Word: boer
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South Africa's Stuart Cloete (rhymes with rooty) is the author of three arresting historical romances about the 19th century Boer settlers and a well-informed study of black Africa (The African Giant). Now his tribal milieu is Victorian England, where white slavery and prostitution flourished underground because a polite society pretended that sexual desire was sinful and disgusting. Cloete's hero (or villain) is Edward Lenton, a hypocritical English country gentleman who seduces five of his children's governesses, then ships the sixth off to be broken in at his favorite London whorehouse. Meanwhile...
Blue & Orange. South Africa has three capitals, one each in three of the four separate states that joined together in 1910. The administrative capital is Pretoria, a city of wide avenues and blue jacaranda blossoms in the onetime Boer Republic of the Transvaal. The Supreme Court is located in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State. Parliament meets in Cape Town, oldest city in the republic and home of most of its 1,747,000 "Coloreds" (mulattoes), who once enjoyed almost the same rights and privileges as the whites...
...When they saw their neighbors, it was usually when they rode to worship at the nearest church, often a two-day journey from their farm. There was no shortage of labor, however. Hottentots and imported East Indian slaves were easy to come by and inexpensive to maintain. Gradually, the Boer farmer became lord of his whole horizon and far beyond...
...British were not far behind. Excited by the discovery of diamonds and gold, British prospectors flocked into the new Boer states. Then came Cecil Rhodes and British capital. And, in 1877, the British government revived an old claim to sovereignty over all former residents of the Cape Colony, laid formal claim to the Transvaal. The eventual result was the Boer War, which lasted for three bloody years and put all of South Africa under the Union Jack...
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was in a very real sense a child of the conflict. He was born at the height of the fighting, in a Dutch village near Amsterdam. His grocer father was a member of a committee to help Boer refugees, and so incensed did he become at their tales of British bestiality that in 1903, the year after the war ended, he moved his family to Cape Town and became a missionary in the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1912, the Verwoerds were assigned to Bulawayo, a new British town in Southern Rhodesia, and young Henk was enrolled...