South Africa
 

Overview
Southernmost country on the African continent.

The Kingdom of Lesotho lies within its boundaries. Area: 470,693 sq mi (1,219,090 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 46,888,000. Capitals: Pretoria/Tshwane (executive), Cape Town (legislative), Bloemfontein/Mangaung (judicial). Three-fourths of the population are black Africans, including the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and Tswana; nearly all of the remainder are of European or mixed or South Asian descent. Languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi (North Sotho), Sotho (South Sotho), Swati (Swazi), Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu (all official). Religions: Christianity (other [mostly independent] Christians, Protestant, Roman Catholic); also traditional beliefs, Hinduism, Islam. Currency: rand. South Africa has three major zones: the broad interior plateau, the surrounding mountainous Great Escarpment, and a narrow belt of coastal plain. It has a temperate subtropical climate. It is one of the world’s major producers and exporters of gold, coal, diamonds, platinum, and vanadium. It is a multiparty republic with two legislative houses; its head of state and government is the president. San and Khoekhoe (Khoisan speakers) roamed the area as hunters and gatherers in the Stone Age, and the latter had developed a pastoralist culture by the time of European contact. By the 14th century, peoples speaking Bantu languages had settled in the area and developed gold and copper mining and an active East African trade. In 1652 the Dutch established a colony at the Cape of Good Hope; the Dutch settlers became known as Boers (Dutch: “Farmers”) and later as Afrikaners (for their Afrikaans language). In 1795 British forces captured the cape. In 1836 Dutch settlers seeking new land made the Great Trek northward and established (1838) the independent Boer republics of Orange Free State and the South African Republic (later the Transvaal region), which the British annexed as colonies by 1902 following the South African War. In 1910 the British colonies of Cape Colony, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange River were unified into the new Union of South Africa, which became independent and withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961. Throughout the 20th century, South African politics were dominated by the question of maintaining white European supremacy over the country’s black majority, and in 1948 South Africa formally instituted apartheid. Faced by increasing worldwide condemnation, it began dismantling the apartheid laws in 1990. In free elections in 1994, Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president. A permanent nonracial constitution was promulgated in 1997.

Profile
Official name Republic of South Africa (English)
Form of government multiparty republic with two legislative houses (National Council of Provinces [90]; National Assembly [400])
Head of state and government President
Capitals (de facto) Pretoria1 (executive); Bloemfontein2 (judicial); Cape Town (legislative)
Official languages 3
Official religion none
Monetary unit rand (R)
Population estimate (2008) 48,783,000
Total area (sq mi) 471,359
Total area (sq km) 1,220,813
1Name of larger municipality including Pretoria is Tshwane.

2Name of larger municipality including Bloemfontein is Mangaung.

3Afrikaans; English; Ndebele; Pedi (North Sotho); Sotho (South Sotho); Swazi; Tsonga; Tswana (West Sotho); Venda; Xhosa; Zulu.

Main

the southernmost country on the African continent, renowned for its varied topography, great natural beauty, and cultural diversity, all of which have made the country a favoured destination for travellers since the legal ending of apartheid (Afrikaans: “apartness,” or racial separation) in 1994.

South Africa’s remoteness—it lies thousands of miles distant from major African cities such as Lagos and Cairo and more than 6,000 miles (10,000 km) away from most of Europe, North America, and eastern Asia, where its major trading partners are located—helped reinforce the official system of apartheid for a large part of the 20th century. With that system, the government, controlled by the minority white population, enforced segregation between government-defined races in housing, education, and virtually all spheres of life, creating in effect three nations: one of whites (consisting of peoples primarily of British and Dutch [Boer] ancestry, who struggled for generations to gain political supremacy, a struggle that reached its violent apex with the South African War of 1899–1902); one of blacks (consisting of such peoples as the San hunter-gatherers of the northwestern desert, the Zulu herders of the eastern plateaus, and the Khoekhoe farmers of the southern Cape regions); and one of “Coloureds” (mixed-race people) and ethnic Asians (Indians, Malays, Filipinos, and Chinese). The apartheid regime was disdained and even vehemently opposed by much of the world community, and by the mid-1980s South Africa found itself among the world’s pariah states, the subject of economic and cultural boycotts that affected almost every aspect of life. During this era the South African poet Mongane Wally Serote remarked,

There is an intense need for self-expression among the oppressed in our country. When I say self-expression I don’t mean people saying something about themselves. I mean people making history consciously….We neglect the creativity that has made the people able to survive extreme exploitation and oppression. People have survived extreme racism. It means our people have been creative about their lives.

Eventually forced to confront the untenable nature of ethnic separatism in a multicultural land, the South African government of F.W. de Klerk (1989–94) began to repeal apartheid laws. That process in turn set in motion a transition toward universal suffrage and a true electoral democracy, which culminated in the 1994 election of a government led by the black majority under the leadership of the long-imprisoned dissident Nelson Mandela. As this transition attests, the country has made remarkable progress in establishing social equity in a short period of time.

South Africa has three cities that serve as capitals: Pretoria (executive), Cape Town (legislative), and Bloemfontein (judicial). Johannesburg, the largest urban area in the country and a centre of commerce, lies at the heart of the populous Gauteng province. Durban, a port on the Indian Ocean, is a major industrial centre. East London and Port Elizabeth, both of which lie along the country’s southern coast, are important commercial, industrial, and cultural centres.

Today South Africa enjoys a relatively stable mixed economy that draws on its fertile agricultural lands, abundant mineral resources, tourist attractions, and highly evolved intellectual capital. Greater political equality and economic stability, however, do not necessarily mean social tranquility. South African society at the start of the 21st century continued to face steep challenges: rising crime rates, ethnic tensions, great disparities in housing and educational opportunities, and the AIDS pandemic.

Land
South Africa is bordered by Namibia to the northwest, by Botswana and Zimbabwe to the north, and by Mozambique and Swaziland to the northeast and east. Lesotho, an independent country, is an enclave in the eastern part of the republic, entirely surrounded by South African territory. South Africa’s coastlines border the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest. The country possesses two small subantarctic islands, Prince Edward and Marion, situated in the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles (1,900 km) southeast of Cape Town. The former South African possession of Walvis Bay, on the Atlantic coast some 400 miles (600 km) north of the Orange River, became part of Namibia in 1994.

Relief
A plateau covers the largest part of the country, dominating the topography; it is separated from surrounding areas of generally lower elevation by the Great Escarpment. The plateau consists almost entirely of very old rock of the Karoo System, which formed from the Late Carboniferous Epoch (about 318 to 299 million years ago) to the Late Triassic Epoch (about 228 to 200 million years ago). The plateau, generally highest in the east, drops from elevations of more than 8,000 feet (2,400 metres) in the basaltic Lesotho region to about 2,000 feet (600 metres) in the sandy Kalahari in the west. The central part of the plateau comprises the Highveld, which reaches between 4,000 and 6,000 feet (1,200 and 1,800 metres) in elevation. South of the Orange River lies the Great Karoo region.

The Great Escarpment (see Drakensberg), known by a variety of local names such as uKhahlamba (Zulu: “Barrier of Spears”) and the Natal Drakensberg, forms the longest continuous topographic feature in South Africa and provides scenery of great beauty. The escarpment is part of uKhahlamba/Drakensberg Park, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. It runs southward from the far northeast, where it is generally known as the Transvaal Drakensberg (Afrikaans: “Dragon Mountains”). It is there, in KwaZulu-Natal province, that the country’s highest point, Njesuthi (11,181 feet [3,408 metres]), is found. Farther south the escarpment forms the boundary first between KwaZulu-Natal and Free State provinces and then between KwaZulu-Natal and Lesotho. There it reaches elevations of nearly 11,000 feet (3,300 metres), including some of the country’s highest peaks, such as Mont aux Sources (10,823 feet [3,299 metres]). The mountainous escarpment continues southwestward, dividing Lesotho from the Eastern Cape province, where it runs westward across Eastern Cape at lesser elevations of 5,000 to 8,000 feet (1,500 to 2,400 metres) and is known as the Stormberg. Farther to the west it becomes the Nuweveld Range and the Roggeveld Mountains and forms the approximate boundary between Northern Cape and Western Cape provinces. At its western extreme, in the vicinity of Mount Bokkeveld and Mount Kamies (5,600 feet [1,700 metres]), the escarpment is not well defined.

An area of ancient folded mountains with elevations between 3,000 and 7,600 feet (900 and 2,300 metres) lies in the southwest of the country; it includes ranges such as the Tsitsikama, Outeniqua, Groot-Swart, Lange, Ceder, Drakenstein, and Hottentots Holland mountains, as well as Table Mountain and its associated features at Cape Town.

Both above and below the Great Escarpment, the topography tends to be broken. Open plains are rare, occurring mainly in northwestern Free State and farther to the west and in smaller areas such as the Springbok Flats north of Pretoria. Ridges, mountains, and deeply incised valleys are common, mainly left by the erosion of ancient landforms. There is little genuine coastal plain between the escarpment and the sea, except in northern KwaZulu-Natal, where it reaches a width of about 50 miles (80 km), and in parts of Western Cape. For most of its 1,836-mile (2,955-km) length, the coastline consists of fairly steep slopes rising rapidly inland and often includes long stretches of beach. Most of the coastline has been uplifted or created by falling sea levels in the recent geologic past, with the result that there are few flooded river valleys or natural harbours. Exceptions include the Knysna Lagoon in Western Cape and the Buffalo River at East London. In KwaZulu-Natal, longshore drift over many centuries has created spits and bluffs from beach sand; in a number of places these features have enclosed bays, which have provided both remarkable sanctuaries for wildlife (as at the St. Lucia estuary) and, when mouths are dredged, good harbours (as at Durban and Richards Bay).

Drainage
Rising in the Lesotho Highlands, the Orange River and its tributaries—chiefly the Caledon and the Vaal—drain the greater part of the country (about 329,000 square miles [852,000 square km]) to the Atlantic Ocean. North of the Witwatersrand (Rand) ridge, the plateau is drained to the Indian Ocean by the Limpopo system, whose major tributaries include the Krokodil, Mogalakwena, Luvuvhu, and Olifants rivers. South of the Olifants River, in the area between the escarpment and the sea, a large number of other river systems, including the Komati, Pongolo, Mfolozi, Mgeni, and Tugela, drain much of KwaZulu-Natal; the Tugela ranks as the largest river by volume in the country. The Mkomazi, Mzimvubu, Great Kei, Great Fish, Sundays, and Gourits rivers drain significant areas farther south, while the Breë, Berg, and Olifants rivers mainly drain the Western Cape fold mountain region. The flows of all South African rivers are highly seasonal, and few offer a level-enough gradient and sufficient volume to allow navigation by even small craft for more than a few miles from their mouths.

Soils
South Africa contains three major soil regions. East of approximately longitude 25° E, soils have formed under wet summer and dry winter conditions; the more-important soil types there are laterite (red, leached, iron-bearing soil), unleached subtropical soils, and gleylike (i.e., bluish gray, sticky, and compact) podzolic soils (highly leached soils that are low in iron and lime). A second major region lies within an area receiving year-round precipitation in Western Cape and Eastern Cape and generally contains gray sandy and sandy loam soils. Over most of the rest of the country, which is generally dry, the characteristic soils comprise a sandy top layer, often a sandy loam, underlain by a layer of lime or an accretion of silica. With some exceptions, South Africa’s soils are not characterized by high fertility, and those that are—for example, in coastal KwaZulu-Natal—tend to be easily degraded.

Climate
Almost the entire country lies within the temperate zone, and extremes of heat and cold are rare. Its location next to a subtropical high-pressure belt of descending air produces stable atmospheric conditions over most of its surface area, and the climate generally is dry.

