Word: kraal
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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...
Where was Mavis to go? She no longer belonged to the Zulus; in just two short weeks away from the kraal, she was taking on the ways of South African civilization. When the Bothas took her back to the kraal for a visit, her old Zulu "mother" called her "Missie" (Mistress) and kissed her. Mavis carefully wiped her lips with a handkerchief and turned away, saying angrily: "I am white, not black like this old woman. Take me away from here." Dr. Botha said desperately: "We are medically positive the child is pure white. Her eyes, hair, cuticles, gums...
Five thousand excited Pondo and Gaika tribesmen put on their best feathers one day last week and poured into the Great Place, the Royal Kraal of Paramount Chief Archibald Sandile of Gaikaland. They gathered for the greatest social event in the history of the tribes: the wedding of Chief Sandile's son, Anthorpe, to Eunice, daughter of Paramount Chief Victor Poto Mdamase of Pondoland...
...heels of the tribesmen came a deluge of uninvited guests: more than 3,000 gawking whites from nearby East London (pop. 76,000) arrived in a raucous parade of cars, buses and lorries. They elbowed their way into the kraal, streamed through Chief Sandile's house as though it were a wax museum. When the bride, covered from head to foot in a ritual green blanket, approached the Royal Kraal, the whites charged toward her, blocking the entrance. The bridegroom, waiting anxiously for a first look at the bride he had never seen, could see only the shouting throng...
...embarrassed bride knelt before the Gaika elders to pay homage, and was almost tumbled to the ground by an overenthusiastic camera bug. Then, draping a leopard skin about her shoulders, she picked up an assagai (spear) to fling it into the Royal Kraal gatepost-the traditional demand for admission to the Gaika tribe. The jam of whites spoiled her aim: she missed. Bridegroom Anthorpe, in a long leopard skin, gave up in disgust and returned to his dressing room. Not for another hour did Anthorpe confront his bride. At an open-air altar, flanked by the mayors of nearby cities...