Where the White Things Are
Nate Barksdale
January 1, 2000
To the vast majority of South Africans, Hendrik Verwoerd is hardly a martyr. As the apartheid government's Minister of Bantu Education, Dr. Verwoerd in 1953 took over and dismantled the church school system that had educated men like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, stating that the benefits of European education were utterly wasted on non-whites.
A few years later, as prime minister, Verwoerd spearheaded the drive to relegate most black South Africans to quasi-independent homelands, where they could live happily and peacefully with their own kind. The homelands system allowed the ruling National Party to deny all rights to, and responsibility for, their country's non-white majority.
Then, on September 6, 1966, at the apex of his political career, Hendrik Verwoerd was cut down, stabbed to death in Parliament by Demetrio Tsafendas, a parliamentary page of mixed racial descent.
Verwoerd epitomized the twisted idealism of the apartheid system and the past that South Africa now struggles to put behind itself. Needless to say, public statues of Verwoerd didn't last long in the New South Africa.
But on a scrub-covered hillock not too far from the geographical center of South Africa, a newly erected statue stands, gazing over a small collection of houses ringed by irrigated farmland. The plaque below the half-scale statue reads, in part, "In die Hartland van die Afrikaner." And thus, the half-sized brazen image of Hendrik Verwoerd presides over the town of Orania like a dour midget king.
I hadn't planned to visit Orania when I arrived in South Africa last September—mostly because I'd never heard of the tiny desert town, and also because I've never really gone out of my way to hang out with white supremacists. But after a few weeks of ...
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