Separate Development as a Failed Project of Social Engineering: The Flawed Logic of Hendrik Verwoerd

An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the outset of a conference on 'The Golden Age of Apartheid'. That talk sought to set a tone for the conference by focusing on contradictions in the racial and cultural logic of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, whose political interventions dominated events and reconfigured society during the period of apartheid's golden age. While 'separate development' presented an apparently moral (if anthropologically questionable) 'separate cultures' argument for 'national development', it was always fundamentally undercut by racist assumptions of apartheid. This seems to have been true of Verwoerd's personal attitudes as well as his political initiatives at the time.