Because most of the country lies at fairly high elevation, which tempers the influence of latitude, even the tropical and near-tropical northern areas are much cooler than would otherwise be the case. High elevation and lack of the moderating influence of the sea produce large diurnal temperature variations in most inland areas.

The climate is greatly influenced by the oceans that surround the country to the east, south, and west. The temperate cyclones of the southern ocean exercise considerable influence on weather patterns, especially in winter, when their circulation moves northward. The cold northward-flowing Benguela Current not only cools the west coast considerably but also contributes to the dryness and stability of the atmosphere over the western parts of the country, while the warm southward-flowing Mozambique and Agulhas currents keep temperatures higher on the east and southeast coasts. The resultant warmer and less-dense air rises more readily, facilitating the entry of moisture-bearing clouds from the east.

South Africa and the adjoining ocean areas are influenced throughout the year by descending, divergent upper air masses that circulate primarily eastward, generally causing fine weather and low annual precipitation, especially to the west. During winter (June to August), cold polar air moves over the southwestern, southern, and southeastern coastal areas, sometimes reaching the southern interior of the country from the southwest. These polar masses are accompanied by cold fronts as well as by rain and snow. In summer (December to February), the Atlantic high-pressure system settles semipermanently over the southern and western parts of the country. Local heating of the landmass sometimes causes low-pressure conditions to develop, and rain-bearing tropical air masses are drawn in from the Indian Ocean over the northeastern region.

South Africa is generally semiarid; its precipitation is highly variable, and farmers often face water shortages. More than one-fifth of the country is arid and receives less than 8 inches (200 mm) of precipitation annually, while almost half is semiarid and receives between 8 and 24 inches (200 and 600 mm) annually. Only about 6 percent of the country averages more than 40 inches (1,000 mm) per year. The amount of precipitation gradually declines from east to west. Whereas the KwaZulu-Natal coast receives more than 40 inches (1,000 mm) annually and Kimberley approximately 16 inches (400 mm), Alexander Bay on the west coast receives less than 2 inches (50 mm).

Summers are warm to hot, with daytime temperatures generally from 70 to 90 °F (21 to 32 °C). Higher elevations have lower temperatures, while the far northern and northeastern regions and the western plateau and river valleys in the central and southern regions have higher temperatures. At night temperatures fall substantially in the interior—in some places by as much as 30 °F (17 °C)—while on the coast the daily range is much smaller. Winters are mostly cool to cold, with many higher areas often having temperatures below freezing at night but readings of 50 to 70 °F (10 to 21 °C) in the daytime; however, winters are warm on the eastern and southeastern coasts. Temperatures generally decline from east to west: Durban has an annual average temperature of 69 °F (21 °C), while Port Nolloth—at a similar latitude but on the west coast—registers 57 °F (14 °C).

Plant and animal life
Flora and fauna
Natural vegetation varies from savanna (parklike grassland with trees) in the Bushveld and Lowveld of Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces through grassland with fewer trees in the Highveld to scrub (fynbos) and scattered bush in the Karoo and drier western areas and even includes desert on the edge of the Kalahari in the north. Western Cape has a distinct vegetation of grasses, shrubs, and trees able to withstand the long, dry summers and is the home of many of South Africa’s 20,000 species of flowering plants. The eastern coast has a more tropical plant life. Sections of Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces collectively form the Cape Floral Region, known for its rich diversity of plant life and designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. Natural forest is limited to mountainous valleys along the Great Escarpment and a few other favoured localities, in particular the Knysna area of the southern coast. The desert region includes such vegetation as narras (Ancanthosicyos horridus), a shrub with an edible fruit, and mongongo nut (Ricinodendron rautennii), a tree with a hollow trunk. Human settlement, herding, and cultivation practices have significantly altered natural vegetation for at least two millennia. White (European) inhabitants have accelerated these processes by introducing exotic plant species; urban growth, rapid population expansion, and the spread of market agriculture, especially since the late 19th century, have also contributed to this change.

South Africa has a rich and varied mammal life, with more than 200 species, including such large animals as lions, leopards, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, baboons, zebras, and many kinds of antelope. Smaller creatures include mongooses, jackals, and various cats such as the caracal. The numbers of animals declined greatly, however, during the expansion of white settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries, and today large mammals exist mainly in the country’s wildlife reserves. South Africa contains more than 800 species of birds, such as the bearded vulture, the bald ibis, and the black eagle; many species of reptiles, including more than 100 varieties of snakes (of which one-fourth are poisonous); and an extraordinarily diverse population of insects.

Conservation
The country contains more than a dozen national parks. The largest, Kruger National Park in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, is noted for its populations of rhinoceroses, elephants, and buffalo, as well as a variety of other wildlife. Mountain Zebra National Park in Eastern Cape province shelters the endangered mountain zebra; Addo Elephant National Park, also in Eastern Cape, protects more of the elephant population; and Bontebok National Park in Western Cape contains the endangered bontebok (a type of antelope). Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park in KwaZulu-Natal, inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1999, provides a protected environment for the Nile crocodile, a large hippopotamus population, and many species of birds, in addition to other animals. Regulated big-game hunting of elephants, white rhinoceroses, lions, leopards, buffalo, and many types of antelope is allowed in the country during certain months of the year. Grysboks, klipspringers, and red hartebeests (all varieties of antelope), giraffes, black rhinoceroses, pangolins (anteaters), and antbears are specially protected animals that cannot be hunted.

Conservation efforts in Southern Africa have been aided by the creation of transfrontier parks and conservation areas, which link nature reserves and parks in neighbouring countries to create large, international conservation areas that protect biodiversity and allow a wider range of movement for migratory animal populations. One such park is the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which links Kruger National Park with Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park and Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park. Another is Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, which links South Africa’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park with Botswana’s Gemsbok National Park.

People
Ethnic groups
Government-determined “racial” and ethnic classification, embodied in the Population Registration Act in effect from 1950 to 1991, was crucial in determining the status of all South Africans under apartheid. The act divided South Africans at birth into four “racial” categories—black, white, Coloured (mixed race), and Asian—though these classifications were largely arbitrary, based on considerations such as family background and cultural acceptance as well as on appearance.

The original Khoekhoe and San peoples of South Africa scarcely exist as distinct groups inside the country today. Many intermarried with other African peoples who arrived before European conquest, and others intermarried with Malagasy and Southeast Asian slaves under white rule to form the majority of the Coloured population. Bantu-speaking Africans entered the area from the north roughly 1,800 years ago; their descendants today constitute about three-fourths of South Africa’s population.

The population formerly classified as Coloured descended from Khoisan (Khoekhoe and San) peoples, slaves imported by the Dutch from Madagascar and what are now Malaysia and Indonesia, Europeans, and Bantu-speaking Africans. Several distinct subethnic groups can still be identified, such as the Malays, who largely originated from Indonesian Muslim slaves, and the Griquas, who trace their origins to a specific historical Khoekhoe community. While some Malays and Griquas have continued to identify themselves as Coloured, others who were so classified by the apartheid government have rejected the label entirely. In many respects they cannot be distinguished culturally or physically from the white population. Those formerly classified as Coloured are concentrated in the western half of the country, particularly in Western and Northern Cape provinces and the westernmost parts of Eastern Cape province, where they form a majority in most districts.

South Africans of Indian descent, who were classified under apartheid as Asian, form a large minority. They went to South Africa originally as indentured workers imported by the British to the former Natal colony beginning in the 1850s and were followed by a smaller group of immigrant traders later in the 19th century. Most of them now live in KwaZulu-Natal and to a lesser extent in Gauteng, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga provinces. Almost all Indian South Africans are urban dwellers. Small communities of other ethnic Asians, including Chinese, live in some of the cities.

Most white South Africans are descendants of European settlers—primarily from Great Britain, Germany, and The Netherlands—who began to migrate to South Africa in the mid-17th century.

Languages
The black African population is heterogeneous, falling mainly into four linguistic categories. The largest is the Nguni, including various peoples who speak Swati (primarily the Swazi peoples) as well as those who speak languages that take their names from the peoples by whom they are primarily spoken—the Ndebele, Xhosa, and Zulu (see also Xhosa language; Zulu language). They constitute more than half the black population of the country and form the majority in many eastern and coastal regions as well as in the industrial Gauteng province. The second largest is Sotho-Tswana, again including various peoples whose language names are derived from the names of peoples who primarily speak them—the Sotho, Pedi, and Tswana. Speakers of Sotho-Tswana languages constitute a majority in many Highveld areas. The other two primary linguistic groups are the Tsonga (or Shangaan) speakers (primarily the Tsonga peoples), concentrated in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, and the Venda speakers (primarily the Venda peoples), located largely in Limpopo province.

White South Africans form two main language groups. More than half of them are Afrikaans speakers, the descendants of mostly Dutch, French, and German settlers. The remainder consists largely of English speakers who are descended mainly from British colonists, though there are a sizable minority of Portuguese and smaller groups of Italians and others. Most of the population formerly classified as Coloured speaks Afrikaans or, to a lesser extent, English.

Eleven languages (Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu) hold official status under the 1996 constitution, and an additional 11 (Arabic, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu) are to be promoted and developed; all languages are spoken to varying degrees in different regions. In some rural areas most residents speak neither Afrikaans nor English, but those two languages allow for communication in most parts of the country. English appears to predominate to an increasing extent in official, educational, and formal business spheres, which reflects a shift away from Afrikaans as the predominant language of government.

Religion
The vast majority of South Africans are Christians. The largest established Christian denominations directly rooted in European settlement but now drawing members from all ethnic groups are the Methodist, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Dutch Reformed churches. A large number of people follow independent African Christian churches, which vary in size from a few to millions of members. These faiths differ widely in their degree of theological orthodoxy or heterodoxy from traditional Christian beliefs, but they tend to be more open to aspects of indigenous culture and religion and to emphasize physical and spiritual healing. The other major religions are Hinduism, among the majority of Indians; Islam, among many Indians and Malays; and Judaism, among a significant minority of the white population.

Settlement patterns
More than nine-tenths of the inhabitants live in the eastern half of the country and in the southern coastal regions. In contrast, the western region, except for the area around Cape Town in the extreme southwest, is sparsely populated. Urban areas contain more than half the population; many of these consist of huge informal or squatter settlements that lack the basic infrastructure for transportation, water, sanitation, or electricity.

A large part of the black population is concentrated in the former “homeland” (Bantustan) areas, scattered territories in the northern and eastern parts of the country that were left to blacks after the 19th-century wars of white conquest and dispossession. Under apartheid, millions of nonwhites were forcibly relocated from cities and white-owned farms into the Bantustans. Boundary changes also placed many large informal settlements under Bantustan jurisdiction, so that some of these areas came to exhibit urban, rather than rural, population densities.

Rural settlement
Whites own the majority of rural land, although blacks originally settled most of it. Traditional black settlements consisted of farming homesteads or villages. The land belonged to the community, and the chief or headman granted each household the right to build a home and cultivate an area of land. Pastoral land around the area was used communally. Conquest and the establishment of white authority and private ownership of land made these settlement patterns subordinate to others. In places where blacks retained their access to land, however, elements of these patterns survived and may still be found in the more-remote parts of certain reserve areas. Where sharecropping and labour tenancy have provided blacks with access to farmland, a local architecture using industrial as well as more-traditional materials has developed. About one-sixth of the black population lives on farmland owned by whites.

