandal of 1978, Muldergate, in which his information minister had spent sixty-four million rand of secret defence funds on a pro-government English newspaper, bribes to American politicians and an attempt to buy the Washington Star, and a commission found that he had known. He resigned the premiership to Botha in September 1978 and took the ceremonial presidency. He resigned that in June 1979 when the commission's findings were published. He died in Cape Town in September 1983. The building in Johannesburg named John Vorster Square, where the security police interrogated their prisoners and eight of them died falling from the tenth floor, is now Johannesburg Central.
- Lived: 1915 CE – 1983 CE
- Nationality: South African
- Roles: prime minister, politician
