Hendrik Verwoerd

Hendrik Verwoerd (September, 8 1901 - September 6, 1966) was the Dutch prime minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966 who organized the laws that lead to the entire apartheid era of the country's history. Birthed in the Netherlands, Hendrik and his family moved to South Africa when he was 2 due to his father's sympathy for the second boer war. Studying in a Lutheran school in Cape Town until the family moved to Rhodesia, Hendrik was then taught in Milton High School, where he received the highest English literature grade in the entire colony. The Verwoerd family returned to South Africa in 1917, where he graduated from school with honors while revered as a smart and intelligent student with a nigh-photographic memory. Over the next few years he was awarded several scholarships and left home to study abroad in Germany, where he married his girlfriend Elizabeth Schmoobie, and possibly also studied the ideologies of the early Nazi Party, which may have inspired the later apartheid policies he put in place.

He came back to SA once again in 1928, this time with his wife, and became a social worker who aided Afrikaners who were left impoverished from the Great Depression. He got into politics in 1937 when he joined the National Party of South Africa, soon drawing controversy after he vocally opposed Jewish immigration driven by discrimination from then-Nazi Germany and protesting against South Africa joining the United Kingdom against Nazi Germany during World War II. Later, in 1958, he increased his political support and won the election for prime minister.

During his term, Verwoerd enforced laws that bolstered his support of Afrikaner nationalism, but also demoted the rights of non-white citizens at the same time. Increasing the power of SA's police force and military to help him enforce his laws, he had thousands of anti-apartheid supporters imprisoned and thousands more exiled. Opposition political parties were banned and non-Afrikaners were forcibly segregated from public areas allowed only for the white minority.

Upon winning prime minister position again in the 1966 election, his government was continuing to develop vehicles and weapons (even nuclear and biological ones). On September 6, 1966, shortly after 2:15 PM, Hendrik was stabbed 4 times in the neck and chest by parliament messenger Dmitri Tsafendas, and soon after died upon arrival at Groote Schuur Hospital. Though this ended his reign, his racist rules of apartheid would linger and not be abolished until 30 years later during the early 1990's. Additionally, towns, roads and facilities once named after him were renamed to further diminish his once heavy influence on the Republic of South Africa.