Word: africa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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During the second year of World War I, a fleet of British warships anchored off the mouth of the Rufiji River in German East Africa and proceeded to bombard an unseen target. When the shelling was over, the 3,400-ton cruiser Königsberg, camouflaged and in hiding 17 miles upstream, was an unrecognizable mass of twisted steel. She was to Germany in World War I what the Bismarck was in World War II: a ghostly, arrogant lone raider that had sunk British warships, transports and merchant vessels and gotten cleanly away after each kill. On the bridge...
...women at least a week's paid vacation a year. It remained for William Edmund ("Billy") Butlin, a bustling, 48-year-old onetime carnival barker, to teach them how to use the new leisure. "I just think about what I'd like for a holiday," says South Africa-born Billy, "and then I give it to 'em." For the aspidistras of the traditional boarding house Billy has substituted neon lights and glass brick; for shoddy, scabrous hotels, rows of neat, bright cottages; and for listless hours when the rain is falling, a round of regimented frolic that...
...Damned? Henry Scobie, the principal character in the story, was deputy police commissioner during wartime in a tiny, fetid port on Africa's west coast. He seemed like a dull, plodding Briton; he was also a serious Catholic. Something happened to his integrity: he betrayed his professional honor, his wife, his best friend, and finally his God. At the end he decided that the only way out was suicide...
What the report said about Nigeria applied, in greater or less degree, to all colonial British Africa. The verdict was especially devastating in the light of the hopes that had been based on African development. Was this what had become of "the Third Empire," the one that was to replace India and Burma as a base of Britain's prosperity and power? Only last year, Sir Stafford Cripps had said: "The whole future of the sterling group and its ability to survive depend on a quick and extensive development of our African resources...
...Socialists, the Laborites were committed to planning for Africa. Commented a Tory M.P., Arthur Douglas Dodds Parker, in last week's debate: "With all their talk, Socialist plans are very scanty." Sample: the planners expected that by now they would be getting greatly increased production of Nigerian coal, peanuts and palm kernels. They neglected to provide increased transportation to move in these products. An order for 20 locomotives for Nigeria was given priority rating three years ago, but it had slipped behind 50 non-priority locomotives which the manufacturer wanted to deliver first for Britain's own railroads...