Hendrik Verwoerd

His actions prompted the passing of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1761, condemning apartheid, and ultimately leading to South Africa's international isolation and economic sanctions.

He was the second child of Anje Hendriks Strik (1873-1940) and Wilhelmus Johannes Verwoerd (1874-1961).

His older brother was Leendert (Len) Verwoerd (1899-1986) and his younger sister, the only one born in South Africa, was Hendrika Johanna Lucretia (Lucie) Verwoerd (1908-1959).

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (8 September 1901 – 6 September 1966), also known as H. F. Verwoerd, was a South African politician, scholar, and newspaper editor who was Prime Minister of South Africa and is commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid and nicknamed the "father of apartheid".

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was born in Amsterdam in the Netherlands on 8 September 1901.

Verwoerd was South Africa's only foreign-born prime minister.

His father was a shopkeeper and a deeply religious man who decided to move his family to South Africa in 1903 because of his sympathy towards the Afrikaner nation in the wake of the Second Boer War.

Verwoerd went to a Lutheran primary school in Wynberg, Cape Town.

By the end of 1912, the Verwoerd family moved to Bulawayo, Rhodesia, where his father became an assistant evangelist in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Verwoerd attended Milton High School, where he was awarded the Beit Scholarship, established by diamond magnate and financier Alfred Beit.

Verwoerd received the top marks for English literature in Rhodesia.

In 1917, the family moved back to South Africa, since the congregation in Bulawayo had appointed a second minister of religion.

His father took up a position in the church in Brandfort, Orange Free State.

Due to the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic, the younger Verwoerd only sat for his matriculation exams in February 1919, achieving first position in the Orange Free State and fifth in country.

Verwoerd studied at Stellenbosch University, where he was regarded as a brilliant social science academic, and it was widely claimed that he possessed a photographic memory.

Verwoerd was fluent in Afrikaans, Dutch, English and German.

He obtained his B.A. with distinctions in Sociology, Psychology and Philosophy, and then completed his Masters cum laude.

He then went on completing his Doctorate in Psychology in 1925 at Stellenbosch University.

Verwoerd's over three hundred page Doctorate thesis titled "Die Afstomping van die Gemoedsaandoeninge" (Afrikaans: The numbing of the Emotion) was at the time regarded as a monumental academic achievement in field of Applied Psychology in South Africa.

Due to the work undertaken by Verwoerd in his doctoral thesis, he was awarded two scholarships for post-doctoral research abroad—one by the Abe Bailey Trust to study at the University of Oxford, England, and another one to continue his studies in Germany.

Furthermore, Verwoerd played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership.

Following the Nationalist electoral victory in 1948, Verwoerd assumed high positions in the government and wielded strong influence over South African society.

Although Apartheid began in 1948 with D. F. Malan's premiership, Verwoerd's role in expanding and legally entrenching the system, including his theoretical justifications and opposition to the limited form of integration known as baasskap, have led him to be described as the "Architect of Apartheid".

Verwoerd played a significant role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies, as Minister of Native Affairs (1950–1958) and then as prime minister (1958–1966).

He was the Union of South Africa's last prime minister, from 1958 to 1961, when he proclaimed the founding of the Republic of South Africa, remaining its prime minister until his assassination in 1966.

Verwoerd was an authoritarian, socially conservative leader and an Afrikaner nationalist.

He was a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond (Brotherhood), a secret white and Calvinist organization dedicated to advancing the Afrikaner "volk" interests, and protested against South Africa's declaration of war on Germany during World War II.

Verwoerd became prime minister in 1958.

His desire to ensure white, and especially Afrikaner dominance in South Africa, to the exclusion of the nonwhite majority, was a major aspect of his support for a republic.

To that same end, Verwoerd greatly expanded apartheid.

When attempting to justify apartheid to international audiences, he branded it as a policy of "good-neighbourliness", stating that as different races and cultures have different beliefs and values, they could only reach their full potential if they lived and developed apart from each other.

He stated that the white minority had to be protected from the nonwhite majority by pursuing a "policy of separate development" and keeping power in the hands of whites.

Apartheid saw the complete disfranchisement of the nonwhite population.

Verwoerd heavily repressed opposition to apartheid during his premiership.

He ordered the detention and imprisonment of tens of thousands of people and the exile of further thousands, while at the same time greatly empowering, modernizing, and enlarging the white apartheid state's security forces (police and military).

He banned black organizations such as the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, and it was under him that future president Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for life for sabotage.

Verwoerd's South Africa had one of the highest prison populations in the world and saw a large number of executions and floggings.

By the mid-1960s Verwoerd's government to a large degree had put down internal civil resistance to apartheid by employing extraordinary legislative power, draconian laws, psychological intimidation, and the relentless efforts of the white state's security apparatus.

On 6 September 1966, Verwoerd was stabbed several times by parliamentary aide Dimitri Tsafendas.

He died shortly after, and Tsafendas was jailed until his death in 1999.