Word: dingaan
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...underlying seriousness, Mittee is written in a light, humorous style. Telling the story in sprightly native idiom, Selina succumbs to digressions almost as often as to Boss Paul. Periodically, the novel stops to paint a tapestry of South African customs and manners, e.g., the rousing celebration of Dingaan's Day, a Boer national holiday, a bit of rural horseplay in which a gullible farmer eats lizard's eggs thinking they are stomach pills. Selina's voice bobs through the story, alternately playful and plaintive, but finally conveying the pain and humiliation for which she can never find...
...guests left their weapons outside the kraal with their women & children. At the height of the festivity, after a tumultuous war dance, Dingaan's Zulus fell upon the Dutchmen, dragged them to the hill of execution, beat them to death with knobkerries, then surged on the Boer wagons to massacre the women & children...
...Dingaan's treachery was soon punished. Later that year, on Dec. 16, 1838, on the banks of Natal's Blood River, another Voortrekker column, headed by Boer Leader Andries Pretorius, bloodily defeated Dingaan's plume-decked, assagai-hurling horde. Of 12,000 Zulus, more than 3,000 perished. The Boers resolved ever after to celebrate Dec. 16 as a day of thanksgiving...
...excluded from all celebrations. For days before the actual dedication ceremonies, while bonfires blazed in the hilltops around Pretoria, frantic rumors had swept the wretched native settlements that the white men were bent on a bloody sequel to the battle of Blood River, that they would go forth on Dingaan's day to slay black men, women & children. The government broadcast special messages to allay their fears...
...family. Dingaan's brother and predecessor, the frightful Chief Tchaka, slaughtered an estimated 1,000,000 fellow blacks in genocidal wars. He liquidated women as useless, mourned his mother's death by killing 7,000 followers, was himself murdered by Dingaan...