Van Doorn said, 'Your predikant hasn't learned much up north,' and Detleef, without endeavoring to defend him, admitted, 'It all sounded so woolly. You must remember these nights, Detlev. je-walloper, a kind of money-minded vulture looking to snap up the discarded pickings off other men's sorting tables. Saltwood, a tall, fine-looking English woman, asked him a series of questions, using English, Afrikaans and Zulu interchangeably.
The struggle had been harsh, as one Englishman noted in his diary: My wheat, two months ago the most promising I ever saw, is now cut down and in heaps for burning. On two occasions we have slept inside the trees. In October, Verwoerd accom- plished one of them: he engineered a plebiscite which authorized the government to break all relations with the English crown and declare itself a republic. The families were more concerned with leaving English rule than with their destination: some proposed to cut east across the Drakensberg Mountains, which had hemmed Shaka's empire.
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