It is Marais's version of the domino theory and it is just as valid. If there are any National Party leaders left today, at least one of them should have the decency to admit, in between all the griping over the "present mess", that Jaap Marais has been right all alone about the thin edge of the wedge. The day that they allowed the first deviation from Verwoerd's blueprint was also the day that they sowed the seeds for the demise of Afrikaner minority rule. They had no option. Tsafendas killed the man with the big picture in his head. Last month, when the death of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko was remembered, a number of people asked where Biko would be today and what his ideas would be had he had not been murdered by Vorster's policemen. In the past 33 years many Afrikaners have asked a similar question about Verwoerd. Brace yourself for a lengthy letter from Jaap Marais giving his answer. In the early 1980s, the Nats unearthed a letter from Verwoerd to Sir Robert Menzies, the former prime minister of New Zealand, in which Verwoerd ostensibly expressed doubts about his own policy. This suddenly discovered letter was an attempt to silence right-wing critics of PW Botha's regime. But the wording was ambiguous and it proved unconvincing. Until recently there were a few we may call Verwoerdian pragmatist. Who maintained that Verwoerds policies could have succeeded if they were fully implemented and if Verwoerd could have persuaded whites to make the financial sacrifices - massive investments in the bantustans - that his policies would entail. Vervoerd's relatives, like his grandson Carel Boshoff Jr, who lives with his family in the Orania Volkstaat, reversed the Verwerdian dream. Instead of turning SA into a white countryby creating black volkstaats, they are now creating a white volkstaat, a Boerestan, by withdrawine from black SA or Azania, as Carel Boshoff Sr, Verwoerd's son-in-law, is fond of calling the place. There is no simple answer to the question of what would have happened to the country if the dagger of mentally deranged Tsafendas had missed its target on the afternoon of September 6, 1966. Except perhaps to admit: It took a madman to rid us of a mad idea.
Du Plessu is deputy editor of City Press and former deputy editor of Beeld

From BUSINESSDAY October 11, 1999