Word: commonwealth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SOUTH AFRICA: "The basic reason for South Africa's leaving the Commonwealth was that if a member practiced apartheid, its influence within the Commonwealth would be destroyed anyway because the Commonwealth today is nothing if not multiracial. It is now up to the members to prove that they stand up for civil rights everywhere...
...that apartheid-minded Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd has walked out of the British Commonwealth, many South Africans of British descent find themselves in an awkward position. Though they recoil from the vulgar "master-race" trumpetings of the regime, they are uncomfortably aware that most did not fight it much, all accepted the comfortable benefits. Wrote one such South African to the Johannesburg Star, in a letter that was part taunt and part self-mockery...
...back Dr. Verwoerd and the Nationalist government. I shall do so for the same reason that cinema audiences cheered the Prime Minister when he appeared on newsreels, for the same reason that kept hundreds of English-speaking South Africans from raising a public outcry at their loss of Commonwealth status...
Macmillan's plain talk must have startled South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who arrived home from London prepared to boast about, not apologize for, leaving the Commonwealth. Verwoerd found many of his countrymen confused and uneasy. The morning of Verwoerd's return, police made predawn raids on the homes of eight African leaders, hauling them from bed to jail; in Johannesburg white hoodlums began beating up Africans in front of the city hall...
...state.) At the airport Verwoerd reassuringly told a crowd of 20,000 Afrikaners that what had occurred in London had actually been a South African "victory." Obviously relieved by Macmillan's assurances that Britain did not intend to end its preferential tariff agreements with South Africa despite the Commonwealth split, Verwoerd seemed to have changed overnight from a lifelong Anglophobe to a bright, new Anglophile. Fondling a bulldog given him by a London "admirer," he spoke emotionally of his affection for Macmillan, explained that by leaving the Commonwealth he had actually done "our British friends" a favor by easing...