South Africa: The Security Man

A week to the day after the assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the leaders of South Africa’s ruling Nationalist Party met in the Parliament building in Cape Town to choose his successor. There were half a dozen candidates for the job, but it was never much of a race. The obvious front runner was beefy Balthazar Johannes Vorster, 50, Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons, and boss of the massive security organization that enforced South African apartheid.

Vorster (pronounced Force-ter) had admitted drawbacks. He suffers from a heart condition that prevents him from traveling by airplane. He has had no experience in foreign affairs, has in fact been outside South Africa only once, on a vacation to South America. In addition, his views on race problems were considered extremist, even by some members of his own racist party. But no other South African could match the support that Vorster enjoyed from the combined forces of the party’s large right wing, its secret Broederbond (Brotherhood) inner sanctum, and the Dutch Reformed Church, in which Vorster’s brother Jacobus is a leading minister. More important, to a nation thrown into traumatic shock by the assassination of its leader, Vorster was the living symbol of what most South African whites wanted most: security at any cost.

By the time last week’s party caucus began, all other candidates had quietly withdrawn and Vorster was elected Prime Minister by acclamation. “God has put the right man in the right place at the right time,” said his brother.

Ox-Wagon Guard. Vorster has not always been so acclaimed. The 13th of 14 children of a wealthy Afrikaner farmer, he studied law at Stellenbosch University, turned up in 1941 as a 25-year-old “general” in South Africa’s pro-Nazi underground, the Ossewa Brandwag (Ox-Wagon Guard). Spouting his admiration for Hitler and contempt for democracy, he was arrested as a Nazi agent in 1942, spent 14 months in a dusty internment camp at Koffiefontein in the Orange Free State. So extremist were his ideas that not even the Nationalists could stomach them at first. In 1948, the party turned down his application for membership on the ground that he “believed in the authoritarian state principle and advocated the destruction of parties.”

But times change. In 1961, shortly after the Sharpeville massacre had set South Africa reeling, Verwoerd decided that authoritarianism was just what the nation needed, named Vorster as Justice Minister, and ordered him to snuff out racial violence. Setting to work with a vengeance, Vorster sent his cops swooping in to arrest African political leaders, beefed up his police force with more men and riot equipment, spent millions of dollars extending the police network of informers.

No Time to Be Sensitive. His theme was kragdadigheid, an Afrikaans word meaning unyielding strength, and he lost no time pushing through Parliament the laws that would make him strong. First came the Anti-Sabotage Act, under which anyone suspected of “liberalist” ideas could be confined to his home indefinitely, denied the right to be heard in the press, and isolated from contact with decent citizens. Then came laws empowering his police to hold anyone without charge—first for 90 days and, as of last year, for 180 days. He also gained the right to extend indefinitely the sentences of all political prisoners, and this year was empowered to take “emergency” police measures such as imposing curfews without declaring a state of emergency. Accused last year of turning South Africa into a police state, Vorster rose in Parliament to offer his defense: “It is not the time to be sensitive about principles.”

When he became Prime Minister last week, Vorster assured his fellow whites that there was at least one principle he would uphold. “I will continue along the road of apartheid,” he promised, and proceeded to deliver his own definition of it. “It is not,” he said, “a denial of human dignity to anyone. On the contrary, it gives an opportunity to every individual, within his own sphere, not only to be a man or woman in every sense of the word, but also to create the opportunity to develop and advance without restriction or frustration—as circumstances justify in accordance with the demands of the development achieved.”

That kind of doubletalk must have mystified his listeners. Then he added: “Until we are again in calmer waters, I believe that I owe it to South Africa to take personal responsibility for the safety of the state.”

Everybody knew what that meant.