Word: strijdom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Prime Minister Johannes Strijdom, the bull-necked zealot who is the leader of South Africa's Nationalist Party, cried that it was "God's will" that the Nationalists get five more years of control over the destinies of the Union of South Africa's 14 million people. The devil was obviously working with the opposition United Party, for, said Strijdom, they wanted to give votes to nonwhites, and had devised a "devilish, satanic" plan to reorganize the South African Senate...
Such oratory and such thinking were enough last week to win a smashing electoral victory at the polls for Strijdom: his Nationalists increased their control of the House of Assembly to 103 of the 163 seats though their popular victory was by no means so decisive since they benefit from 50-year-old electoral laws which favor the hinterland. The United Party, which is as segregationist as Strijdom but talks of "white leadership with justice," increased its representation by one, to 53, but its party leader, Sir De Villiers Graaff, lost his gerrymandered seat to a Nationalist candidate. Minor political...
...African National Congress, political arm of the voteless 9,000,000 blacks, called for a three-day protest strike during election week. Strijdom's Nationalists reacted by outlawing the congress in four native reserves, forbidding Africans to assemble in groups of more than ten in urban centers, sending squads of club-swinging police on raids in native shantytowns. They need not have bothered: few Africans seemed disposed to give up three days' pay for a bootless protest...
Stabbing the air with his fingers, shaping if like a symphony conductor, gaunt Johannes Strijdom lived up to his billing. "We Afrikaners," he thundered, "believe that God put us on the southern tip of the African continent to establish, build and maintain white civilization. We must destroy any move toward bastardization. For this reason the government has introduced apartheid [racial segregation] into every possible sphere." At the opposition United Party, which draws its support largely from South Africa's 1,200,000 citizens of British descent, Strijdom leveled a deadly charge: "They are imperialists more concerned with British interests...
...signs were that come election day, Strijdom's Nationalists, thanks to effective gerrymandering, would win something like their present majority (94 out of 159 seats) in South Africa's House of Assembly, even if, as last time, they do not get an actual majority of votes. But whoever won, it would make little real difference to the nation's 9,250,000 voteless Africans, who outnumber the whites three to one. For anyone who cherished the illusion that the Nationalists were unique in their commitment to white supremacy. Sir de Villiers Graaf, leader of the United Party...