The Assassin of Milner Park

The tall, white-haired Prime Minister beamed as he walked back to his box after inspecting the prize cattle at the annual Rand Show in Johannesburg's Milner Park. It was a warm, sunny Saturday, and Hendrik Verwoerd's speech had been particularly suitable for the 50th anniversary of South African nationhood. "We shall not be killed!" he shouted to the thousands of whites in the grandstand. "We shall fight for our existence, and we shall survive." He took his seat beside his wife Betsie, not noticing David Pratt, a wispy, 54-year-old Transvaal farmer in green tweeds, who clambered briskly up the concrete steps behind the Prime Minister, flashing his exposition-committee-man's lapel badge to get past the husky detectives.

Mounting a photographer's chair to get closer to the Prime Minister, the stranger spoke, and Verwoerd turned to shake the hand of a presumed greeter. Instead he stared at the point-blank muzzle of a .32 automatic. Pratt fired twice, and South Africa's Prime Minister lay on the concrete aisle, blood spurting from two holes in his cheek and ear. His wife flung her arms around him, crying "What's happened? What's happened?" Then she fainted. Verwoerd's personal bodyguard, Major Carl Richter. was a few feet away when, belatedly, he realized what had happened and fainted too.

Seized by astonished guards, Pratt was hustled through the angry crowd, crying "God help me!" Verwoerd was laid on a stretcher, rushed to Johannesburg's Gen eral Hospital.*After tense waiting, word came from the surgery: Verwoerd's jaw was shattered in two places, and his palate was punctured, but he would live.

Eccentric Farmer. The assassin's motive was still not clear, although he was known to hate Verwoerd's National Party. Born in England, Pratt was educated at Cambridge, has lived for 17 years in a 25-room mansion on his 1,000 acres of the rich veld 20 miles west of Johannesburg; there he breeds prize Ayrshires and, in a concrete-lined trout run, raises fish for Johannesburg restaurants. A gentle, kind man who collects guns, Pratt has a history of epilepsy and a tendency toward sudden violence. Last year, after his Dutch wife left him for another man. he arrived at Amsterdam's airport with a gun in his pocket and proclaimed his intention of killing her. Chief worry: that the shooting of the Afrikaners' leader by an Engelsman would deepen the long Boer hostility toward the English-speaking whites.

The nation's Africans could be thankful that the assassin was white. If he had been black, a blood bath might have followed. For the blacks, the week had already been bitter enough as Verwoerd's police and troops relentlessly worked to stamp out the dying embers of revolt. Chief quarry was the ringleaders who still urged blacks to stay at home rather than return to their jobs in white men's shops and factories.

Outside Cape Town, where a cordon of helmeted soldiers and sailors surrounded 100,000 beleaguered Africans in Nyanga and Langa townships, police launched lightning raids from dawn to dusk. The cops broke into the squalid homes at random, flailing the hapless inhabitants with whips and shouting "Go to work." In one foray, more than 1,500 were herded away to police stations for questioning.

Roving police squads sped through the main streets of Cape Town itself, swinging sjamboks (leather whips) and grabbing "intimidators" who, according to Justice Minister Franc,ois Erasmus, "stood at street corners giving certain signs" to keep Africans from going to work. Near Durban, African stay-at-homes stoned and beat other natives returning from work in town. Black police carrying Zulu-style shields and assagais (short spears), moved in, killing four and wounding 20.

New Passes. By week's end, the "locations" at both Cape Town and Durban were cowed. Most workers were back at their jobs, and the hapless blacks who had burned their passes in the first emotional days of violence were lamely queueing up for new ones (at $2.80 apiece) at government offices. Without the hated passbooks, no job was possible, for the authorities were warning white employers of severe penalties for hiring workers without them.

But it was clearly just the end of a skirmish; few doubted that the real battle lay ahead--perhaps not too far ahead. Arraigned in court at Johannesburg under the tough emergency regulations, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, head of the militant Pan-African Congress, was defiant. "We are going underground," he warned even as the legislators in Cape Town took the final vote to ban both his group and the bigger, older African National Congress. The nervous police soon got proof that this was not an idle boast. Scores of A.N.C. leaders had escaped arrest in the confusion of the first raids; ten of them, including young Joe Matthews, head of the A.N.C. Youth League, and Moses Mahhida, top African trade union leader, were already operating from hidden outposts, issuing mimeographed instructions to their followers in several cities.

On the Beaches. Until the shots ripped into Hendrik Verwoerd's face, many whites could still remain unconcerned. The beaches and cocktail lounges of Durban were crowded with holidaying Transvaalers oblivious of the violence on the city's outskirts, and in bustling Johannesburg, business went on much as usual. But even among the whites, opposition to Verwoerd's policies was growing. For the first time, Afrikaner and English-speaking business groups spoke out. Their objection was simple: the disturbances were jeopardizing the economy. Jan Moolman, chairman of the Wool Board, called on the government to "amend their policies --or else." Peter Mosenthal, a textile manufacturer who is president of the Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce, declared: "The time has arrived when organized commerce must speak. The Bantu certainly have legitimate grievances."

Churchmen were in the vanguard of the demands for reform, except for the Afrikaner Dutch Reformed leaders, who remained silent. Durban's Roman Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley warned bluntly that "Africans are determined to have political participation in their future, and I don't see how white South Africa can face up to it fast enough." The Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Netherlands-born Joost de Blank, announced that he was sending a representative to Geneva to ask the World Council of Churches to expel the South African Dutch Reformed Church unless it takes a stand against Verwoerd's harsh racism. Johannesburg's Anglican Bishop R. A. Reeves, an outspoken defender of black rights, fled to nearby Swaziland for fear of imminent arrest.

Skunk Status. Abroad, criticism mounted. In London, the House of Commons passed an unprecedented resolution of condemnation of a Commonwealth partner's domestic policy, auguring trouble ahead when South Africa's delegate shows up for the Commonwealth prime ministers' conference in May. At this rate, wailed Die Surge", the Nationalist mouthpiece, South Africa would soon achieve "permanent status as the skunk of the world." Foreign Minister Eric Louw was unmoved. "We will not hand over control of South Africa to a native majority," he told a radio interviewer. "South Africa has gotten used to being slandered for the past 14 years."

At week's end, the government had 100,000 men under arms to keep internal peace. This was almost half the size of the entire force mustered by South Africa for service in World War II. It seemed a fair measure of the cost, in time, money and peace of mind, of maintaining apartheid's unequal balance.

*The world press, out in force to cover the Prime Minister's speech, was caught with its pencils down. Most had gone to the press room to write their stories; TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs left, saying casually, "If someone was going to shoot Verwoerd, he'd have done it by now." One of the few journalists on the spot: Britain's olympian Rebecca West, covering for the London Sunday Times. Sample West prose: "A man got on his seat and shouted 'Shame to Johannesburg!' but that was the only fierce reaction; the sluggishness and remoteness of the afternoon persisted . . ."

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