Rural patterns created by white settlement from the late 17th century onward were centred on privately owned farmsteads, usually considerable distances apart, each having its associated cluster of sharecropper, tenant, or employee housing. As the frontier of white settlement expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, each farmer claimed land, often several thousand acres, and this gave rise to a settlement pattern of widely dispersed homesteads. Smaller farms and more-intensive cultivation, however, always existed in some areas, such as the grape-growing areas of the southwest. As the urban demand for food and other agricultural produce grew rapidly from the late 19th century, many farms closer to towns or in more-favourable ecological zones were subdivided, and a denser pattern emerged. More recently the general tendency has been for farm sizes to increase and the number of landowners to decline. The population of farmworker residents has also decreased as mechanized production methods and corporate farm ownership have become more widespread.

Urban settlement
Urban settlement in South Africa originated both as concentrations of population around the political centres of African chiefdoms and kingdoms and as towns established by European colonizers. For reasons of water availability and land-use patterns, Sotho-Tswana peoples of the interior generally lived in large settlements, the largest having tens of thousands of inhabitants, while coastal Nguni peoples lived in a more dispersed manner. The defeat of black polities by whites and their allies, particularly during the 19th century, led to the abandonment or destruction of capitals such as Dithakong, a Tswana stronghold in what is now Northern Cape, and Ulundi, a major Zulu royal village in central Zululand (now northern KwaZulu-Natal). Those black-established settlements that survived tended to be subordinated politically and economically to the colonial centres established alongside them, as at Mafikeng.

European colonization of South Africa began with towns, Cape Town being the first, in 1652. The Dutch established a few colonial towns in the south and southwest, including Stellenbosch, Tulbagh, Graaff-Reinet, and Swellendam. New towns such as Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Beaufort West, and Durban were created more rapidly with the advent of British rule at the start of the 19th century. The Great Trek of Dutch farmers and townspeople, which commenced during the 1830s, led to a range of new, mainly small urban centres in the interior focused on church and government: Winburg, Pietermaritzburg, Potchefstroom, Bloemfontein, Lydenburg (now Mashishing), and Pretoria. These towns were laid out with large lots and a grid pattern, features that generally survive today.

Until the 1860s all South African towns were small; the largest, Cape Town, had a population of fewer than 40,000 in 1865. Urbanization accelerated rapidly from the 1870s as railway building, mining, and economic expansion proceeded. Although the population of the Cape Town metropolitan area reached 130,000 by the turn of the 20th century, Johannesburg, which was established in 1886, had already surpassed it in size. Continued rapid growth since the early 20th century has created four major urban concentrations. Of these, by far the largest is the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging complex; centred on Johannesburg, it radiates about 45 miles (70 km) in each direction and is now mostly in Gauteng province. Other urban concentrations are centred on Durban, Cape Town, and the Port Elizabeth–Uitenhage area. The main centres in these metropolitan areas offer the same full range of services found in cities of their size in other countries; but, despite the end of legal segregation, all show great disparities of income and access to urban services between the wealthiest, predominantly white areas and the poorest, exclusively black districts.

Outside these major metropolitan areas, most South African towns are small and serve either mining communities or surrounding rural areas. Between these extremes are several cities with rapidly growing populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands: the port of East London, the Free State capital Bloemfontein, newer industrial centres such as Witbank in Mpumalanga, and a few rural service centres that have become regional administrative and educational centres, such as Mafikeng, Nelspruit, and Polokwane.

South African cities have shown a measure of racial segregation in residence since their colonial foundation. Settler-founded towns contained a majority of white inhabitants until the discovery of diamonds and gold in the late 19th century initiated the industrial revolution. In the early years of the 20th century, segregated public-housing areas were created when urban populations became largely black. Various government measures beginning in the 1920s gave authorities the power to segregate blacks and others; during the 1930s and ’40s such provisions were extended to Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and Indians (South Asians), culminating in the Group Areas Act of 1950. Under its provisions, South African cities acquired their characteristic form: white residential areas, generally situated in more-favourable localities (environmentally pleasing or close to the city centre), occupied most of the urban space, while other sectors and peripheral localities were set aside for nonwhites; many of these latter areas were initially devoted to segregated public-housing estates called “townships.” A degree of racial housing integration occurred in some cities in the 1980s, and such high-density residential areas as Hillbrow in Johannesburg became effectively integrated despite the Group Areas Act. The act was repealed in 1991, but the racially defined settlement patterns in the towns and townships persist.

Demographic trends
The South African population rose steadily over the last quarter of the 20th century, increasing from some 27 million in 1985 to more than 41 million by 1996. By the late 1990s, however, the incidence of AIDS began to rise, limiting population growth. In the early 21st century, South Africa’s birth rate was similar to the world average, but, largely because of AIDS, the country’s death rate was about twice as high as the world average. Average life expectancy in South Africa was similar to or higher than that of most Southern African countries but much lower than the world average.

Immigration from Europe exceeded 20,000 people per year during the late 1960s and early ’70s, but in the late ’70s and ’80s the number of whites leaving South Africa tended to exceed the new arrivals. In the early 21st century, South Africa saw an increase in the number of immigrants and refugees from other African countries fleeing political persecution or seeking greater economic prospects, especially from neighbouring Zimbabwe.

Andries Nel
Alan S. Mabin
Christopher C. Lowe

Economy
The economy of South Africa was revolutionized in the late 19th century when diamonds and gold were discovered there. Extensive investment from foreign capital followed. In the years since World War II, the country has established a well-developed manufacturing base, and it has experienced highly variable growth rates, including some years when its growth rate was among the highest in the world. Since the late 1970s, however, South Africa has had continuing economic problems, initially because its apartheid policies led many countries to withhold foreign investment and to impose increasingly severe trade sanctions against it.

South Africa’s economy did not immediately rebound in the early 1990s while apartheid was being dismantled, as investors waited to see what would happen. Only after democratic elections in 1994 did significant investment return. Postapartheid South Africa was then faced with the problem of integrating the previously disenfranchised and oppressed majority into the economy. In 1996 the government created a five-year plan—Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR)—that focused on privatization and the removal of exchange controls. GEAR was only moderately successful in achieving some of its goals but was hailed by some as laying an important foundation for future economic progress. The government also implemented new laws and programs designed to improve the economic situation of the marginalized majority. One such strategy, called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), focused on increasing the number of employment opportunities for people formerly classified under apartheid as black, Coloured, or Indian, improving their work skills, and enhancing their income-earning potential. The concept of BEE was further defined and expanded by the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) Act of 2003 (promulgated in 2004), which addressed gender and social inequality as well as racial inequality.

The South African economy is essentially based on private enterprise, but the state participates in many ways. Through the Industrial Development Corporation, the apartheid-era government set up and controlled a wide array of public corporations, many relating to industrial infrastructure. Two such corporations—one, the country’s primary producer of iron and steel; the other, an important producer of oil from coal—were privatized in the 1980s. The Electrical Supply Commission (ESKOM), the major electricity utility, remains government-controlled, but several entities that formerly were branches of government have been converted to public corporations, including Transnet, which runs the railways and harbours. In the 1990s the government partially privatized airlines and telecommunications, and, despite fierce opposition from trade unions, official economic policy has been to continue partially or completely privatizing many public enterprises.

Economic policy has been aimed primarily at sustaining growth and achieving a measure of industrial self-sufficiency. High rates of inflation and declining investment, however, have complicated the economic situation. Trade sanctions exacerbated these problems, but they continued even after the end of apartheid and sanctions. Dependence on imports renewed inflationary pressure while limiting the government’s ability to meet pressing social demands. Economic policy became the subject of ongoing debate between those favouring market forces and the advocates of substantial state intervention; still others favoured an export-led or inward-looking industrial policy.

Historically, the stated policy of the African National Congress (ANC), which took power in 1994, was that it would seek a state-led mixed economy based on nationalized mining and financial enterprises; since taking leadership of the government, it has in fact pursued privatization of a substantial number of formerly state-owned enterprises. The government faces competing demands—to improve the living conditions of the impoverished black population while also addressing the demands for economic liberalization from business interests and Western governments. It has chosen to make maintaining business confidence and boosting investment the core element of its economic policy.

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
Agriculture is of major importance to South Africa. It produces a significant portion of exports and contributes greatly to the domestic economy, especially as an employer, though land and water resources are generally poor. Arable land constitutes only slightly more than one-tenth of the country’s surface area, with well-watered, fertile soils existing primarily in the Western Cape river valleys and on the KwaZulu-Natal coast. The Highveld of Mpumalanga and Free State historically has offered adequate conditions for extensive cereal cultivation based on substantial government extension services and subsidies to white farm owners. Some dry areas, such as in the Fish River valley of Eastern Cape province, have become productive through the use of irrigation. Further irrigation has been provided by the ongoing Orange River Project, which upon completion should add about another three-tenths to the total amount of land in production.

Among the major crops are corn (maize), wheat, sugarcane, sorghum, peanuts (groundnuts), citrus and other fruits, and tobacco. Sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs are raised for food and other products; wool and meat (beef, lamb and mutton, and goat) are important. Dairy (including butter and cheese) and egg production are also significant, particularly around the major urban centres.

Timber resources are minimal, but the small amount of forested land has been supplemented by substantial areas under plantation in the wetter parts of the east and southeast. The forest industry supplies mining timber, pulpwood for paper and board mills, and building timbers mostly sufficient for a construction industry that primarily uses brick, concrete, and steel. Fishing areas lie mainly off the western and southern coasts. The principal shoal-fishing catches are pilchard and maasbanker, while offshore trawling brings in kingklip, Agulhas sole, Cape hake, and kabeljou, among others.

Resources and power
South Africa is rich in a variety of minerals. In addition to diamonds and gold, the country also contains reserves of iron ore, platinum, manganese, chromium, copper, uranium, silver, beryllium, and titanium. No commercially exploitable deposits of petroleum have been found, but there are moderate quantities of natural gas located off the southern coast, and synthetic fuel is made from coal at two large plants in the provinces of Free State and Mpumalanga.

Although for decades manufacturing has employed more people and produced a greater proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than mining has, the mining sector continues to form the core of the South African economy as mining-centred holding companies invest in other economic activity. Gold remains the most important mineral—South Africa is the world’s largest producer—and reserves are large; however, production is slowly declining, and prices have never equaled their spectacular highs of the early 1970s. As a result, a number of older mines have been rendered marginal or unprofitable. Several gold mines closed in the 1990s, and thousands of mine workers lost their jobs. The main goldfields centred historically on Johannesburg; the major areas of production now lie some distance east, west (Far West Rand), and south (northern Free State) of Johannesburg, centred on the areas of Klerksdorp and Evander.

Coal is another of South Africa’s valuable mineral products. Large known deposits lie, mostly at easily mined depths, beneath the Mpumalanga and northern Free State Highveld. Coal is produced primarily for export (to East Asia and Europe) and for the generation of electricity.

South Africa is the world’s largest producer of platinum and chromium, which are mined at centres such as Rustenburg and Steelpoort in the northeast and are becoming increasingly significant economically. Vast deposits of platinum-group and chromium minerals are located mainly to the north of Pretoria. Northern Cape province contains most of the major deposits of iron ore and manganese, and titanium-bearing sands are common on the eastern seaboard. In addition, the country produces uranium, palladium, nickel, copper, antimony, vanadium, fluorspar, and limestone. Diamond mining, historically concentrated around Kimberley, now occurs in a variety of localities. The South African diamond industry, among the world’s largest, is largely controlled by De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd.

Nearly all of South Africa’s electricity is produced thermally, almost entirely from coal. Most electric power is generated by ESKOM at huge stations in Mpumalanga. Synthetic fuel derived from coal supplies a small proportion of the country’s energy needs, as does imported oil refined at the ports or piped to a major inland refinery at Sasolburg. A nuclear power plant at Duinefonte has operated since 1984. Hydroelectric potential is limited, though there are government-developed projects on a number of rivers; more significant are the projects to import electricity from stations on the Zambezi River at Cahora Bassa, Mozam., and on rivers in the Lesotho Highlands. South Africa exports electricity to various Southern African countries.

