Word: rhodesias
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...British Prime Minister [Harold Wilson] had come to Rhodesia to try, somehow, to prevent the white-supremacist colonial regime of Ian Smith from seizing independence ... The United Nations had urged sanctions to starve the settlers out ... And Wilson himself had talked grimly of the 'bloodbath' that might follow a unilateral declaration of independence ... In his talks with Smith last month in London, it had become painfully clear that neither side would make any meaningful compromise on the fundamental issue. The British would give Rhodesia its freedom only on condition that the nation's 4,000,000 blacks be guaranteed control...
Until the end of his life, Ian Smith, Rhodesia's last white Prime Minister, believed there was nothing wrong with his white-minority government's 14-year reign over the nation's 5 million blacks. The right-winger declared independence from Britain in 1965, ruling Rhodesia despite raging civil wars, sanctions and global disdain. In 1980, after Smith finally bowed to international pressure, black nationalist Robert Mugabe was elected President and renamed the nation Zimbabwe. Smith...
...Irme Kertesz, 2002), South Africa (J.M. Coetzee, 2003), Austria (Elfriede Jelinek, 2004), England (Harold Pinter, 2005), Turkey (Orhan Pamuk, 2006). By choosing Doris Lessing in 2007 the Academy has scored a triple: she was born in Iran, known then as Persia, in 1919; raised in Zimbabwe, known then as Rhodesia; and lives in the U.K. In its citation, the academy called her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." (An epicist, if you're curious, is a person who writes epics...
Like so many writers' lives, Lessing's has been an improbable one. Her parents were English, and her father sought his fortune as a bank clerk in Persia, then as a bush farmer in Rhodesia, with limited success. Lessing bridled at their strict Edwardian mores and left school at 13 - that was the end of her formal education, although she continued to read voraciously. She left home at 15, moved to England and became associated with the Communist movement. Her writing career began in earnest in 1950 with her first novel, The Grass Is Singing...
...seaside." Bruce, an angelic blond boy with a solemn demeanor, came from a well-to-do family but, having been exiled to a boarding school in Surrey, radiated loneliness and idealism. "My heart's desire," he said soulfully, "is to see my daddy." His father was in Rhodesia, which may have had something to do with his stated ambition to go to Africa "and try and teach people who are not civilized to be more or less good." The world's most adorable idealist, Bruce was also a Christian socialist: "I think we should give all, some, most...