In all the fervour attending the death of Pope John Paul II, another and quite important demise didn’t get nearly the recognition it deserved. Last Saturday, Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk took time off from his Cabinet devotions and gathered the remaining faithful to a low-key ceremony in which he formally switched off the last remaining life-support of the New National Party.
Like poor Terri Schiavo, the NNP had long since had its feeding-tube removed. Surviving only on the adipose tissue of accumulated self-esteem, the party had been getting more wasted by the week. It had hung around political death row far longer than anyone had expected. Alas, all its appeals and frantic prayers went unheard. It was decided a low-key suicide would be the least embarrassing conclusion.
It’s very tempting to compare the brief political dynasty of the National Party to that of a long-shelf-life global religion like Catholicism. In its short but inglorious existence, the NP had its own consecrated franchise of popes. When its doctrines swept it into power in 1948, at the spiritual helm was Pope Malan the Morose who celebrated his ascension to earthly infallibility by an act of liturgical transubstantiation. In a swirl of incense he removed coloured people from the voters’ roll.
He was succeeded by Pope Strijdom the Syphilitic. Embittered and morally celibate, when general paralysis of the insane summoned poor Strijdom to paradise, there came into blessed consecration the most sublime of all National Party pontiffs: Verwoerd the Visionary. His reformation of the sacred rituals and internecine dialogues of the Holy Communion of the Broederbond elevated the concept of orthodox separate development to undreamed-of levels. Pope Verwoerd’s homilies did not go unnoticed from above. With a teeming multiracial heaven to administer, God called home early his beloved National Party representative on Earth. At the very apogee of his mission, Pope Verwoerd was divinely terminated, right inside the NP’s private Vatican, by a free-range Greek heretic.
As the funeral dirges faded away, the Devout and Pious Collegeum of the Cabinet assembled to elect the next NP pope. With a blossom of pure white smoke from the Tuynhuys chimneys, Pope Balthazar John the Enforcer donned the first ever papal mitre in the shape of a Nazi helmet.
With Vorster hastily deconsecrated for stealing from the collection plate, there came into pontifical eminence the most venerable of Holy National Party Fathers, Pope PW the Backward; his mission, to winch the party even further back into the 19th century. His most blessed reign was truncated brutally by one of the most trusted of all his cardinals, who snatched ecclesiastical power with no other help than some spunky editorials by Max du Preez. This subversive cardinal became the new father of the faith, the so-called ‘pous-modern”, De Klerk the Indescribable.
From these transitory but sanctified NP pontificates flowed a steady stream of bulls, encyclicals, letters of faith and contemplations, as profoundly conservative as anything Pope John Paul II ever imagined. The Group Areas Act, the Mixed Marriages Act, Section 16 of the Immorality Act, The Homelands Act and many others, designed to keep the wide church of the South African NP faithful where their entrenched beliefs prompted them to remain: in haunted approbation of a harshly retributive trinity: Die Vaderland, Die Transvaler and Die Holy Burger.
True to Catholic-like dogma, the NP faithful were encouraged to breed. Only by vast increases in the numbers of its flock could the faith hope to survive the onslaught of teeming indigenous masses. Any use of birth-control devices or nostrums led to excommunication. From the first year of their marriages, National Party mothers were expected to extrude a new baby every 12 months, and to continue to do so throughout their fertile years or until catastrophic uro-genital collapse had their bladders falling on the floor.
For seven and 50 long years, the National Party spread its blessed creed across the minds of its laity. Now, noiselessly shunted into eternity by its last acting pope, Kortbroek the Hypocrite, the National Party reliquary will be preserved in the basilica of the Voortrekker Monument — affectionately known as the Siestine Chapel. Among many sacrosanct heirlooms will be Pope Malan’s signed copy of the Old Testament, Pope Verwoerd’s Visitor’s Guide to Amsterdam Brothels, Pope Balthazar John’s first edition of Mein Kampf, Pope PW’s personal rhino-hide sjambok, a coffee-table edition of Gateway to Oranje and a plaster cast of one of Pope Strijdom’s chancres.
Now ensconced in the upper echelons of the Holy Church of the Comrades, Kortbroek himself will continue his apostatic mission among the pew-fellows of his adopted political church and in which he has recognised many of the values, codes and doctrines that the National Party once held supreme: moral high-grounding, deceit, arrogance, condescension and political narcissism. He’ll feel quite at home as he engages his assignment of approving more luxury golf courses and getting his followers’ precious 4x4s back onto the beaches.
Sealed in an airproof corrugated-iron casket, the remains of the National Party are buried beneath the hallowed ground of its philosophical mentors, the Naspers boardroom.