Manufacturing
The major manufacturing sectors are food processing and the production of textiles, metals, and chemicals. Agriculture and fisheries provide the basis for substantial activity in meat, fish, and fruit canning, sugar refining, and other processing; more than half these products are exported. A large and complex chemical industry has developed from early beginnings in the manufacture of explosives for use in mining. A coal-based petrochemical industry produces a wide range of plastics, resins, and industrial chemicals. The metal industry, centred in Gauteng, draws much of its raw material from the iron and steel producing firms located in the area. Imported materials supply aluminum manufacturers located mainly in KwaZulu-Natal. Manufacturing encompasses automobiles, ships, building materials, electronics, and many other products, notably armaments. Though the weapons industry has begun to diversify into nonmilitary production, the postapartheid government has also promoted a controversial export trade in arms, after military sanctions were lifted.

Manufacturing has depended heavily on foreign capital; it expanded rapidly in the 1960s and early ’70s but grew relatively slowly or even contracted during the ’80s. As mining gradually declines, manufacturing and its need for foreign capital take on even greater importance for national development. About one-fourth of manufacturing output is exported.

Finance
South Africa has a well-developed financial system, centred on the South African Reserve Bank, which is the sole issuing authority for the rand, the national currency. It formulates and implements monetary policy and manages foreign-exchange transactions. There are many registered banking institutions, a number of which concentrate on commercial banking, as well as merchant, savings, investment, and discount banks. One such bank, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, is a quasi-governmental company created to promote development projects. Private pension and provident funds and more than two dozen insurance companies play significant roles in the financial sector. An active capital market exists, organized around the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Trade
Because of its dependence on foreign trade, South Africa’s economy is sensitive to global economic conditions. Precious metals and base metals have been leading exports; agricultural goods and military equipment also play an important role. The country’s major imports are chemicals, chemical products, and motor vehicles. South Africa’s main trading partners are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. Regional trade in Southern Africa is increasingly important, especially through the Southern African Development Community. Since the end of apartheid, South African companies have sought to expand investment in other African countries, particularly in mining and commercial activity.

Services
Tourism is becoming increasingly important to South Africa’s economy. While the majority of tourists come from African countries, an increasing number of arrivals are from Europe and the Americas. There are many tourist attractions, notably the national and transnational parks. Travel across South Africa’s borders into other African countries is being eased. Among the most popular tourist attractions are the wine regions in Western Cape province, Table Mountain, Robben Island (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999; the location of an infamous prison), and historic sites such as the former diamond mine in Kimberley, the Vredefort Dome (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005; the world’s oldest and largest meteorite impact site), and the Mapungubwe settlement area (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003; the ruins of an important kingdom of the Iron Age). Ecotourism is increasing in popularity, as is village tourism, in which visitors can learn about traditional rural culture.

Labour and taxation
Until the early 1970s the labour movement in South Africa was dominated by white trade unions, which held that the highest-skilled jobs should be reserved for whites only. A militant black trade union movement emerged, beginning with a wave of strikes in 1973–74, and numerous strikes followed. The most important trade union federation is the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which maintains a formal political alliance with the ANC and is a nonracial but mainly black body that includes the country’s largest unions, among them the National Union of Mineworkers. Other federations include the black consciousness-rooted National Council of Trade Unions and the mainly white Federation of South African Labour.

Central government taxation consists primarily of income taxes on individuals and businesses and a value-added tax on transactions. Provincial governments depend mainly on transfer payments from the central government, while property taxes and levies on businesses provide the main support for local governments.

Transportation and telecommunications
South Africa contains no navigable rivers; coastal shipping provides the only water transport. The country’s network of roads and railways—the most extensive in Africa—handles most of the transportation demand, supplemented by air travel.

Railways and roads
The railway system, which serves all the major cities, most smaller towns, and many rural areas, is almost entirely owned and operated through the Transnet public corporation, although parts of Transnet are gradually being privatized. A narrow gauge of 3 feet 6 inches (107 cm) was adopted in the 1870s to lower the cost of construction in mountainous terrain. More than four-fifths of the network of more than 19,000 miles (31,000 km) of track is electrified, and the system has been computerized since 1980. Coal and iron ore, among other products, are transported on these lines. Long-distance passenger services have declined, but many commuters use train services in all the major urban centres. The luxurious Blue Train—which primarily runs the 1,000 miles (1,600 km) between Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town—and the surviving steam-operated services are popular tourist attractions.

The road network contains some 185,000 miles (300,000 km) of roads, ranging from rural unpaved stretches to multilane freeways; about two-fifths of the roads are paved. Most towns are connected by two-lane highways; multilane freeway systems extend around the four major urban areas, but, over long distances, only Johannesburg and Durban are connected by such a highway. Most of the responsibility for maintaining and regulating roads falls to the different levels of government, but some long-distance roads have been transferred to the private sector and transformed into toll roads. In the 1990s the government instigated significant public-private initiatives to develop a transport corridor from Gauteng across Mpumalanga to Maputo in Mozambique and other corridors in major urban areas.

Air transport and shipping
Inland air services, both passenger and freight, are operated by the state-owned South African Airways and by an increasing number of private competitors. Air services connect all major cities. South African Airways and many foreign carriers fly between South Africa and all neighbouring countries; international service extends worldwide. The international airport near Johannesburg is the main hub of the country’s air transport both domestically and internationally, while the airports at Cape Town and Durban play increasingly important roles as international destinations.

All South African ports are owned and operated by South African Ports Operations and National Ports Authority, subsidiaries of Transnet. Durban, which serves most of KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, and northern Free State, is the major port. Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, and East London (the only river port in South Africa) handle mixed traffic for their immediate hinterlands and more-distant locations. All these ports handle goods traveling to and from other African countries, including Zimbabwe, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Maputo, the port closest to Johannesburg, serves many areas of the northern provinces. Newer ports have also been developed at such places as Richards Bay, which handles exports of coal on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal, and in the excellent natural harbour at Saldanha Bay north of Cape Town, from which iron ore is exported.

Telecommunications
Telecommunications systems are rather well developed, but their distribution is highly uneven. Many areas in South Africa still do not have basic telephone service. A program has been under way since the mid-1990s to vastly increase the number of telephone lines. Several cell phone companies provide coverage to many parts of the country. Internet connections exist in the major cities, and South Africa has one of the highest degrees of Internet connectivity in Africa. Telkom, the state telecommunications company, was partially privatized at the beginning of the 21st century.

Government and society
Constitutional framework
South Africa’s original constitution, the British Parliament’s South Africa Act of 1909, united two former British colonies, the Cape of Good Hope and Natal, with two former Boer (Dutch) republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The new Union of South Africa was based on a parliamentary system with the British monarch as head of state. The Republic of South Africa Constitution Act of 1961 transformed the country from a dominion within the British Commonwealth into an independent republic.

South Africa’s political development was shaped by its colonial past and the implementation of apartheid policies by the white minority. After widespread protest and social unrest, a new nonracial interim constitution was adopted in 1993 and took effect in 1994. A new, permanent constitution, mandated by the interim document and drafted by Parliament in 1996, took effect in 1997.

Constitutions through the 1980s
The 1909 South Africa Act served as the country’s constitution until 1961. When South Africa officially became a republic in 1961, a constitution was finally written. In addition to providing for the already established positions of president and prime minister, the constitution gave Coloureds and Asians some voting rights. A new constitution was promulgated in 1984. The bicameral parliament was replaced by a tricameral system that created a House of Assembly for whites, a House of Representatives for Coloureds, and a House of Delegates for Indians. The black majority was given few political rights in either constitution.

The 1996 constitution
The 1996 constitution’s preamble points to the injustices of South Africa’s past and defines the republic as a sovereign democratic state founded on the principles of human dignity, nonracialism and nonsexism, and the achievement of equality and advancement of human rights and freedoms. Another of the guiding principles, that of “cooperative government,” emphasizes the distinctiveness, interdependence, and interrelationship of the national, provincial, and local spheres of government. The constitution established the bicameral national Parliament. The lower house, or National Assembly, comprises 350 to 400 members who are directly elected to a five-year term through proportional representation. The National Council of Provinces, which replaced the Senate as the upper house, is made up of 10-member delegations (each with six permanent and four special members, including the provincial premier) chosen by each of the provincial assemblies. For most votes each delegation casts a single vote. The president, elected from among the members of the National Assembly by that body, is the head of state; as the national executive, the president presides over a cabinet that includes a deputy president and a member whom the president designates as the “leader of government business” in the assembly.

Local government
Provincial government
Local government was established in 1909 when the four former colonies became provinces. Each was governed by a white-elected provincial council with limited legislative powers. The administrator of each province was appointed by the central government and presided over an executive committee representing the majority party in the council. Provincial councils were abolished in 1986, and the executive committees, appointed by the president, became the administrative arms of the state in each province. By the late 1980s a small number of blacks, Coloureds, and Indians had been appointed to them.

In 1994 the four original provinces of South Africa (Cape of Good Hope, Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Natal) and the four former independent homelands (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei) were reorganized into nine provinces: Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, North-West, Free State, Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (now Gauteng), Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga), Northern (now Limpopo), and KwaZulu-Natal. The constitution provides for the election of provincial legislatures comprising 30 to 80 members elected to five-year terms through proportional representation. Each legislature elects a premier, who then appoints a provincial executive council of up to 10 members. The provincial legislatures have the authority to legislate in a range of matters specified in the constitution, including education, environment, health, housing, police, and transport, although complex provisions give the central government a degree of concurrent power. South Africa thus has a weak federal system.

Municipal government
Urban municipal government has developed unevenly in South Africa since the early 19th century. In the 20th century, intensified urban segregation was accompanied by the creation of councils that advised the administrators appointed by white governments to run black, Coloured, and Asian “locations” and “townships.” In most rural areas, white governments tried to incorporate indigenous hereditary leaders (“chiefs”) of local communities as the front line for governing blacks, although the Cape administration also set up a parallel system of appointed “headmen.”

Under the 1996 constitution, local government is predicated on a division of the entire country into municipalities. Executive and legislative authority is vested in municipal councils, some of which share authority with other municipalities. Chiefs remain important in rural governance. They generally work with appointed councils regarded by their supporters as traditional. Efforts by other blacks to reform and democratize rural administration and reduce the power of chiefs have become some of the most violently contentious issues in postapartheid politics.

Justice
The common law of the republic is based on Roman-Dutch law, the uncodified law of The Netherlands having been retained after the Cape’s cession to the United Kingdom in 1815. The judiciary comprises the Constitutional Court (with powers to decide on the constitutionality of legislative and administrative actions, particularly with respect to the bill of rights), the Supreme Court of Appeal (the highest court of appeal except in constitutional matters), the High Courts, and Magistrate’s Courts. Parliament may create additional courts but only with status equal to that of the High and Magistrate’s Courts. The Supreme Court is headed by a chief justice, who is appointed by the state president, as are the deputy chief justice and the chief justice and deputy chief justice of the Constitutional Court. Other judges are appointed by the president with the advice of the Judicial Service Commission.

Traditional authorities exercise some powers in relation to customary law, which derives from indigenous African practice codified in some areas (such as KwaZulu-Natal) by colonial rulers. Customary law continues to be recognized in various ways. For example, marriage in South Africa takes place either under customary law or under statute law, with profound implications for the legal status of African women married under customary law. Most civil and criminal litigation is a matter for the Magistrate’s Courts.

