Word: strijdom
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...Klerk family tree is deeply rooted in politics. A great-grandfather sat in the now defunct Senate, and Uncle Johannes Strijdom served as Prime Minister from 1954 to 1958. The family often vacationed at Strijdom's summer estate in the Kruger National Park. The brothers' indomitably conservative father Jan de Klerk played a pivotal role in the Nationalists' dramatic victory in 1948 as the party's secretary in the Transvaal. F.W. was only twelve at the time, and his father's passion for electoral politics made an indelible impression...
When South African Prime Minister Johannes Balthazar Vorster took office three years ago, he seemed the ideal man to continue the white supremacist ways of his predecessors-Johannes Strijdom, Daniel Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd. Grim and humorless, he had served five years as Minister of Justice and took credit for some of South Africa's harshest apartheid laws. To the ruling Nationalist Party, he was a hero, dedicated to preserving its policy of strict color separation. It is little short of amazing, then, that Vorster should now be under attack by Nationalist right-wingers as a dangerous liberal...
...Prime Minister Barry Hertzog made a pact with the South African Party's pliable Jan Christian Smuts-whom Verwoerd considered a tool of the British-he was so disgusted that he joined Afrikanerdom's ultranationalist secret society, the Broederbond (brotherhood). With a young Transvaal lawyer named Johannes Strijdom, he founded Die Transvaler, an Afrikaans-language newspaper, to put across their message. Verwoerd resigned from Stellenbosch to become the editor...
...Violently racist, it demanded laws to protect the unskilled and often illiterate Afrikaner laborers against the "indignity" of working alongside blacks, hammered home the theme that Strijdom was the only man who could save South Africa from the swart gevaar (black peril). So anti-British was the paper that it cheered Hitler and protested South Africa's participation in World War II. The only mention it made of the visit of King George VI in 1947 was a note warning its readers to avoid certain Johannesburg streets, which would be jammed with traffic because "some foreign visitors" were...
Working together, with Strijdom as the leader and Verwoerd the brain and propagandist, the two men slowly rebuilt the Nationalist Party in their own image. In 1948, the Nationalists surged back into power, and Verwoerd became Minister of Native Affairs. It was just the place for him, and he used it to transform South Africa...