Word: africa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...light industry, with new factories built to manufacture everything from bicycles to bed frames. The Ivory Coast has also achieved a tidy trade balance, with imports of $236 million and exports of $277 million last year. Per capita income for Ivorians is $200 a year, the highest in Black Africa...