Political process
All citizens 18 years of age and older have the right to vote. Prior to universal suffrage, introduced in 1994, blacks, Coloureds, and Asians (primarily Indians) were systematically deprived of political participation in the conduct of national and provincial affairs, with few exceptions. In the Cape Colony and, later, Cape of Good Hope province, a property-qualified franchise once allowed a minority of better-off Coloureds and blacks to vote (rights eventually abolished under apartheid). Black representation in Parliament—provided by a small number of elected white representatives—was abolished in 1959, on the theory that blacks would eventually find their political rights as citizens of the “homelands” that would eventually become independent. Coloureds, who had been on a common voting roll with whites, were forced into separate representation in Parliament in 1956, and that arrangement was abolished altogether in 1968.

The 1984 constitution extended the franchise to Coloureds and Asians in segregated houses of Parliament, but the substance of power in most matters, particularly over the general policy of apartheid, remained with the house representing whites. Blacks continued to be excluded from the national government.

White women gained the right to vote in 1930; other women did not gain that right until universal suffrage was introduced in 1994. Women have since made strides in attaining important government positions. At the beginning of the 21st century, they made up about one-third of the National Assembly. In 2005, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka was appointed deputy president—the first woman named to that position.

The major political party is the African National Congress (ANC; founded 1912). Banned from 1960 until 1990, the ANC changed from a national liberation organization to a political party after it won a majority at national democratic elections held in 1994. Other parties with significant support are the Inkatha Freedom Party (a largely Zulu organization), the Freedom Front (a right-wing white party), the Democratic Party (the heir to a long liberal tradition in white politics), and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC; a group that broke away from the ANC in 1959). The South African Communist Party, a longtime ally of the ANC in the fight against apartheid, entered candidates for the 1994 election on the ANC’s lists, as did the South African National Civic Organization and the trade union federation COSATU.

Another party that played a significant role in South Africa’s history was the National Party (NP), which ruled the country from 1948 to 1994. Founded in 1914 and supported by both Afrikaners and English-speaking white South Africans, the NP was long dedicated to policies of white supremacy and developed the apartheid system. By the early 1990s the NP, bowing to international pressure, had moved toward sharing power with the country’s black majority and was later defeated in 1994 in the country’s first multiracial elections. The party sought to recast its image by changing its name to the New National Party in December 1998, and it allied itself with the Democratic Party and the Federal Alliance in 2000 in an attempt to gain more political power. After several years of declining popularity, the party’s federal council voted to disband the party in 2005.

Security
South Africa has a large, well-equipped army, by far the largest contingent of the country’s armed forces. The navy has a small fleet consisting of frigates, submarines, minesweepers, small strike craft, and auxiliary vessels. The air force’s craft include fighter-bombers, interceptor fighters, helicopters, and reconnaissance, transport, and training aircraft.

The armed forces entered a period of transition in 1994. South Africa’s military traditionally had been white, with a small standing force and a large reserve component. However, from the 1970s an increasing number of black troops were recruited. Compulsory military service, formerly for white males only, ended in 1994. Guerrillas of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), and of the PAC’s military have been incorporated into a renamed South African National Defence Force. This integration has not been entirely smooth: ex-guerrillas have been perceived by many military professionals as lacking training and discipline, while the old-line white noncommissioned and commissioned officer corps has been perceived by some black soldiers as riddled with racism. A number of top officers under the old government were forced out in the 1990s as various apartheid-era abuses came to light, although concerns prior to the 1994 elections of possible rebellion by conservative military and police leaders have diminished.

During the apartheid period the South African government, through a network of private and government-controlled corporations led by the state-owned Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor), developed a variety of new weapons systems, mostly in order to overcome the effects of the international arms embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council in 1977. Nuclear weapons were developed in great secrecy—six atomic bombs were built during the 1970s and ’80s—but the nuclear weapons program was terminated in 1989, and the bombs were dismantled the following year by the NP government as the prospect of a black-led government became increasingly likely.

The regular police are organized nationally and comprise regulars as well as reservists. There have been about equal numbers of whites and nonwhites, reflecting a disproportionately high number of whites. Police responsibility for maintaining internal security brought them into sharp conflict with antiapartheid demonstrators during the 1970s and ’80s. The specialist security police gained power within the force during that time, while thousands of poorly trained and poorly disciplined auxiliary police were recruited. As political control increasingly took precedence over basic policing, black communities were often treated as enemies rather than as citizens to be protected. The police were granted immunity and extrajudicial powers under the states of emergency first declared in 1983, and their actions were widely seen as abusive, contributing to the growth of international pressure on South Africa’s government. Once the police had been freed of the burden of enforcing apartheid, they faced the challenge of forging better relationships with communities in the fight against rising crime levels.

In the late 1970s the daily average prison population was almost 100,000, one of the highest rates in the world. Of these, the majority were imprisoned for statutory offenses against the so-called pass laws, repealed in 1986, which restricted the right of blacks to live and work in white areas and which did not apply to other racial groups. Under the states of emergency declared at periods of peak conflict in the 1980s, as many as 50,000 persons were detained without charge or trial. The proportion of the population in prison then declined, many detainees being released in 1990 with the end of a state of emergency; negotiations for a new constitution also led to the release of many political prisoners. An amnesty policy was instituted, covering politically inspired offenses committed by both whites and nonwhites during the closing years of the struggle against apartheid, provided that offenders fully revealed their actions to a public commission. The prison population began to increase significantly in the mid-1990s, and in the early 21st century South Africa’s prison population rate was the highest in Africa and among the highest in the world.

Health and welfare
While racial bias was not explicitly written into health legislation during the apartheid period, medical care for South Africans invariably reflected the economic and political inequalities of the society, as well as the consequences of apartheid’s residential and administrative segregation and of deliberately unequal government health funding. Hospital segregation has ended, but access to medical services remains greatly inferior in historically black areas. The health status of blacks is generally low; malnutrition is perhaps the most important long-standing example, especially among rural children. There is an enormous discrepancy in infant mortality rates, which are lowest for whites and highest among rural blacks. The number of South Africans infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, increased sharply during the 1990s, especially among blacks, and, at the beginning of the 21st century, South Africa ranked near the top of United Nations estimates of proportions of national populations infected with HIV. Since 1994 both the Department of National Health and the administrations of the new provinces have emphasized primary health care delivery, building in some instances on programs that farsighted medical workers instituted during the apartheid period.

A highly sophisticated public health system exists in the cities and large towns. Some of the largest public hospitals are linked to the university medical schools, but those located in the formerly segregated black areas tend to be overcrowded. Many of the more-expensive private hospitals are accessible only to those with higher incomes, still predominantly whites. Most regularly employed persons enjoy a degree of private medical insurance, but, because a high proportion of black adults are not in formal-sector employment, reliance on insurance through employers produces a racially skewed pattern of access. By contrast, private general practitioners and specialists supply most needs for the most affluent.

Government provides a number of welfare measures, among them small pensions for all citizens beyond retirement age whose incomes are below a minimal level. Large numbers of elderly blacks, and often their dependents, gain a minimal livelihood from this system. In the past, welfare systems were administered separately for the different racial groups; the value of pensions was greatest for whites, less for Indians and Coloureds (those of mixed ancestry), and lowest for blacks. During the late 1980s the differentials began to be reduced, and they were eliminated under the 1996 constitution.

The two most important features affecting social conditions in South Africa are the high unemployment rate for blacks and the wide disparity between black and white income levels. In the early 21st century, estimates of black unemployment were higher than the unemployment rates of the groups formerly classified under apartheid as Indians and Coloureds and significantly higher than the unemployment rate for whites. Blacks who were employed were generally in the lowest-paying and least-prestigious positions. This pattern partially reflected the composition of South Africa’s population, with its many migrants to industrial and urban areas, and also indicated how large the country’s informal economy had become. Substantial wage advances for miners and industrial workers since the 1970s have not been shared by the nonunionized or the underemployed. On the other hand, employment opportunities in government, the professions, and business have grown rapidly for blacks, Indians, and Coloureds, and since the early 1990s nonwhites have gradually occupied more midlevel positions.

Housing
Traditional housing varied according to ethnic group. The Nguni and the Swazi lived in dispersed households governed by chiefs, while the Sotho lived in villages and farmed on land outside the villages. The Xhosa built their houses near the tops of ridges that overlooked local rivers, and the Ndebele decorated their homesteads with colourful pictures and symbols. Zulu housing was centred around the imizi (kraal), which consisted of a fence that enclosed a number of beehive-shaped one-room houses.

Local authorities have been responsible for public housing since the 1920s, although control over black housing reverted to the central government in 1971. A housing shortage existed and was somewhat addressed through a massive program of township development in black areas begun in the 1950s but diminished in the 1970s. During the 1980s “site-and-service” schemes emerged to provide land equipped with basic infrastructure for poorer, usually black people around the cities to build upon, but the housing crisis remained severe in the face of rapid population growth and urban migration. Housing policy since the early 1990s has emphasized the joint roles of the public and private sectors; the government launched an ambitious program of capital subsidies and loan guarantees in an effort to upgrade housing conditions and assist all citizens in acquiring title to some form of shelter.

Education
Primary and secondary schools
School education is compulsory for all children between 7 and 16 years of age or through ninth grade, whichever is reached first, and begins in one of the 11 official languages. After second grade, students begin learning another language.

The right to a basic education is guaranteed in the constitution. The country has a national educational system, which oversees the education implemented in the provinces. The school system contains both private and public schools. During the apartheid era, schools run by white education departments had the best resources in the public school system, and white-oriented private schools received substantial public subsidies. Although some of these schools began to admit black pupils after 1990, informal white resistance, capacity limitations, and fees (often newly imposed with apparent exclusionary intent) generally have kept blacks out of historically white public schools. Private schools, many of which offer superior educational programs, remain largely inaccessible to most blacks because of the high cost. In an effort to rectify past inequalities, the government has pledged significant resources toward improving the physical and learning environment of the school system. To that end, the government implemented a new national curriculum in the early 21st century.

Literacy rates in South Africa are high by African standards. Since 1970, literacy rates have grown from one-half to four-fifths of the population.

Higher education
South Africa is home to many institutions of higher education. The oldest and largest of the universities is the University of South Africa (UNISA), which was established in Cape Town but is now based in Pretoria and offers correspondence courses in both English and Afrikaans. The oldest of the residential universities are those of Cape Town, Fort Hare, Stellenbosch, and the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg); of these, Stellenbosch began as an Afrikaans-language institution, while Fort Hare was originally established to serve blacks only. Other institutions in South Africa include the University of Pretoria, North-West University, the University of Johannesburg, and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Historically, most blacks with postsecondary degrees earned them through UNISA or Fort Hare, but the English-language institutions—including the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg and Durban) and Rhodes University—admitted a few black students until 1959, when their ability to do so was restricted by apartheid legislation that they fiercely opposed. The government then established several new institutions (the Universities of the North, Zululand, Western Cape, Durban-Westville, and Vista and the Medical University) for various black groups and increased the number of black-oriented technikons, schools designed to teach technical industrial skills. The officially independent homelands of Bophuthatswana, Transkei, and Venda also established their own universities.

Even after apartheid-era restrictions were removed, many postsecondary institutions remained influenced by their historically dominant racial and ethnic character. Coloured and Indian students were integrated into historically white universities more rapidly than blacks. Professional and postgraduate courses were still concentrated at the formerly white universities until an ambitious restructuring program was undertaken in the early 21st century. Under the government’s plan, several universities and technikons were consolidated in an effort to improve the access to and quality of education available to all students regardless of race, to eliminate duplication of services, and to better meet the country’s projected workforce requirements.

Cultural life
Blending Western technology with indigenous technology, Western traditions with African and Asian traditions, South Africa is a study in contrasts. It also provides lessons in how cultures can sometimes blend, sometimes collide: for example, within a short distance of one another can be found the villas of South Africa’s white elite and the tar-paper shacks of black day labourers, office buildings with the most sophisticated electronic wiring and one-room houses that lack electricity. A great gulf still exists between the white minority and the black majority in matters of education and economic opportunity. Yet, South Africa is making steady progress in erasing some of these historic disparities and their consequences. Daily life is better for most of its people, and culture and the arts, which sometimes were forced into exile, are flourishing in the free climate of the postapartheid era.

