SOUTH AFRICA

 

Area:  471,445 square miles

Population:  42,718,530 (2004 estimate)

Capitals: Pretoria (administrative capital); Cape Town (legislative capital); Bloemfontein (judicial capital)

Religions: Christian, Hindu, Islam

Languages: 11 official languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu 

Ethnic Groups: Black (75.2%): Zulu, Xhosa, North Sotho, South Sotho, Tswana, Shangaan-

     Tsonga, Ndebele, and Venda; white (13.6%): Afrikaners (Afrikaans-speaking descendants of Dutch, German, and French settlers) and English-speaking descendants of English, Irish, and Scottish settlers; mixed race (8.6%); Indian (2.6%)

Literacy:  86% (2003 estimate)

Life Expectancy: 44 years  

Industry: Gold, chromium, diamonds, assembled automobiles, machinery, textiles, iron and steel, chemicals, fertilizer, metalworking, food stuffs

Export Crops: Wool, corn, sugar, karakul pelts, fruit, wine

Food Crops: Corn, wheat, sugarcane, fruits, vegetables, beef, poultry, mutton 

 

Archaeological evidence shows it is probable that the hominid predecessors of modern humans originated in various parts of East and Southern Africa. The earliest fossils that have been discovered anywhere in the world that are attributed to modern Homo sapiens come from the Klasies River mouth in the eastern Cape Province and Border Cave on the Natal-Swaziland border. Some of South Africa’s most ancient peoples are the San, hunter-gatherers who continued to practice their way of life to historic times. Another early people were the Khoikhoi, pastoralists who herded sheep and cattle. As early as the third and fourth centuries C.E., Bantu-speaking people were established in the north and northeast of South Africa. Migration further southward continued in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Bantu-speakers were agriculturalists with skills in iron smelting and other metal technology who migrated over the centuries from the Niger-Cameroon area into central, eastern, and southern Africa. The majority of the Bantu-speaking population who settled in present-day South Africa belonged to the Sotho-Tswana group who occupied the greater part of the central plateau of South Africa. The Nguni, of whom the Zulu and Xhosa were subgroups, lived along the coastal land between the Drakensberg Mountains and the Indian Ocean. The Venda occupied the Zoutpansberg area in the extreme north of the Transvaal. Within these major groupings, expansion and migration continued to occur. 

 

Four centuries ago, a new wave of people appeared in southern Africa, arriving this time from the sea. As part of Portugal’s search for a sea route to India, Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape in 1487. After Vasco de Gama’s successful voyage to India in 1497-1499, the Cape lay on the main route of European commerce with the East. In the early 17th century English and Dutch ships stopped regularly at the Cape to replenish their food supplies and drinking water. In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck arrived with three vessels to set up a refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company at what later became Cape Town. Within its first ten years, the colony became a complex, racially stratified society as the result of three processes. First, the Dutch East India Company released some of its employees from their contracts and gave them land with the status of “free burghers.” Second, the company imported slaves from West Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Indonesia, India, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), including a large minority of Muslims, and set them to work in the colony. Third, the Dutch settlement expanded and encroached upon lands belonging to the indigenous populations, which resulted in a series of wars ending with the defeat and subjugation of the Khoikhoi and the ruthless extermination of the San. By the early 1700s and throughout the 18th century, the colonists known as trekboers – semi-migrant farmers – began to spread out over a vast area in their search for new grazing lands. In the latter half of the 18th century, the eastern and northern migration of the trekboers collided with the southern and western expansion of the Bantu-speaking peoples, particularly the Xhosas. Fierce fighting between these peoples continued into the mid-19th century. During this time, internal strife led to a bloody civil war among the Bantu-speaking groups out of which the Zulu nation rose to power under Shaka and Dingane.

 

As a result of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Britain occupied the Cape Colony in 1795. In 1803 they handed it back to Holland, but reoccupied it in 1806 and gained permanent possession of it from the Dutch in 1814. In 1807 Britain outlawed the slave trade. In 1820, 5000 British settlers arrived in the Cape Colony. In 1834 all slaves were emancipated. That same year Britain forced the Boers (also known as Afrikaners) to return disputed territory to the Xhosa. Outraged by all this interference, the Boers chose to leave. About 12,000 Afrikaners embarked on the “Great Trek” north and east into lands occupied by Xhosa, Zulu, and other African nations, which would become the Boer republics of Natal (on the East Coast), Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. They defeated the Zulus in Natal only to see it annexed by Britain in 1843. Over the next 30 years, the Boers, Zulus, and British fought over land, with the British eventually granting the Boers sovereignty in Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The discovery of huge diamond deposits in Orange Free State in 1867 and the subsequent discovery of gold in the Transvaal prompted Britain to annex the diamond fields (1877) and then the Transvaal republic (1877) and to conquer the Zulu kingdom, the most powerful African state in Southern Africa (1879). When the Transvaal Boers rebelled in 1880 (the First Anglo-Boer War), the British granted the Boers self-government.

