Pratoria. The Free State of Oranges. August 1875.

In Pratoria (1), the leaders of the white colony have gathered to debate the emergency.

"They won't come." Jan Blots (2) declared, flatly. "It's an ebsellute bleddy waste of time to send a mission to Enkh-Morpork. They'll just sey – Oh, so you're still hanging on down there? Congratulations, chaps!" end send us a framed iconogreph of the Petricien to heng up on the wall. They won't send fighting soldiers, end thet is the only aid we need!"

Blots' wide farmer's face was red with fury and embarrassment. His khaki safari suit was rumpled and damp with sweat in the Howondalandian summer and clung unflatteringly to his stocky frame.

Cecil Smith-Rhodes, by consent the current Prime Minister, allowed Blots time to work out his frustration. Inwardly, he was thinking Cheesemakers. Tulip-growers. Windmill mechanics. I just wish more of us were Morporkian.

Smith-Rhodes is a man who would be proud if you called him an imperialist and a racist. He would argue that the white races had superior Gods and were innately superior, and as such had a gods-given right to rule over the lesser races, the blacks and the coloured. Where, he said, on the panoply of the gods of Dunmanifestin, is there a black one? Do you see a Howondalandian God there? No, and there is a reason for that!

To this end, he came to prominence by his insistence the colony expand its borders. He had led the expedition into neighbouring Rumbabwe, capturing it quickly and incorporating it into the colony. The new lands wee immediately hailed as Rhodesia after their conqueror. The former inhabitants, two peace-loving tribes, were either assimilated on the usual conditions, to pay rent to live in what had been their own country and to labour in the fields of the new white masters, to earn the money to pay that rent and preserve some sort of meagre living. Or else had fled and joined the KwaZulu Confederation.

"I think they'll listen this time, Jan." Cecil said, soothingly, He opened a leather pouch and tipped a handful of glowing white stones on the desktop. "I sent a far larger bag of these little beauties with the messenger. The message was – if you will not send your army freely, we'll rent it. Oh, they'll come."

"Yes, to capture the gold and diamond mines!" burst out another Boor. Verkramp3 is a tall, thin, man with a receding chin and a painfully prominent adam's apple. He is high in the counsels of BOSS, the Bureau Of State Security, lives in a paranoid altered state of consciousness, and sees threats and enemies everywhere.

"Please, meinheer Verkramp!" said Smith-Rhodes. "Try not to be so suspicious. What good their taking our mines if five minutes later, the impis of the M'Becil and the N'Coherent and the N'Comprehensibl capture them for the Kwa'Zulu?

After that, those of us who cannot escape will be slaves to the black."

He paused to let this awful concept sink in.

"Think of our womenfolk."

He didn't elaborate. Everyone in the room pondered the most awful, terrifying, fate of all. White women at the mercy of kaffirs.

Smith-Rhodes grinned internally. That particular non sequiteur always silenced argument. It was a useful ploy with the Boors.

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(1) Founded by pioneer settler Andres van der Prats, hence City of Prats

(2) A founder of the controversial 20th century Republic of South Africa was General Jan Smuts, a Boer who had an impressive record of victories against the British. He was also responsible for laying down the first principles of apartheid – separation of the races.

(3) One of many, many, author's tributes I shall be making to Tom Sharpe's comic farces of life in apartheid South Africa – Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Lieutnant Verkramp is a certifiably insane secret policeman with too much time on his hands. Tom Sharpe was deported as an undesirable alien for continually poking fun at the lunatic system of apartheid. He then wrote the definitive comic novels, with which anyone who's read the whole of Terry Pratchett can profitably fill the wait for the next Discworld.