Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd
We include Hendrik Verwoerd in this list because white South Africa was in every respect a dictatorship in the post-War period, and it was Verwoerd who was perhaps most instrumental in setting up the system of statutory racism in South Africa known as Apartheid.
White South Africa, in particular Afrikaans/Dutch speaking South Africa, was extremely conservative, with strong, Calvinist religious ideals that underwrote in many respects the Afrikaner self-image of racial superiority. It also precluded, in general, the wholesale corruption that has tended to characterize most of Africa. As such, Apartheid South Africa was an economically powerful entity, although with a political system both archaic and retrogressive.
Until 1948, South Africa was a British dominion, and so its tendency towards harsh racial policies was limited by the overall superintendents of the British government. WWII, however, broke the bonds of British control over the empire, and South Africa was one of the first to have severe political links. A simmering, long-standing distrust of the British on the part of the Afrikaans-speaking white majority in South Africa found expression in the general election of 1948. Victory was secured by the hard-right Nationalist Party, and soon afterwards South Africa was declared an independent republic.
This new South Africa was led in the first instance by an aging technocrat by the name of Daniel Malan, but he was soon superseded by the much more aggressive ex-Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. This was a turning point in South African history, and it was Verwoerd who began systematically to formalize long-standing and restrictive race conventions into law.
Although the details of this are probably beyond the limits of this short discussion, the essential elements of blacks’ preclusion from mainstream society began and steadily took root under Verwoerd’s term of leadership.
By the 1960s, the statutory system of Apartheid in South Africa was more or less fully implemented, and the United Nations and other international forums had begun to distance themselves from, and isolate South Africa. The effect of this was to entrench the system even further, and to back white South Africa into a defensive corner. Verwoerd suffered an assassination attempt in April 1960, which he survived, but he eventually did fall to an assassin, a parliamentary messenger who stabbed him to death in September 1966.
Apartheid, however, was not the work of one individual, but rather a system, and subsequent white nationalist leader further refined and entrenched that system. It would not be until a concentrated international Anti-Apartheid campaign matured in the early 1990s that the system would eventually fall.