ABSTRACT
In May 1961, more than a year after the Sharpeville demonstration gave the government the excuse to ban the ANC and the PAC and with them mass resistance to apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd took white South Africa out of the British Commonwealth as an essentially Afrikaner Republic. Although the all-white referendum on the republic was promoted in terms of national self-determination, the idea appealed hardly at all to English-speaking voters (Moodie 1975:285) and the Thanksgiving Celebration at the Voortrekker Monument, at which Verwoerd invoked God’s will before a crowd decked out in Voortrekker garb (Pelzer 1966:32), left no doubt as to the priority of Afrikaner interests. The prime minister’s invocation of divine authority lent this event the aura of prophecy fulfilled, harking back to the Covenant struck by the Boers on the eve of Blood River (Meyer 1940:92), while the reprise of Voortrekker themes and theatrics reminded the nation that the tuiste vir die nageslag [home for posterity] (Cronjé 1945) was to be a corporatist volkstaat rather than a liberal democracy on the British model (Meyer 1942:29).
