Word: commonwealth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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South Africa runs to $2½ billion. London and New York have been chary for the past year of putting vitally needed money into the Union's gold mines. New funds might now dry up entirely. The Commonwealth market takes 70% of South Africa's fruit and half its wine and brandy...
...Without Commonwealth preference, the sugar industry might lose a market worth $20 million. Prices tumbled on the Johannesburg stock exchange...
...Britain and abroad, South Africa's exit was the occasion for (as Nehru put it) "relief, not elation." Malaya's Prime Minister Abdul Rahman stated the view of the Afro-Asians: "No man, because of his color, should be regarded as an outcast. We of the Commonwealth have proclaimed our stand to the world." The London Times saw the Commonwealth as now on "a secure multiracial basis," and the Guardian stated bluntly: "An unhealthy limb has been removed...
Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's walkout from the Commonwealth sent a tremor through the Union of South Africa. Many of the English-speaking minority felt a sinking sensation as their last link with Britain was severed. Diamond Magnate Harry Oppenheimer called the news "appalling." Said Johannesburg's Englishlanguage Star: "A time of deep sadness for all South Africans except the Afrikaner extremist whose hostility to all things English was not appeased by the break with monarchy." The Cape Times said: "Now we are a lonely little republic at the foot of turbulent Africa...
...delightedly to what they saw as a crushing Verwoerd defeat. On trains and buses carrying them from their "locations" to jobs in Johannesburg, Africans cried to each other. "Marvelous!" "Wonderful!" In house arrest at Groutville, 35 miles from Durban. Tribal Chieftain Albert Luthuli was "overjoyed" to know that "the Commonwealth stands for emancipation of all people everywhere, and especially in a former British colony." An exultant black told a rally, "South Africa has been publicly declared the polecat of the world...