Daily life and social customs
As they are everywhere in the world, patterns of daily life in South Africa are conditioned by social class, ethnicity, religion, and residence: the life of a black diamond miner in Limpopo province is much different from that of an Indian shopkeeper in Durban, an Afrikaner office worker in Johannesburg, or a teacher of English extraction in Cape Town. As the government struggles to expand the economy in order to provide equally for all citizens, great disparities continue to exist. Yet, all these people are likely to enjoy much the same pleasures: the company of family and friends, films from the studios of Johannesburg and Hollywood alike, music and dance, and visits to South Africa’s magnificent national parks and scenic landscapes.

The great mixture of cultures makes for a wide variety of food choices in the country, from the traditional food of various cultures to the cosmopolitan cuisine that is available in many large cities throughout the world. African food is centred around vegetables, with maize (corn) as an important staple, often in the form of a porridge known as mealie pap. A dish made from broken dried corn kernels, sugar beans, butter, onions, potatoes, chiles, and lemon is called umngqusho. It is still possible to visit a shebeen, an African tavern where beer is home-brewed. Dutch and English settlers introduced sausages and bobotie, a meat pie made with minced meat that has been cooked with brown sugar, apricots and raisins, milk-soaked mashed bread, and curry flavouring. The Portuguese introduced various fish dishes to the country. The Indian influence added spices and even samosas, savoury pastries popular as a snack. All South Africans enjoy the braai, a South African barbeque. Beef, chicken, lamb, pork, ostrich, and other game meat are savoured, although meat consumption is limited in many places because of its expense.

Among its holidays, South Africa celebrates Human Rights Day on March 21, Freedom Day on April 27 (to celebrate the first majority elections in 1994), National Women’s Day on August 9, Heritage Day on September 24, and National Day of Reconciliation on December 16.

The arts
A century and a half of white domination in most of the country (more than three centuries in the Western Cape) and the great extent of its ties to the global market economy have profoundly transformed black culture in South Africa. The strongest links to traditional societies have been through the many languages embodying the country’s cultural diversity, whose nuances of idiom and sensibility carry over into the arts. Traditional art forms such as dancing and textile weaving are used as vehicles of ethnic identity and are carefully preserved, while modern art forms from painting to literature have flourished in the years since the end of apartheid. Still, much of this has taken place through private initiatives because major institutional support for culture has been largely abandoned, especially for cultural projects perceived as elitist or European in orientation; the closing of the National Symphony Orchestra in 2000 is one such example.

Music
Many popular South African arts represent a fusion of cultural influences, such as township jazz and pop music, religious choral music, and so-called “traditional” dances performed competitively by mine workers in decidedly untraditional settings. Others are innovations created in response to new circumstances, such as the lifela song-poems composed by Sotho migrant workers to express and comment upon the life of miners. Because miners were frequently so far away from home, traditional rituals had to be performed during the weekends or on holidays. Mining companies often sponsored dances as an outlet for the men, and tourists came to view the exotic African musical forms.

South African music is a fusion of various musical styles such as traditional indigenous music, jazz, Christian religious music, and forms of popular music from the United States. These combinations are evident in the music of such performers as the African Jazz Pioneers, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and others. During the apartheid period, black and white musicians were segregated, although they still collaborated on occasion; a notable example is Johnny Clegg, a white South African who learned traditional Zulu music and formed the mixed-race bands Juluka and Savuka, both of which had international followings. Township music, a lively form of music that flourished in the townships during the apartheid era, has also been popular within the country and abroad.

Art
Rock and cave art attributable to the San, some of which is thought to be about 26,000 years old, has been found across much of Southern Africa. The greatest number of paintings, which primarily depict human figures and such animals as elands, elephants, cattle, and horses, have been found in the Drakensberg mountains (part of uKhahlamba/Drakensberg Park, designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000). Terra-cotta figures dated to ad 500 are known as Lydenburg heads, named after the town in which they were discovered. Excavations at Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe in the Limpopo River valley have found gold animal statues as well as a wealth of pottery and clay animal figurines. More recently, Zulu wooden statues, produced in the 19th century before the Zulu War (1879), are further examples of South Africa’s artistic history.

Visual artists continue to create in traditional forms, but many contemporary artists—including Jane Alexander, Helen Sebidi, Willie Bester, and Bongiwe Dhlomo—employ Western techniques as well.

Literature
South African literature proved to be an important expression of resistance against apartheid throughout the 20th century. One of its best-known works is Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), which drew world attention to the separatist system. Two decades later, literary resistance organized around journals and magazines, whose contributors were collectively known as the Sestigers (“Sixtyers,” writers of the 1960s). Reacting against the National Party’s increasingly authoritarian policies, the Sestigers grew in influence but soon divided into factions insisting on the need for violent revolution on the one hand and art for art’s sake on the other. In the 1970s many books continued to criticize the apartheid regime, including André Brink’s Kennis van die aand (1973; Looking on Darkness), Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979), and Breyten Breytenbach’s In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy (1977). Also during this time, the government enacted the Publications Act of 1974, which expanded and strengthened existing censorship policies. Many authors went into exile; some did not return until the 1990s, while others remained abroad even after the end of apartheid. Brink, however, remained in South Africa and wrote, in Writing in a State of Siege (1983), about how unsuccessful the National Party had been in silencing South African writers:

For a very long time three different streams of literature ran their course: black, Afrikaans, and English. But during the last few years a new awareness of common identity as writers has arisen, creating a new sense of solidarity in a body of informed and articulate resistance to oppression.

Black literature
Of those three streams, the least known is black literature. South Africa’s various black cultures have rich oral traditions, including narrative, poetic, historical, and epic forms, which have changed and adapted as black life has changed. While there is a fear that classical forms of the oral traditions are at risk of being lost with the spread of literacy and recorded music, these oral traditions have exerted a major influence on the written literatures of South Africa, merging with literary influences from elsewhere in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, and Europe.

Such writers as Oliver Kgadime Matsepe (North Sotho), Thomas Mofolo (South Sotho), Guybon Sinxo (Xhosa), and B.W. Vilakazi (Zulu) have been more deeply influenced in their written work by the oral traditions of their cultures than by European forms. Other black writers, beginning in the 1930s with Solomon Plaatje and his historical novel Mhudi (1930), have explicitly used black oral history when writing in English. As literacy spread, a commercial press developed, primarily in English, that was aimed at a black audience and shaped new generations of writers. Notable were the contributors to the journal Drum, including Nat Nakasa, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, and Lewis Nkosi, who vividly captured the rhythms of urban township life and the milieu of rising black ambitions for freedom. Government crackdowns in the 1960s crushed much of that spirit and forced Dennis Brutus, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Mazisi Kunene, and other writers into exile.

Afrikaans literature
The second stream, literature written in Afrikaans, has its origins in the culture and arts of the early Afrikaner nationalist movement. Beginning in the 1880s, the movement laid the foundation for the political nationalism that coalesced following British conquest and contributed to the ideology of apartheid. In the 1920s—through the secret organization called the Afrikaner-Broederbond and through cultural organizations—teachers, academics, Dutch Reformed Church ministers, writers, artists, and journalists began to develop a powerful, if also authoritarian, vision of an exclusive, divinely ordained national “racial” identity. That vision, promoted in literature, drama, music, and public commemorative sculpture and other forms of expression, became apartheid’s official culture, asserting the paradoxical proposition that the other, non-Afrikaner cultures should develop along their own lines, in a manner prescribed by the state.

Writers of Afrikaans literature later explored more-universal themes—such as love, conflict, nature, and daily life—and, eventually, even opposition to apartheid. The first two decades of the 20th century were dominated by such poets as Jakob Daniel du Toit and C. Louis Leipoldt. The appearance of the Dertigers (“Thirtyers,” poets of the 1930s), a group of talented poets including W.E.G. Louw, signified the new standard in Afrikaans literature. Prominent among the Sestigers, who followed decades later, were the novelists Etienne Leroux and Brink and the poet Breytenbach. Post-Sestigers writers of note include the poets Wilma Stockenström, Sheila Cussons, and Antjie Krog and the novelists Elsa Joubert, Karel Schoeman, and Etienne van Heerden.

Anglophone literature
The third stream, Anglophone literature, arose in the late 19th and the early 20th century with writers such as Olive Schreiner, an early feminist who is credited with writing the first great South African novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), and Herman Charles Bosman, whose short stories chronicled the foibles of life on the veld. After World War II Paton, Gordimer (who later was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature), and others produced what might be called a literature of the liberal conscience, combining sharp and critical social observation with meditation on the responsibilities and fates of individuals enmeshed in oppressive situations they lack the power to change.

Multicultural literature
During the 1970s there emerged in the arts powerful themes of national and multiracial, multilingual cultural patterns, as writers and artists from all backgrounds concentrated on exploring and portraying the turmoil affecting South African society. Reaction to apartheid engendered a sense of black culture and history that drew inspiration from West and North African, Caribbean, and African American intellectual movements. The themes of black consciousness evident in the poetry and prose of urban writers such as Mothobi Mutloatse, Miriam Tlali, Mbulelo Mzamane, and Njabulo Ndebele and published in such periodicals as Staffrider were derived from the literary and oral traditions of black languages in South Africa and in literature by blacks in European languages.

For many decades, works with strong political themes or explicit sexuality were banned. Authors such as Breytenbach, Brink, Leroux, and Dan Roodt, whose works were banned, began exploring the cultural ground on which Afrikaners would need to make their way in a reconstructed and democratic South Africa.

The authors Adam Small and Alex La Guma have written vividly in Afrikaans and English, respectively, of the effects of racial discrimination and of the complex and frequently violent nature of life in South Africa. Many black and white writers addressing these and other themes have received international recognition. Writers such as J.M. Coetzee (awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature), Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote have joined such established figures as Mphahlele, Paton, Brink, and Leroux in bringing South African literary life to the wider world. With the end of apartheid, some South African writers have tried to write about nonapartheid subjects, while others cannot seem to escape the topic.

Theatre
South African playwrights responded to the new cultural and political milieu with such innovations as multilingual plays. Support for the newer indigenous theatre came from independent and nonracial theatrical organizations, such as the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Plays by Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema, Fatima Dike, Zakes Mda, and Pieter-Dirk Uys have been performed worldwide.

Film
Since the 1890s, when the medium was first introduced, film has been an important means of cultural expression for South African artists. The country’s first major narrative film, The Kimberley Diamond Robbery, appeared in 1910. It was followed through the 1910s and ’20s by several epics that rivaled the Hollywood productions of Cecil B. DeMille, notably I.W. Schlesinger’s Symbol of Sacrifice (1918), which employed 25,000 Zulu warriors as extras to depict the Zulu War of 1879.

As is the case with other arts, film has also been used as a means of political commentary, despite official censorship in the apartheid era. In the 1970s director Ross Devenish brought Fugard’s highly political play Boesman and Lena (1973) to the screen, and Soweto-based playwright and filmmaker Gibson Kente directed How Long (Must We Suffer…)? (1976), the first major South African film made by a black artist. A Dry White Season (1989), based on a novel by Brink, used a largely American cast to bring the harsh reality of apartheid to an international audience. Other films that reached a wider audience include Afrikaner director Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), Oliver Schmitz and Thomas Mogotlane’s Mapantsula (1988), Manie van Rensburg’s Taxi to Soweto (1991), Anant Singh and Darrell Roodt’s Sarafina! (1992), and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (2005), based on a novel by Fugard.

