Fate destroys Afrikaner plinth

Johannesburg - Those who suffered under apartheid can be forgiven for seeing divine intervention in the collapse of a parking…

Johannesburg - Those who suffered under apartheid can be forgiven for seeing divine intervention in the collapse of a parking garage in Pretoria yesterday and burial of the massive sculptured head of former South African prime minister J.G. Strijdom beneath it, reports Patrick Laurence.

Unlike his successors, Strijdom, an ardent Afrikaner nationalist known to his followers as the Lion of the North, did not attempt to dress white hegemony up in the ideological rhetoric of separate development or separate freedom. He spoke openly of wit baasskap or white domination.