Word: boers
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Rumors of Rebellion. The Strauss party carried the fight to the country. Strongarm squads of both sides brawled in the streets and there were rumors that would not be downed of rebellion and civil war. "The time has come," wrote an Orange Free State Boer to his local newspaper, "when all burghers should be armed . . . with a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Who knows what lies ahead?" A German South African who had fled from Hitler thought he knew...
Malan's headlong rush towards a narrow Afrikaner state-anti-British and anti-black-was too much for one of South Africa's oldest living heroes: 80-year-old General Sarel Francois Alberts. In the Boer War, Alberts fought alongside the late great Field Marshal Smuts against the hated British; after Smuts made peace (in 1902), they fought one another. Alberts, in 1914, rebelled against South Africa's pro-British government; he was defeated and captured by one of Smuts's toughest lieutenants: Dolf de la Rey. Since then, captor and captive have gone their separate...
Politically, the church has not been so fastidious. Claiming two-thirds of South Africa's 1,500,000 Boers as members, it has been a powerful and unabashed leader of extreme Boer nationalism. During World War II, Reformed predikants (Afrikaans for "pastors") refused to baptize children of South African soldiers who were fighting with the British against the Germans. Daniel Malan, once a predikant himself, has lined up most of his fellow clergymen behind his rabble-rousing campaign for apartheid (race segregation policy). "The Negroes," the church has officially announced, "cannot have the vote because they are incapable...
...audience of 2,500 applauded, but few came forward to sign up. Boer nationalists like the Reformed Church precisely because it is such a handy political tool. Less politically minded churchgoers, instead of joining Reformed splinter sects like Devos', have switched to other Protestant sects or to Roman Catholicism. "Like vultures battening on a dead body," the church's official newspaper, Kerkbode, commented, "the sects batten on the church." Angrily the political predikants have rebuked Roman Catholic nuns for refusing to discriminate in hospital work between blacks & whites...
...seemed to be heading its way. Thwarted by the supreme court in his attempt to disfranchise 50,000 Cape colored voters (TIME, March 31), Prime Minister Malan declared that the court is no more than "a few judges, appointed and paid by the government." He added: "The struggle for [Boer] freedom has been reopened ... No compromise is possible...