Word: bantu
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Herding their cattle over the grassy uplands rolling down from Kilimanjaro in what is now Kenya and Tanganyika, the Masai were fierce, sensual warriors who used dung and ochre for hair oil and drank cattle blood laced with urine. In periodic sport they swooped down on their Bantu neighbors, ramming seven-foot spears through the males and carrying off their women, who often did not seem to mind; the tall, aristocratic Masai were notable men, and Masai wives did not work...
...soon be over. South Africa's Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd himself-the ruthlessly logical racist who looks so much like a kindly Kris Kringle -has lately added a "positive" side to apartheid. "In the year 2000," he once explained in his high professorial voice, "we should expect the Bantu population to number 19 million. How will they be handled? These people must work, they must live somewhere. There is only one way out-we are faced with the choice of either giving the white man his own area and the Bantu his, or having one state in which...
...Africa." cried the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, his mournful face almost aglow, "a number of nations have gained their freedom or are on the road to freedom, and this desire is also present amongst the Bantu people of the Union." He was speaking last week in behalf of a bill-"a God-given task"-that would ostensibly grant that freedom to the Bantus by setting up what will eventually become eight separate black states, which presumably would gradually become more and more nearly self-governing. The Prime Minister himself compared the arrangement to the British Commonwealth of independent...
...What Will Happen . . .?" In reality, the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government bill was nothing more than the logical last step in a policy that began some 300 years ago, when Dutch East India Co. colonists settled on the Cape of Good Hope and there planted an almond hedge to keep blacks and whites apart. The recent turmoil all over Africa has made South African whites increasingly anxious to raise a thick hedge that would prove impenetrable to the Union's blacks...
Union of South Africa's 9,600,000 blacks will get what, before later additions, amounts to only 13% of the land, and far from the best land at that. And for all the glowing promises about a gradual "creative withdrawal" of white leadership, the promised Bantu rights are largely illusory in their own reserves, and nonexistent outside of them in the places where Bantus continue to work...