South Africa: The Fight Goes On

When South African Prime Minister Johannes Balthazar Vorster took office three years ago, he seemed the ideal man to continue the white supremacist ways of his predecessors—Johannes Strijdom, Daniel Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd. Grim and humorless, he had served five years as Minister of Justice and took credit for some of South Africa’s harshest apartheid laws. To the ruling Nationalist Party, he was a hero, dedicated to preserving its policy of strict color separation. It is little short of amazing, then, that Vorster should now be under attack by Nationalist right-wingers as a dangerous liberal.

In the Transvaal, stronghold of the most intransigent white supremacists, a long-simmering quarrel between Vorster and the archreactionaries has burst into the open. Super-Segregationist Dr. Albert Hertzog, 70, expelled from the party last month, will formally launch a new political union this week—the Christian National Party—to challenge the Nationalists. For nearly 40 years, Hertzog has worked for apartheid. As he told 2,000 yelling, stamping followers in Pretoria, the Transvaal capital: “Die stryd duur voort”—the fight goes on. “I was expelled,” he said, “not because I deviated from party principles but because I wanted to maintain the principles in their purest form.”

Looking Outward. To Hertzog—and to a significant number of other Afrikaners—Vorster has broken the rules. He has not violated basic attitudes, in their view, because he still believes devoutly in apartheid. But Hertzog and his followers accuse the Prime Minister of “weak, vacillating and opportunistic leadership, resulting in the Nationalist Party being ripped from stem to stern.”

Since he took power in 1966—in the wake of Verwoerd’s assassination —Vorster has embraced the heretical belief that South Africa should change its policy of all-out separation from the black African states to the north. His “outward-looking” policy, built on Verwoerd’s first gestures in this direction, has succeeded in creating an odd but effective trade grouping, of white-and black-ruled states in southern Africa: Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Malawi, Rhodesia and the Portuguese territories of Mozambique and Angola. Overtures have been made, moreover, to other black republics.

Vorster has encouraged immigration from Europe at the rate of 50,000 a year to keep white South Africa from being totally submerged by blacks. The right-wingers complain, however, that the newcomers, mostly Southern European Catholics, will soon outnumber the Dutch-descended, Afrikaans-speaking Calvinists, who have increasingly dominated South African politics since the 1930s. In any event, Vorster’s immigration effort seems doomed. Current projections indicate that by the year 2000, there will be 70 nonwhites to every white in South Africa. Even today, white South Africans total only 3,600,000, compared with 13 million blacks and 1,800,000 half-castes, or “Coloreds.” To add to his sins, Vorster has tried to lure English-speaking South Africans into the Nationalist Party.

Political Football. What finally prompted the right-wingers to lose patience with Vorster—and vice versa —was a rugby match. Last August, the Prime Minister announced that he was permitting New Zealand’s rugby team, which includes native Maoris, to compete in South Africa next year. Appalled, the right wing began an all-out assault on him. Though warned by party officials to temper their criticism, right-wingers intensified it instead. Hertzog and two other members of Parliament were thrown out of the Nationalist Party. There was never any question of their joining the weak opposition United Party, which also endorses apartheid. It is dominated by descendants of English settlers, who are anathema to the ultra-right Afrikaners. Hertzog, who entered politics in 1930, won fame of sorts by barring television from the country while he was Minister of Posts and Telegraph under Vorster. After Vorster dropped him from the Cabinet in 1968, Hertzog became leader of South Africa’s verkramptes (narrow-minded ones), in opposition to Vorster’s verligtes (enlightened ones). In a high-pitched voice, he asks backers to join him in the struggle “to make South Africa a safe country for the white man.” In an attempt to keep Hertzog’s followers from gathering strength, Vorster has scheduled national elections for next April, a year ahead of time. More significant, he and other Nationalists, under pressure from Hertzog’s allies, have begun making concessions to the right.