Word: velde
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Eons ago two long rivers cut parallel valleys down the sides of the southern Rhodesian plateau, leaving a broad ridge bisecting the country. Men began to call the broad ridge the High Veld, for it was 4000 to 5000 feet above sea level. On the High Veld was, and is, life, in a rich, tropical savanna graced with tall grass and scattered umbrella-shaped trees. Africans once proudly owned and farmed it, but a century ago they were gradually pushed down its steep sides by the white settlers...
...bottom they found the Low Veld--the depressed valleys below 3000 feet on either side of the ridge. Tens of thousands of untrained Africans with no means of transportation now crowd the Low Veld. It is a hot, unproductive, malaria infested area with inadequate hospitals and few opportunities for improvement. Here sixty per cent of the African population is employed--mostly on the land...
...much at stake. Few communities in the world can match the sun-drenched affluence that Rhodesia's hardy settlers have achieved for themselves. Lions still command the distant escarpments, and elephants, baboons and rhinos forage in the valleys of rivers bulging with hippos. But on rolling high veld, brushed with elephant grass and flowering jacaranda trees, the whites have carved out a tidy empire of modern tobacco farms and cattle ranches that has brought modest prosperity to the land. Taxes are low and so are prices; and, for whites, wages are high enough to permit all but the most...
...penniless natives to go to work for the settlers to pay it. But the settlers worked beside them in the fields and gradually adopted a paternal feeling toward them. New settlers poured in, built themselves Victorian towns and sturdy houses, and planted mealies (corn) and tobacco on the veld. When more land was needed, the natives were moved off, until in 1928 the officials decided something had to be done to protect them. The result was the Land Apportionment Act, which set aside roughly half of the countryside as "native reserves"-but also prohibited the blacks from owning or even...
With Lilford paying most of the bills and Smith in charge of organization, the Rhodesian Front sprouted like mealies on the veld at Gatooma. All the rightist fringe groups, including the Dominion Party of Contractor William John Harper (now Internal Affairs Minister), got into the act, as did such present powers as South Africa-born Lawyer Desmond Lardner-Burke