Word: backveld
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...thwarted Boer aspirations. After taking his law degree at the University of Pretoria, he returned to his father's farm, where he raised ostriches. He improved a natural gift for histrionics by speech-making in front of mirrors. In 1929 he was elected to Parliament for the backveld district of Waterberg, quickly established himself as an uncompromising Afrikaner Nationalist. "The Lion from the North," as he has come to be known, is apt to make intolerant old Daniel Malan seem a lamb by comparison...
Always at heart a moderate, General Hertzog found himself in uneasy company. The extreme nationalists had gone in for religious racism. They had celebrated the centenary of the Great Trek hysterically for a whole year, touring the backveld from town to town in ox wagons. Anyone who didn't grow a voortreker (pioneer) beard was an "outlander" or a traitor. A synagogue was dynamited, and George VI's message to the final jamboree was read in Afrikaans. A hangover from this emotional bender was the growth of the Ossewa Brandwag (Ox-Wagon Fireguard), an Afrikaans cultural organization specializing...
...support Britain at war. To Canada and Australia the war was serious business from the first, but to many dour Afrikaans-speaking Boers of the Rand and the Transvaal in the Union of South Africa it was just another cause for dissatisfaction with the British. Plenty of backveld farmers and Kimberley merchants are unreconstructed. Their long memories reach back to the Great Trek of 1835-38 when stubborn Dutch farmers moved into the wilderness to get away from the British, to the Boer War in 1899 which kept them sullen subjects of the British Crown...
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