Word: strijdom
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Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom was eight years old when the savagely fought Boer War ended in British victory. His life was devoted to reversing that judgment of history. When he died last week at 65, after a long illness (heart disease), wasted away to less than 100 Ibs., Prime Minister Strijdom, hailed by his Nationalist supporters as "the Lion of the Transvaal," had nearly accomplished his object...
...stocky man, thin-lipped and blue-eyed, who orated in harsh, leonine gutturals, Strijdom was the son of a Dutch ostrich farmer in Cape of Good Hope Province. By turns a farmer, lawyer, newspaper publisher and banker, Strijdom was unswervingly a politician. In 1929 he was elected to represent the rural constituency of Waterberg. Soon his fiercely Calvinist insistence on quoting Biblical chapter and verse that he thought supported racial segregation won him the derisive title of "the Messiah of Waterberg." His opponents of the largely English-speaking United Party were all much wittier and smoother than Strijdom, but they...
...Strijdom's program had simplicity: he hated the tie with the British Commonwealth, he hated "British-Jewish capitalism," he hated the threat to the 3,000,000 whites of South Africa of 11,000,000 slowly awakening blacks, coloreds (mixed bloods) and Indians. He was one of the first advocates of apartheid (segregation ). When he took over as Prime Minister in 1954, succeeding Daniel F. Malan, a man of the same stamp, his administration rammed through laws that packed the Supreme Court and Senate, began the mass resettlement of natives into reserves. He was suspicious of all outsiders...
...Africans, while the Nationalists concentrate on the 1,650,000 Boer descendants who speak Afrikaans, the London Economist was moved to wonder whether the Afrikaners had emerged as the master race, "with the English, the Coloureds, the Indians and the Natives as a descending order of inferior castes." Premier Strijdom, in his victory speech, announced his conviction that South Africa as a "republic is coming sooner than the United Party expects...
Financial and political advantages of the sterling bloc have kept Strijdom in the Commonwealth until now. But in their hour of triumph. Nationalists tried to placate the English-speaking South Africans. Advised the Nationalist Transvaler: "Don't feel bad about the election . . . Leave your valley of mistrust and suspicion. The Nationalist Party has shown that language and culture rights-and money-of both sections are safe in its care." Added Strijdom: "Formidable and manifold problems are facing South Africa, and some of them can only be solved if cooperation between the two main language groups is strengthened...