Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...born Lawrence Earl is a good storyteller (Yangtze Incident, TIME, July 23. 1951) with a weakness for pretty prose. To Earl, a woman's waist is a "sweet, inward curve," and a hunk of driftwood can be "ductile to the heaving flood." So when Earl ran into an African crocodile-hunter named Bryan Herbert Dempster, he noted that 28-year-old Hunter Dempster had a "hard challenge in his bright, sapphire eyes [that] had come of something more peremptory than time." But Author Earl picked up a good story...
From then on, he was obsessed by the idea of crocodile hunting. He ran away from school, scorned his father's efforts to make him a farmer. When World War II began, he joined the South African Air Force, but soon "lost his temper" and was put under arrest. He escaped by pole-vaulting the prison stockade, hopped a train to Durban and enlisted in the artillery under a fake name. Demobilized in 1945, a veteran of Anzio and Cassino, he set about the more serious business of fighting crocodiles...
...indignant bull-hippo, who immediately seized both the dinghy and the Zulu helmsman and tore them to pieces. Dempster also found that his hard-nosed service bullets were useless: they ricocheted off a croc's bumpy hide. But the worst snag was the crocodile-birds, a species of African plover. The crocodile's "dental service" is provided by his plovers ("a mating pair ... to each crocodile"), who fly fearlessly into his open jaws and pick leeches and scraps of food from between his teeth. At the least hint of danger, they leave his jaws with a shriek...
...Savanhu, a Negro M.P., accused the government of "using ruthless methods, including starvation and intimidation, to break the Negro strike." Attacked from both sides, Garfield Todd kept his head, and by so doing, saved many others. He ordered an impartial inquiry into the miners' complaints. Last week his African Labor Board put pressure on the Oppenheimers to give the Negroes a worthwhile raise...
...Gilded African." In Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte scoffed at the "First of the Blacks" as a "gilded African," and sent 90 ships and 40,000 veterans of the Egyptian campaign to retake Saint-Domingue. By treachery, the French captured Toussaint and shipped him off to France to die in a moutain prison. But in the end, black troops and yellow fever smashed the French for good...