Cultural institutions
The South African National Gallery, home to 19th–20th-century African art and 16th–20th-century European art, and the District Six Museum, which honours an interracial bohemian enclave that was destroyed by government decrees during the apartheid era, are in Cape Town. Robben Island (designated a UNSECO World Heritage site in 1999), north of Cape Town in Table Bay, was once the site of an infamous prison and is now home to a museum. The National Museum at Bloemfontein contains institutes for such areas as herpetology, ornithology, mammalogy, arachnology, paleontology, archaeology, and local history. The African Art Centre in Durban exhibits work by local artists. The National Library of South Africa, the national reference and preservation repository formed in 1999 by the merger of the South African Library and the State Library, has campuses in Cape Town and Pretoria. The Nelson Mandela National Museum, honouring the life and work of Mandela, comprises three sites centred in or around Mandela’s home village in Qunu, Eastern Cape. The museum opened on Feb. 11, 2000—10 years from the day that Mandela was released from prison. A museum dedicated to the history of apartheid opened in Johannesburg in 2001. Monuments to important South African historical figures—from both the colonial era as well as the antiapartheid struggle—can be found throughout the country.

Sports and recreation
South Africans avidly participate in sports and outdoor recreational activities. The country’s national parks provide opportunities not only to view wildlife but also to pursue activities such as rock climbing and hiking. As with most other aspects of South African life, however, sports and recreational activities developed differently for whites and blacks. Whites played football (soccer), rugby, and cricket and enjoyed sports in world-class facilities, while blacks were restricted to such sports as football, boxing, and, secondarily, athletics (track and field); moreover, their facilities were poorly maintained and ill-equipped.

White South African athletes collected more than 50 Olympic medals from 1908 to 1960, but the country was suspended from the Olympic Games in 1964–92 because of its apartheid policies. During the transition from apartheid to democracy (1990–94), South Africa was readmitted to the Olympics, and a small, racially mixed Olympic team competed in the 1992 Summer Games. At the 1996 Summer Games, swimmer Penelope Heyns became the first South African Olympic gold medallist in the postapartheid era, and marathon runner Josia Thugwane earned the distinction of becoming the first black South African to claim a gold medal.

Other postapartheid sports teams have also done well. South Africa’s rugby team, the Springboks, returned to international competition in 1995 and won the Rugby World Cup that year and in 2007. When South Africa’s national football team, affectionately nicknamed Bafana Bafana (Zulu for "The Boys"), returned to international competition, it won the 1996 African Cup of Nations at home, was runner-up to Egypt at the same competition in 1998, and qualified for its first World Cup finals in 1998. South Africa is scheduled to host the 2010 World Cup, the first time that an African country has been selected to do so.

Media and publishing
The white-oriented press in contemporary South Africa, which has a long tradition of free expression for whites, found itself under increasing political and legal constraints from the 1950s onward and was subjected to heavy censorship in the 1980s. Legislation was passed in late 1993 and promulgated in 1994 to better ensure fairness in the press. Historically, the strongest elements of the press have been distinct English- and Afrikaans-language publishers, such as Argus and Perskor. Black readership has expanded greatly, though some papers aimed at that market, such as The World, were banned during the apartheid period, while individual journalists were banned, detained, and threatened. During the 1980s a new independent press emerged, represented by newspapers such as New Nation and Weekly Mail. Vrye Weekblad, the first Afrikaans-language antiapartheid newspaper, closed in 1994. With South Africa’s reemergence in the world economy, foreign media interests began to take a greater interest in the local market; the largest daily newspaper group in the country was taken over by an international concern.

Television, introduced in the mid-1970s, and radio constitute important forces in South African society. Until the lifting of emergency media restrictions in February 1990, the government tightly controlled both and used them to communicate its own views and to counter perceived threats to the apartheid system. Most electronic media remain publicly owned, but the pattern of management and public participation in their control changed decisively after 1994 from all white- and male-dominated management to a more representative mix under the new government. A number of privately owned radio stations have been set up in major urban markets since the mid-1990s, and independent television productions have become more common. Increasingly, programming is aimed at the many linguistic and cultural groups in the country.

The digital revolution has markedly affected South Africa. Most major publications have an online presence, as do a rapidly growing number of companies and governmental agencies.

Randolph Vigne
David Frank Gordon
Alan S. Mabin
Christopher C. Lowe



 

History

The prehistory and history of South Africa span nearly the entire known existence of human beings and their ancestors—some three million years or more—and include the wandering of small bands of hominins through the savanna, the inception of herding and farming as ways of life, and the construction of large urban centres. Through this diversity of human experience, several trends can be identified: technological and economic change, shifting systems of belief, and, in the earlier phases of humanity, the interplay between physical evolution and learned behaviour, or culture. Over much of this time frame, South Africa’s past is also that of a far wider area, and only in the last few centuries has this southernmost country of Africa had a history of its own. This article focuses on the country of South Africa. For information about the country in its regional context, see Southern Africa.

Prehistory
The earliest creatures that can be identified as ancestors of modern humans are classified as australopithecines (literally “southern apes”). The first specimen of these hominins to be found (in 1924) was the skull of a child from a quarry site at Taung in what is now the North-West province. Subsequently more australopithecine fossils were discovered in limestone caves farther northeast at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai (collectively designated a World Heritage site in 1999), where they had originally been deposited by predators and scavengers.

South Africa’s prehistory has been divided into a series of phases based on broad patterns of technology. The primary distinction is between a reliance on chipped and flaked stone implements (the Stone Age) and the ability to work iron (the Iron Age). Spanning a large proportion of human history, the Stone Age in Southern Africa is further divided into the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic Period (about 2,500,000–150,000 years ago), the Middle Stone Age, or Mesolithic Period (about 150,000–30,000 years ago), and the Late Stone Age, or Neolithic Period (about 30,000–2,000 years ago). The simple stone tools found with australopithecine fossil bones fall into the earliest part of the Early Stone Age.

The Early Stone Age
Most Early Stone Age sites in South Africa can probably be connected with the hominin species known as Homo erectus. Simply modified stones, hand axes, scraping tools, and other bifacial artifacts had a wide variety of purposes, including butchering animal carcasses, scraping hides, and digging for plant foods. Most South African archaeological sites from this period are the remains of open camps, often by the sides of rivers and lakes, although some are rock shelters, such as Montagu Cave in the Cape region.

Change occurred slowly in the Early Stone Age; for more than a million years and over a wide geographic area, only slight differences existed in the forms of stone tools. The slow alterations in hominins’ physical appearance that took place over the same time period, however, have allowed physical anthropologists to recognize new species in the genus Homo. An archaic form of H. sapiens appeared about 500,000 years ago; important specimens belonging to this physical type have been found at Hopefield in Western Cape province and at the Cave of Hearths in Mpumalanga province.

The Middle Stone Age
The long episode of cultural and physical evolution gave way to a period of more rapid change about 200,000 years ago. Hand axes and large bifacial stone tools were replaced by stone flakes and blades that were fashioned into scrapers, spear points, and parts for hafted, composite implements. This technological stage, now known as the Middle Stone Age, is represented by numerous sites in South Africa.

Open camps and rock overhangs were used for shelter. Day-to-day debris has survived to provide some evidence of early ways of life, although plant foods have rarely been preserved. Middle Stone Age bands hunted medium-sized and large prey, including antelope and zebra, although they tended to avoid the largest and most dangerous animals, such as the elephant and the rhinoceros. They also ate seabirds and marine mammals that could be found along the shore and sometimes collected tortoises and ostrich eggs in large quantities. The rich archaeological deposits of Klasies River Mouth (see Klasies), on the Cape coast west of Port Elizabeth, have preserved the first known instance of shellfish being used as a food source.

Klasies River Mouth has also provided important evidence for the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Some of the human skeletons from the lower levels of this site, possibly 115,000 years old, are decidedly modern in form. Fossils of comparable age have been excavated at Border Cave, in the mountainous region between KwaZulu-Natal province and Swaziland.

The Late Stone Age
Basic toolmaking techniques began to undergo additional change about 40,000 years ago. Small finely worked stone implements known as microliths became more common, while the heavier scrapers and points of the Middle Stone Age appeared less frequently. Archaeologists refer to this technological stage as the Late Stone Age. The numerous collections of stone tools from South African archaeological sites show a great degree of variation through time and across the subcontinent.

The remains of plant foods have been well preserved at such sites as Melkhoutboom Cave, De Hangen, and Diepkloof in the Cape region. Animals were trapped and hunted with spears and arrows on which were mounted well-crafted stone blades. Bands moved with the seasons as they followed game into higher lands in the spring and early summer months, when plant foods could also be found. When available, rock overhangs became shelters; otherwise, windbreaks were built. Shellfish, crayfish, seals, and seabirds were also important sources of food, as were fish caught on lines, with spears, in traps, and possibly with nets.

Dating from this period are numerous engravings on rock surfaces, mostly on the interior plateau, and paintings on the walls of rock shelters in the mountainous regions, such as the Drakensberg and Cederberg ranges. The images were made over a period of at least 25,000 years. Although scholars originally saw the South African rock art as the work of exotic foreigners such as Minoans or Phoenicians or as the product of primitive minds, they now believe that the paintings were closely associated with the work of medicine men, shamans who were involved in the well-being of the band and often worked in a state of trance. Specific representations include depictions of trance dances, metaphors for trance such as death and flight, rainmaking, and control of the movement of antelope herds.

Pastoralism and early agriculture
New ways of living came to South Africa about 2,000 years ago. Until that time, human communities had survived by gathering plant foods and by hunting, trapping, and scavenging for meat, but with the introduction of agriculture—arguably the single most important event in world history—people began to make use of domesticated animals and plants. This in turn led to a slow but steady rise in population and to more-complex political and religious organizations, among other things. Crops could be grown and cattle, sheep, and goats herded near permanent villages and towns in the east, where rainfall was adequate. In the more arid west, domestic livestock were kept by nomadic pastoralists, who moved over wide territories with their flocks and herds.

Although the origin of nomadic pastoralism in South Africa is still obscure, linguistic evidence points to northern Botswana as a probable source. The linguistic evidence is supported by finds of sheep bones and pottery from Bambata Cave in southwestern Zimbabwe that have been dated to about 150 bc. Whether new communities moved into South Africa with their flocks and herds or whether established hunter-gatherer bands took up completely new ways of living remains unclear. In any case, the results of archaeological excavations have shown that sheep were being herded fairly extensively by the first few centuries ad in eastern and western parts of the Cape and probably in the northern Cape as well.

While traces of ancient herding camps tend to be extremely rare, one of the best-preserved finds is at Kasteelberg, on the southwest coast near St. Helena Bay. Pastoralists there kept sheep, hunted seals and other wild animals, and gathered shellfish, repeatedly returning to the same site for some 1,500 years. Such communities were directly ancestral to the Khoekhoe (also spelled Khoikhoi) herders who encountered European settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-17th century.

The archaeological traces of farmers in the eastern regions of South Africa are more substantial. The earliest sites date to the 3rd century ad, although farming was probably already well established by this time. Scatters of potsherds with distinctive incised decoration mark early village locations in Mpumalanga and parts of KwaZulu-Natal.

The Iron Age

Because the first farmers had knowledge of ironworking, their archaeological sites are characterized as Iron Age (c. ad 200). New groups of people arriving in South Africa at that time had strong connections to East Africa. They were directly ancestral to the Bantu-speaking peoples who form the majority of South Africa’s population today.

