Word: kaffir
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Millions of U.S. small-towners remember the institution called Chautauqua, usually with affection. For over half a century it gave to the culture-curious and the culture-hungry a tent show of live entertainment that ranged from the Kaffir Boys' Choir to a course on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, from the measured comments of Viscount Bryce to the soaring platitudes of William Jennings Bryan. Carol Kennicott, the stifled and discontented heroine of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, went to Chautauqua in Gopher Prairie and "was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager...
They were on their way to the Paraguayan Chaco, where Canadian and European Mennonites, in settlements now decades old, have made the swampy wilderness bear fat crops of cotton and kaffir corn. There the immigrants will have a chance to prove by the banks of the Paraguay what their co-religionists have proved by the banks of the Susquehanna, the Dnieper and Canada's Red River-that Menno Simons' followers are among the world's best farmers...
...grow used to one race's normal body odor and do not notice it. But the odor of one race is sometimes strange and objectionable to another race. Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, in A Study of History, tells of a dainty English lady in South Africa who hired Kaffir servants. One little black girl fainted repeatedly in the lady's presence. The inexperienced child was unaccustomed to the shocking smell of white people...
...greatest gold rush since the Klondike was on last week. But most of the prospectors were the slick, sharp-eyed speculators of the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges. In the "kaffir circuses"-the usually cautious sections of the exchanges where South African gold stocks are traded-the market value of Orange Free State shares zoomed $100,000,000 in 48 hours...
...ever, was the time for the rain makers. In the kraals the witch doctors prepared to use their muti (medicine). In Parliament Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts proclaimed a national day of prayer for rain. On the advice of their witch doctors, Basutos climbed their peaks with calabashes of Kaffir beer to propitiate their ancestors. But no rain came...