Word: pretoria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Last week, on the 111th anniversary of the Blood River battle, the thanksgiving day turned into a raucous demonstration of Boer chauvinism. Prime Minister Daniel Malan's nationalist government formally dedicated a new monument to the Voortrekkers, a massive, brooding granite tabernacle on the boulder-strewn veld near Pretoria. South Africa's 8,000,000 black people were 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...
Last week the council was convened for the first time since 1946-to hear its death sentence. Since Europeans objected to its meeting in Pretoria's City Hall, the council squeezed into a stiflingly hot little backstreet meeting room. Said Secretary for Native Affairs Dr. W.J.G. Mears, explaining the council's dissolution: "It has apparently created a sense of frustration in the councilors...
...land is ours again," screamed Nationalist students at Pretoria and Stellenbosch universities. "We're boss now," crowed three young toughs in Prime Minister Daniel Malan's own Piquetberg; they stormed into Grocer Abe Ginsberg's Main Street store and helped themselves to cheese. "In future we'll take what we want without paying." In rural Burghersdorp a pro-Malan voter had got so excited over the election returns on his radio that he ran out firing his rifle in the air, accidentally shot down his antenna. A Smuts supporter kicked his radio to smithereens...
...been a commonplace incident in the year 1893. A young Hindu lawyer, riding the train from Durban to Pretoria, would insist on sitting in a first-class compartment. Provincial constables would restore the situation to normal by ejecting 24-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi at the next stop, a dusty station near the remote Natal-Transvaal frontier...
...Smuts is reputed a sound sleeper, chiefly because he gets to bed early, has often slept on camp cots or iron beds. But last week South Africa's weather-beaten, 77-year-old Prime Minister spoke of troubled nights. To women members of his United Party gathered in Pretoria he said: "Have you ever had the experience of waking at 2 o'clock in the morning in a sweat of not knowing how to solve the problems of tomorrow-as I have experienced throughout my life? I sometimes say that mankind today is at 2 o'clock...