Word: strijdom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom was eight years old when the savagely fought Boer War ended in British victory. His life was devoted to reversing that judgment of history. When he died last week at 65, after a long illness (heart disease), wasted away to less than 100 Ibs., Prime Minister Strijdom, hailed by his Nationalist supporters as "the Lion of the Transvaal," had nearly accomplished his object...
...stocky man, thin-lipped and blue-eyed, who orated in harsh, leonine gutturals, Strijdom was the son of a Dutch ostrich farmer in Cape of Good Hope Province. By turns a farmer, lawyer, newspaper publisher and banker, Strijdom was unswervingly a politician. In 1929 he was elected to represent the rural constituency of Waterberg. Soon his fiercely Calvinist insistence on quoting Biblical chapter and verse that he thought supported racial segregation won him the derisive title of "the Messiah of Waterberg." His opponents of the largely English-speaking United Party were all much wittier and smoother than Strijdom, but they...
...African National Congress, political arm of the voteless 9,000,000 blacks, called for a three-day protest strike during election week. Strijdom's Nationalists reacted by outlawing the congress in four native reserves, forbidding Africans to assemble in groups of more than ten in urban centers, sending squads of club-swinging police on raids in native shantytowns. They need not have bothered: few Africans seemed disposed to give up three days' pay for a bootless protest...
...Africans, while the Nationalists concentrate on the 1,650,000 Boer descendants who speak Afrikaans, the London Economist was moved to wonder whether the Afrikaners had emerged as the master race, "with the English, the Coloureds, the Indians and the Natives as a descending order of inferior castes." Premier Strijdom, in his victory speech, announced his conviction that South Africa as a "republic is coming sooner than the United Party expects...
Financial and political advantages of the sterling bloc have kept Strijdom in the Commonwealth until now. But in their hour of triumph. Nationalists tried to placate the English-speaking South Africans. Advised the Nationalist Transvaler: "Don't feel bad about the election . . . Leave your valley of mistrust and suspicion. The Nationalist Party has shown that language and culture rights-and money-of both sections are safe in its care." Added Strijdom: "Formidable and manifold problems are facing South Africa, and some of them can only be solved if cooperation between the two main language groups is strengthened...