Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Salisbury Plain as Britain demonstrated her prize new .280-cal. rifle. More than simple curiosity was involved: this is the weapon with which Britain hopes to equip not only her own infantrymen (who have been using the bolt-action, single-shot .303-cal. Lee-Enfield since the South African War), but all the North Atlantic Treaty nations. Disagreement over it caused a hitch at the recent small-arms conference in Washington, where Britain's Defense Minister Emanuel Shinwell argued...
Patrick Gordon-Walker, Commonwealth Relations Secretary, replied for the government but his arguments were unconvincing. Said he: "A very difficult case . . . We [must] balance private interests and public will and public good . . . against an African background which is not easy to understand . . . The passing of the motion tonight might have very grave consequences...
Heedless of South African law, which states clearly that mingling of white and black persons is a criminal offense, light-skinned sailormen, heavy with pocket money, paraded the streets with Zulu-dark girls, while Cape Town's white Portuguese chatted happily in their mother tongue with handsome, mahogany-brown Brazilians. Local police tried desperately to figure out which were black, which were white and which in-betweens, finally gave up. Brazilian Captain Pedro Paulo de Aranjo Suzano was no help at all. Said he: "They are all Brazilians...
...eight-month-old South African lion cub named Chaka (after the early 19th Century Zulu tyrant) was put aboard a plane in Johannesburg, headed for Moscow as a gift from the Russian consulate to Joseph Stalin...
Back in civilian life, the Pinkertons prospered. Every kind of criminal, from Western train robber to international jewel thief, fell before them. In 1886, they solved a New Orleans murder case in which the main clue was an obscure African poison injected from a hollow needle into the leg of a pretty girl. In the '20s, they caught a bigamist who gave as his reason for burning his second wife the indisputable fact that "it is hard for a man to support two wives...