JUST as Americans can tell you where they were and what they were doing when John F Kennedy was assassinated, there is a whole generation of Afrikaners who can recall exactly the moment when they heard that HF Vervoerd had been stabbed to death by a parliamentary messenger with the unpronounceable name of Dimitri Tsafendas. Many called him Stafendas. A 12year-old schoolboy at the time, I remember our neighbour's wife across the street running into the house, her face wet with tears. "Doktor," as he was fondly known, is dead," she cried. My uncle, a Dutch Reformed dominee, was visiting my mother. To this day I can still see the three of them huddled together around the radio. That was the first time I saw a grown man cry. After that I saw Afrikaner men crying at the funerals of loved ones, but never for a dead politician. Later that year I entered an essay writing Competition. I ended my essay on Verwoerd with the first lines from Jan Cilliers poem on the death of Beer War hero Christiaan de Wet: "Stir, broers/daar gaan 'n man verby/hy groet/en dis verlaas/Daar's nog maar een soos hy/bekyk hom goed. "Loosely translated: Quiet, brothers, there goes a man, he greets us and that is for good. He is one of a kind. Have a good look at him. Of course the comparison was, and is, invalid. De Wet was a hero, Verwoerd a dangerous ideologue. But like De Wet, he was one of a kind. Because when Verwoerd died, he died with the blueprint of apartheid in his head. None of the National Party heads of government that succeeded him, BJ Vorster, PW Botha or FW de Klerk, was possessed of the intellect or the force of personality to preside over and execute a social engineering project of such magnitude.Of course the comparison was, and is, invalid. De Wet was a hero, Verwoerd a dangerous ideologue. But like De Wet, he was one of a kind. Because when Verwoerd died, he died with the blueprint of apartheid in his head. None of the National Party heads of government that succeeded him, BJ Vorster, PW Botha or FW de Klerk, was possessed of the intellect or the force of personality to preside over and execute a social engineering project of such magnitude.
Verwoerd is often wrongly called the architect of apartheid. No, he was the genius who provided the wholly indefensible concept of apartheid with a brand new theoretical framework called separate development. It amounted to the balkanisation of SA into ethnic states with the ultimate result of started in the permanently removing all Africans from what was then called white SA Today it is easy to see the flaws. But Verwoerd provided Afrikaners with a logical and, as they thought then, a morally defensible answer to demands majority rule in a unitary state. Verwoerd's successors tried hard to carry his plan forward, but they simply lacked his rare characteristics. Officially, separate development remained the policy. However, stripped down to its bare essentials, National party rule after Verwoerd was reduced to the pursuit of white power and privilege. Vorster bought himself some political space with his short-lived and mostly result-free policy of "detente" and his famous "Give me six months" speach. So did PW Botha with "Adapt or Die" and the tricameral parliament. But the world and the majority in SA knew: essentially, it was all about holding on to white power. It is no coincidence that the large scale abuse of human rights by the apartheid state in the post-Verwoerd era. As Eugene de Kock and others testified adnauseum before the truth commission: "This is what we had to do to keep them in power. Part of the tragedy is that Botha and De Klerk today refuse to admit this. Jaap Marais, the veteran leader of the Herstigte Nasionale Party, and his deceased former leader Albert Hertzog were the only politicians who realised that Tsafendas had not only killed 'Doktor", he had also killed the grand plan. To this day Marais remains convinced that Verwoerd was murdered as part of an evil plot designed to deliver the Afrikaners to "Communist black majority rule".

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