The Assassin of Milner Park

Monday, Apr. 18, 1960

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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.