Word: platteland
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...venture out into the Afrikaners' rural platteland in the Transvaal or the Orange Free State, and apartheid looks alive and well. The Afrikaner driving his bakkie (pickup) rides alone in the front seat, while his black laborers squat in the back. Outside, some blacks sit eating bread and drinking milk they have bought from the nearby corner store, which has a counter for natives only. There is no obvious hostility here, just a sense that this is how things are, and always will be. As the Lord made them...
...tell them [long pause]they have another guess coming." The audience went wild. A National Party worker, standing 6 ft. 6 in. in his bush boots, pounded the shoulder of the spectator next to him. "Man," he shouted, "this is the man! This is the Churchill of the platteland...
...outcast people." Before the polls opened on election morning, long rows of anxious voters stood impatiently to cast their ballots. At first the overwhelmingly anti-government vote from the big cities indicated that the republic might be defeated. But the tide turned in favor of Verwoerd when the platteland returns began arriving. By nightfall, the Nats had a 74,000 majority, giving them 52% of the votes-even though statistics showed many of Verwoerd's own Afrikaners had voted...
...picking up "dangerous" whites as well, including all the top leaders of Alan (Cry, the Beloved Country) Paton's little Liberal Party, except Paton himself, who commented, "I feel slightly disreputable. I must have slipped up somehow." Into the Cities. The Africans reacted like lightning crackling across the platteland sky. That afternoon a procession of 30,000 headed into Cape Town itself, chanting slogans and singing as a pink police helicopter, fluttering overhead like a nervous butterfly, radioed the throng's progress ahead to headquarters. Hastily, platoons of troops took position outside Parliament, where the legislators were debating...
...Strydom has few rivals. One of these is his brother-in-law Jan de Klerk, 54. Strydom appointed De Klerk, a onetime paid party official who has never been elected to Parliament, his Minister of Labor. Eager to curry more votes among the ardent white-supremacist farmers of the platteland, Minister de Klerk promptly ordered South Africa's garment industry to hold in reserve "for whites only" some 30,000 to 40,000 garment jobs, ranging in categories from cutter to supervisor...