Word: africa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Dingaan the Vulture was one of Darkest Africa's crudest black despots.* In 1838 a column of 600 Boers in white covered wagons was trekking northward from the Cape colony into Natal; the bearded Voortrekkers (pioneers), who wanted to get away from the hated British and find new homes in the Zulu domain, asked Dingaan to give them land. The Vulture agreed, if the Voortrekkers would first recover some cattle stolen from him by a hostile tribe. The Boers did so, then went to seal the bargain at a great feast in Dingaan's kraal...
...111th anniversary of the Blood River battle, the thanksgiving day turned into a raucous demonstration of Boer chauvinism. Prime Minister Daniel Malan's nationalist government formally dedicated a new monument to the Voortrekkers, a massive, brooding granite tabernacle on the boulder-strewn veld near Pretoria. South Africa's 8,000,000 black people were excluded from all celebrations. For days before the actual dedication ceremonies, while bonfires blazed in the hilltops around Pretoria, frantic rumors had swept the wretched native settlements that the white men were bent on a bloody sequel to the battle of Blood River, that...
...monument's steps to gaze reverently at the bas-reliefs of Voortrekker heroes and other figures of South African history. At noon, a shaft of sunlight fell through an opening in the monument's dome upon the words "Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika" (We for You South Africa), engraved on an altar 130 feet below. The crowd watched in solemn silence while organs played; at that moment, throughout the land, bells pealed from every town and village belfry...
White Light. Then the speeches started. Their main theme: only the Afrikaner (i.e., descendants of the Boers) might rightfully carry "the white light of Christendom" into "the black heart of Africa...
Died. Sem Benelli, 72, Italy's on-again-off-again Fascist poet and playwright (The Jest), a leader with the late Luigi Pirandello in the modern Italian theater, veteran of Mussolini's 1935-36 march on Ethiopia (I Was in Africa); in Genoa...