Word: transvaalers
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...unraveling of the Group Areas Act began in 1982, when the Transvaal supreme court ruled that an Indian found to be in violation of the law could not be evicted from her home unless authorities could prove the "availability of alternative accommodation." That was -- and still is -- an impossible task. Severe overcrowding plagues most nonwhite areas, which contain 73% of the country's total population but cover only 13% of its land. In the black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, for example, the typical four-room "shoe box" home is occupied by an average of 16 people...
Attacked from both left and right, Botha is campaigning as a "moderate" with a ferocity that only Afrikaners could consider moderate. Choosing the U.S. as his favorite target, Botha at an election rally in Lichtenburg in the Transvaal declared that the congressional sanctions against South Africa meant the Kremlin "had its work done for it in Washington." Waving his arms, Botha insisted, "South Africa is the scapegoat of America's bad conscience, ((but)) the South African government is not prepared to surrender." Some 2,000 Afrikaners leaped to their feet, applauding wildly. Carrying his campaign to restive Stellenbosch last week...
...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...
...their isolation, the two landlocked Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State lost all contact with their Dutch origins. The Afrikaners had their own language now and their own lands. There was no thought of ever going home to Europe because there was no longer any home to go to. And the outside world ignored their struggles. The Enlightenment had passed them by, and so had the Industrial Revolution...
...quarter of a billion carats were to be dug out in the next century. Since the diamonds lay in Afrikaner lands, the British simply declared that they were annexing those lands, and British miners came pouring in. Two decades later rich deposits of gold were discovered in the Transvaal. Still more Britons and other foreigners came flooding in to dig up what had been the Voortrekkers' homeland...