Foreign News: FOUR HORSEMEN OF APARTHEID

• Share

Abused, mocked and scorned by most of the world, South Africa's embattled Afrikaners look for leadership to jour stubborn men who are the architects of apartheid and who believe so strongly in their own views that they are oblivious to any suggestion of change.

Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, 59, South Africa's husky, silver-haired Prime Minister, was born in The Netherlands, but at two, was taken to South Africa, where his father became a Dutch Reformed missionary. Verwoerd (pronounced Fair-voort) was educated at Cape Province's Stellenbosch University, intellectual fount of Afrikanerdom, became a professor of applied psychology, which should have given him uncommon insight into the minds of his nation's n million nonwhites.

Yet, in the wake of the first bloody rioting, he told an anxious white audience: "The Bantu are orderly and loyal to the government. They understand that we are thinking of their interests." In eight years as Minister of Native Affairs in the regimes of Daniel Malan and Johannes Strijdom, genial Dr. Verwoerd fashioned South Africa's tough segregation decrees. Using such criteria as the shape of noses and kinkiness of hair, his system classifies blacks, mixed-blood coloreds and Asians by race, then allocates to each a rigid, underprivileged place in society, in which his residence, travel, employment—even his drink—can be determined by government officials. The editor of the National Party's pro-Nazi Die Transvaler during World War II, Verwoerd once fought a humanitarian scheme to provide haven in South Africa for a shipload of Jewish refugees from Germany, likes to boast that none of his seven children were ever bathed or put to bed by a black servant. His main goal is to make South Africa a republic. He plans to hold a plebiscite on the issue this year, kicked off the campaign at a recent public meeting with the words, "We are not oppressors ... we are Christians, and we attempt to do what is right."

François Christiaan Erasmus, 64, as Minister of Justice, has powers beyond control of any court, can "name" anyone a Communist or "ban" his right to travel and meet with others by simple decree—with no evidence needed. In the first month after he took over last December, stubby, handsome Frank Erasmus issued banning orders on eight people, an alltime record. And when last week the government decided to outlaw the only two African organizations of any substance, it was stiff, humorless Erasmus who stood in Parliament to introduce the legislation. The son of a Boer farmer, Erasmus was trained for the law, but plunged into Afrikaner politics at 30, attaching himself to a then obscure leader named Daniel F.