Word: botha
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...first time Dr. Johan Hendrik Botha saw green-eyed blonde Mavis, she was clad in rags, covered with veld sores and standing barefooted on the cow-dung floor of a filthy Zulu kraal. Horrified, the doctor, who treats thousands of Zulus in the lonely hills of northern Natal, decided instantly that six-year-old Mavis was a white child; he took her home. Young Mrs. Botha gave Mavis a good bath, tied her hair in gay ribbons, gave her her first doll, her first shoes and set her at a table to learn to eat with knife & fork...
...Zulus could tell Dr. Botha nothing about the child's origin, save her name. She could not speak a word of English and the Bothas could only communicate with her through their Zulu kitchen boy. Mavis, however, loved her soft mattress and liked salads better than the Zulu putu (porridge...
Kruger led his handful of men against thousands of British regulars for six months, then made a desperate trip to Europe in search of aid. He died in Switzerland in 1904, and it was left to mere youths such as Smuts, Botha and Hertzog to build and shape today's Anglo-Boer Dominion of South Africa...
...time, the new imperialism came, with Louis Botha as the warm heart and Jan Smuts as the cool brain of the Union of South Africa. Jan Smuts recovered his admiration for the British: "They gave us back-in everything but name-our country. . . . They're a big people." But many a Boer, clinging to the memory of the pioneer Voortrekkers, whose ox wagons and rifles had beaten aside the yellow-brown Hottentots and the black Kaffirs, remained unreconstructed. They called Smuts Rhodes redivivus (Rhodes reborn), or Slim (sly, cunning) Jannie, and other more barbed names...
...World War I the diehards saw a new chance for freedom. Prime Minister Botha and Defense Minister Smuts put down a rebellion of their old comrades-at-arms. Then in 1915, in a smartly led campaign, they captured German South West Africa for the Empire. In 1916 Jan Smuts commanded imperial troops which eventually seized control of German East Africa...