Hendrik Verwoerd: An Evil Genius

The people who loved this man say that he was a kind man, full of compassion. But let us look at this man who was the real architect of apartheid in South Africa in the twentieth century.

Born in 1901 in Cape Province of parents from the Netherlands, Hendrik Verwoerd was probably never completely fluent in Afrikaans, the language of most of the whites in South Africa. Certainly, he held the native Africans in contempt; he didn't even want black waiters serving him food while he was prime minister of South Africa: all of the servants were white. But he probably held the boers in contempt as well, because the typical Afrikaner has no problem employing African agricultural labourers to pick his grapes or spray his cattle with insecticides. No, when this man said apartheid, he meant it: he really wanted to keep the races separate in South Africa.

But what's really aberrent about this man is that he was a psychologist: he should have known better; he should have known that factors like environment go a long way towards shaping human behaviour. Of course, the good doctor probably understood that. As prime minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966, he used his political office to try to create an inferior race among the blacks of South Africa: the townships of South Africa were his "Skinner boxes," his mazes. Even today, the Africans are still scrambling for pieces of cheese that the white throw them.

More than Stalin, Hitler or Saddam Hussein, Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was an evil genius: he used a country as a laboratory to test his "scientific" theories. Only the results were rigged: you would be "inferior" too, if you were a Zulu rickshaw operator in Jo'burg, living on less than a thousand calories a day in a shantytown.

Perhaps as poetic justice, he was assassinated by a mentally unstable boer named David Pratt over a land dispute -- a strange way for doctor and a potential mental patient to come together. Or maybe he was attacked by one of his laboratory rats.