With the discovery of gold in the Transvaal, tens of thousands of people from around the world (uitlanders or “foreigners’) poured into the new city of Johannesburg. Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape colony and the most powerful man in the diamond and gold mining industries, plotted an attempted coup known as the Jameson Raid to supplant the Boer government of the Transvaal republic and claim it for the British Empire. Rhodes’ scheme misfired in 1895, forcing Rhodes to resign as prime minister. Exasperated by British interference, the Boers declared war in 1899. The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) was considerably more destructive than the first. When the Boers turned to guerilla warfare, Britain responded by burning Boer farms and placing tens of thousands of Boer women and children in concentration camps where 20,000 people died. The British eventually won the war.   

 

In 1910 Britain combined its colonies, Cape and Natal, with the Boer republics of Orange Free State and Transvaal to create the Union of South Africa. Louis Botha, an Afrikaner, became the first prime minister. Segregationist policies reducing blacks’ voting rights, restricting their movement, preventing them from immigrating to the cities, and denying them access to all but the most menial employment were pursued. In 1912 organized political activity among Africans began with the establishment of the South African Native National Congress, which later changed its name to the African National Congress (ANC). Between 1908 and 1914 an Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi led several campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience to defend the rights of Indians in Natal.

 

In 1948 the hard-line Afrikaner Nationalist Party (NP) won power and began to implement its policy of complete racial separation called apartheid. The government legislated absolute racial separation in virtually all aspects of life, and the laws, which imposed crushing hardships on the black population, were aggressively enforced. In 1952 the ANC organized the Defiance Campaign, a plan of mass action involving boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and non-cooperation. The government smashed the movement by arresting the leaders and raiding their homes. On May 21, 1960, a mass anti-pass campaign took place at Sharpeville. Without warning or provocation, the police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. Sixty-nine people were shot, most of them in the back, and 180 people were wounded. The government crushed the dissent and unrest that followed by instituting a state of emergency and banning the ANC, Pan African Congress (PAC), and other black political groups. The Sharpeville massacre aroused worldwide protest and marked a turning point in popular attitudes to the South African situation in the western world. It also marked a major turning point within the black South African resistance movement with the decision to abandon nonviolent passive resistance in favor of armed struggle as a means of achieving freedom and justice. In 1961 Nelson Mandela, a lawyer and ANC leader, went underground and formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the militant wing of the ANC. With the help of the American C.I.A. in South Africa, Mandela was arrested and tried for treason. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.

 

A second major turning point occurred on June 16, 1976, with the Soweto Children’s Uprising, when police fired on protesting schoolchildren in the Soweto township, igniting a riot that spread around the country and in turn provoked boycotts and strikes. The following year Stephen Biko, the charismatic leader of the Black Consciousness movement, died in police custody. To both of these events, the world reacted with horror and condemnation. By the mid-1980s anti-apartheid protests and mass mobilization became a permanent feature of South Africa’s political life, and no amount of government repression short of a total civil war could contain it. The South African economy slumped as international sanctions, disinvestment, and trade boycotts took their toll. 

 

F.W. De Klerk, who was elected president of South Africa in 1989, saw the writing on the wall and began to reform the government. On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years’ imprisonment. Most of the apartheid laws were abolished in 1991. Despite sporadic violence (in many cases instigated by white extremists), multiracial and multiparty elections were peacefully held in April 1994. Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected black president. In 1996 a new constitution was approved with an extensive bill of rights guaranteeing equality for all who live in South Africa. Nelson Mandela retired at the end of his term in 1999. On June 2, 1999, Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president of South Africa and leader of the ANC, was elected president in a landslide, having already assumed many of Mandela’s governing responsibilities.

 

In 2000 and 2001, South Africa faced a slumping economy, rising crime rate, and AIDS epidemic of nearly 5 million people, the highest number of HIV-positive people in the world. President Mbeki’s highly controversial views on AIDS -  denying the link between HIV and AIDS – led to death and despair as well as condemnation from critics at home and abroad, including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Finally, in August 2003, after years of mass mobilization, legal action, and civil disobedience by the Treatment Action Campaign, the AIDS drug lobby group, and its leader, Zachie Achmat, Mbeki agreed to change his hands-off AIDS policy by promising an anti-AIDS prevention and treatment program through the public health system. In April 2004 parliamentary elections resulted in a resounding victory for the ANC. Thabo Mbeki was reelected president of South Africa.       

 

SOURCES:

Breyer, Christopher. “A History of South Africa,” Mark Taper Forum, March 1997.

Mkhondo, Rich. Reporting South Africa. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1993.

Oakes, Dougie, ed. Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story. The Reader’s Digest Association South Africa, 1988.

Omer-Cooper, J. D. History of Southern Africa. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1994.

“South Africa,” Culturgram ‘99. David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies, Brigham Young University, 1998.

“South Africa,” Lycos Network. http://infoplease.lycos.com/ipa/A0107983.html, 2005.

“TAC Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize,” sabcnews.com/south_africa/health, December 2, 2003.

Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

 

Compiled by Mary Holmström and updated in February 2005.