Iron Age sites
Early Iron Age farmers grew crops, cutting back the vegetation with iron hoes and axes, and herded cattle and sheep. They heavily supplemented farming by gathering wild plant foods, engaging in some hunting, and collecting shellfish if they lived near enough to the coast. Where conditions for agriculture were favourable, such as in the Tugela River valley in the east, villages grew to house several hundred people. Some trade existed between groups of farmers—evidence for specialization in salt making has been found in the northeast—and with the hunter-gatherer bands that continued to occupy most parts of South Africa. Finely made life-size ceramic heads found near the city of Lydenburg (now Mashishing) in eastern South Africa and dated to the 7th century ad are all that remains of the people who once inhabited this region.

Early Iron Age villages were built in low-lying areas, such as river valleys and the coastal plain, where forests and savannas facilitated shifting (slash-and-burn) agriculture. From the 11th century, however, in the period conventionally known as the Late Iron Age, farming communities began to settle the higher-lying grasslands. It has not been established whether these new communities were inhabited by invaders or reflected the diffusion of new knowledge to existing populations. In many areas the new communities started making different forms of pottery and built villages out of stone. Most probably these and other changes in patterns of behaviour reflect the increasing importance of cattle in economic life.

First urban centres
Other changes came in the north. Arab traders established small settlements on the Tanzanian and Mozambican coasts in their search for ivory, animal skins, and other exotica. The trade beads they offered in return began to reach villages in the interior, the first indications that the more complex economic and social structures associated with long-distance trade were developing. The arid Limpopo River valley, avoided by the earliest farmers, developed as a trade route. Sites such as Pont Drift (c. 800–1100) and Schroda (dated to the 9th century) show that their occupants were wealthy in both livestock and trade beads.

The Limpopo River valley was also the setting in which Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe developed as South Africa’s first urban centres during the 11th century. Starting as a large village like Schroda and Pont Drift, Mapungubwe rapidly developed into a town of approximately 10,000 people. Differences in status were clearly demarcated: the elite lived and were buried at the top of the stark sandstone hill at the town’s centre, while the rest of the population lived in the valley below. Hilltop graves contained lavish burial goods, including a carefully crafted gold rhinoceros and evidence of specialized crafts such as bone and ivory working. Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe were abandoned after the 13th century after having been occupied for several hundred years. The trade connections that the Limpopo valley offered were taken over by Great Zimbabwe, farther to the north.

Europeans in South Africa
The first Portuguese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, their occupants intent on gaining a share of the lucrative Arab trade with the East. Over the following century, numerous vessels made their way around the South African coast, but the only direct African contacts came with the bands of shipwreck survivors who either set up camp in the hope of rescue or tried to make their way northward to Portuguese settlements in present-day Mozambique. Both the British and the Dutch challenged the Portuguese control of the Cape sea route from the early 17th century. The British founded a short-lived settlement at Table Bay in 1620, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a small garrison under the slopes of Table Mountain for provisioning their fleets.

Settlement of the Cape Colony
The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend to establish more than a minimal presence at the southernmost part of Africa. Because farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, however, nine men were released from their contracts with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River in 1657. The company made it clear that the Khoekhoe were not to be enslaved, so, beginning in that same year, slaves arrived in the Cape from West and East Africa, India, and the Malay Peninsula. By the end of the century, the imprint of Dutch colonialism in South Africa was clear, with settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, growing wheat, tending vineyards, and grazing their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots Holland Mountains some 30 miles (50 km) away. A 1707 census of the Dutch at the Cape listed 1,779 settlers owning 1,107 slaves.

In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, pastoralists had readily traded with the Dutch. However, as the garrison’s demand for cattle and sheep continued to increase, the Khoekhoe became more wary. The Dutch offered tobacco, alcohol, and trinkets for livestock. Numerous conflicts followed, and, beginning in 1713, many Khoekhoe communities were ravaged by smallpox. At the same time, colonial pastoralists—the Boers, also called trekboers—began to move inland beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains with their own herds. The Khoekhoe chiefdoms were largely decimated by the end of the 18th century, their people either dead or reduced to conditions close to serfdom on colonial farms. The San—small bands of hunter-gatherers—fared no better. Pushed back into marginal areas, they were forced to live by cattle raiding, justifying in colonial eyes their systematic eradication. The men were slaughtered, and the women and children were taken into servitude.

The trekboers constantly sought new land, and they and their families spread northeast as well as north, into the grasslands that long had been occupied by African farmers. For many generations these farmers had lived in settlements concentrated along the low ridges that break the monotony of the interior plateau. While it is difficult to make population estimates, it is thought that some of the larger villages could have housed several hundred people. Cattle were held in elaborately built stone enclosures, the ruins of which survive today across a large part of Free State province and in the higher areas north of the Vaal River. Extensive exchange networks brought iron for hoes and spears from specialized manufacturing centres in the Mpumalanga Lowveld and the deep river gorges of KwaZulu-Natal.

Thus, by the closing decades of the 18th century, South Africa had fallen into two broad regions: west and east. Colonial settlement dominated the west, including the winter rainfall region around the Cape of Good Hope, the coastal hinterland northward toward the present-day border with Namibia, and the dry lands of the interior. Trekboers took increasingly more land from the Khoekhoe and from remnant hunter-gatherer communities, who were killed, were forced into marginal areas, or became labourers tied to the farms of their new overlords. Indigenous farmers controlled both the coastal and valley lowlands and the Highveld of the interior in the east, where summer rainfall and good grazing made mixed farming economies possible.

Cape Town was developing into South Africa’s major urban centre, although it took many years for it to equal the size that Mapungubwe had attained some five centuries earlier. The initial grid of streets had been expanded and linked the company’s garden to the new fortress that overlooked Table Bay. Houses featuring flat roofs, ornate pediments, and symmetrical facades sheltered officials, merchants, and visitors en route between Europe and the East. A governor and council administered the town and colony. While the economy was in principle directed by the interests of the Dutch East India Company, in practice corruption and illegal trading were dominant forces. Both the town and the colony existed in large part because of slaves, who by now outnumbered their owners.

Martin Hall
Julian R.D. Cobbing


 

Growth of the colonial economy

From 1770 to 1870 the region became more fully integrated into the world capitalist economy. Trekboers, who were weakly controlled by the Dutch East India Company, advanced across the semidesert Karoo of the central Cape and collided with African agricultural peoples along a line running from the lower Vaal and middle Orange river valleys to the sea around the Gamtoos River (west of modern Port Elizabeth). These agriculture-based African societies proved resilient but, even at their height in the 1860s, were unable to unite completely enough to expel the Europeans.

The decisive moment for the colony occurred in 1806 when Britain seized Cape Colony during the Napoleonic Wars. Initially the colony’s importance was related to its function as a strategic base to protect Britain’s developing empire in India. In the next few years, however, it also served as a market, a source of raw materials, and an outlet for emigration from Britain.

African societies after the 1760s were increasingly affected by ivory and slave traders operating from Delagoa Bay, Inhambane, and the lower Zambezi River in the northeast as well as by traders and raiders based in the Cape to the south. In response to these invasions, the farming communities created a number of sister states different in structure, scale, and military capacity from anything that had existed before. The Pedi and Swazi in the eastern Highveld, the Zulu south of the Pongola River, the Sotho to the east of the Caledon River valley, the Gaza along the lower Limpopo, and the Ndebele in present-day southwestern Zimbabwe proved to be the most successful.

The areas of the western Cape with the longest history of settlement by Europeans had evolved an agricultural economy based on wheat farming and viticulture, worked by imported slave labour. Slaves were treated harshly, and punishments for slaves who assaulted Europeans were brutal—one of the most heinous being death by impalement. Escaped slaves formed groups called Maroons—small self-sufficient communities—or fled into the interior. Because slave birth rates were low and settler numbers were increasing, in the 1780s the Dutch stepped up the enserfment of surviving Khoe (also spelled Khoi; pejoratively called Hottentots) to help run their farms. Those Khoe who could escape Dutch subjugation joined Xhosa groups in a major counteroffensive against colonialism in 1799–1801, and there were slave rebellions in the outskirts of Cape Town in 1808 and 1825.

The Dutch refusal to grant citizenship and land rights to the “Coloured” offspring of unions between Europeans and Khoe or slaves produced an aggrieved class of people, known as Basters (or Bastards), who were Christian, spoke Dutch, and had an excellent knowledge of horses and firearms. Many fled north toward and over the Orange River in search of land and trading opportunities. After merging with independent Khoe groups, such as the Kora, they formed commando states under warlords, three of the more successful being the Bloem, Kok, and Barends families, who were persuaded by missionaries in the early 19th century to change their name to Griqua. By the 1790s they were trading with and raiding local African communities such as the Rolong, Tlhaping, Hurutshe, and Ngwaketse. For self-defense some of these African communities formed larger groupings who competed against each other in their quest to control trade routes going south to the Cape and east to present-day Mozambique.

The Portuguese and also some British, French, Americans, and Arabs traded beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms along the southeast coast in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, wax, and skins. During the late 18th century, large volumes of ivory were exported annually from Delagoa Bay, and slaves were taken from the Komati and Usutu (a major tributary of the Maputo) river regions and sent to the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil to work on sugarcane and coffee plantations. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay and coastal trade routes with the central interior.

European trade precipitated structural transformation within societies inland of Delagoa Bay. Warlords reorganized military institutions to hunt elephants and slaves. Profits from this trade enhanced the warlords’ ability to disperse patronage, attract followers, and raise military potential and, in turn, their capacity to dominate land, people, and cattle. Near the bay, Tembe and Maputo were already powerful states by the 1790s. To the west of the coastal lowlands emerged the Maroteng of Thulare, the Dlamini of Ndvungunye, and the Hlubi of Bhungane. Between the Pongola and Tugela rivers evolved the Mthethwa of Dingiswayo south of Lake St. Lucia, the Ndwandwe of Zwide, the Qwabe of Phakatwayo, the Chunu of Macingwane, and, south of the Tugela, the Cele and Thuli. Several groups—for example, the Mthethwa, Ndwandwe, and Qwabe—later merged with the Zulu. These groups competed to dominate trade and became more militarized the closer they were to the Portuguese base.

The Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal by the 1860s. European settlement advanced to the edges of the Kalahari region in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the tsetse-fly- and mosquito-ridden Lowveld along the Limpopo River valley in the northeast. Armed clashes erupted over land and cattle, such as those between the Boers and various Xhosa groups in the southeast beginning in the 1780s, and Africans lost most of their land and were henceforth forced to work for the settlers. The population of European settlers increased from some 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. Although it is difficult to accurately estimate the African population, it probably numbered somewhere between two and four million.



 

Increased European presence (c. 1810–35)

British occupation of the Cape
When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries tried to capture the Cape so as to control the important sea route to the East. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending the Dutch East India Company’s role in the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The Cape became a vital base for Britain prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Cape’s economy was meshed with that of Britain. To protect the developing economy there, Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market until the mid-1820s. Merino sheep were introduced, and intensive sheep farming was initiated in order to supply wool to British textile mills.

The infrastructure of the colony began to change: English replaced Dutch as the language of administration; the British pound sterling replaced the Dutch rix-dollar; and newspaper publishing began in Cape Town in 1824. After Britain began appointing colonial governors, an advisory council for the governor was established in 1825, which was upgraded to a legislative council in 1834 with a few “unofficial” settler representatives. A virtual freehold system of landownership gradually replaced the existing Dutch tenant system, under which European colonists had paid a small annual fee to the government but had not acquired land ownership.

A large group of British settlers arrived in 1820; this, together with a high European birth rate and wasteful land usage, produced an acute land shortage, which was alleviated only when the British acquired more land through massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s the British vision of the colony did not include African citizens (referred to pejoratively by the British as “Kaffirs”), so, as Africans lost their land, they were expelled across the Great Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony.

The first step in this process included attacks in 1811–12 by the British army on the Xhosa groups, the Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe. An attack by the Rharhabe-Xhosa on Graham’s Town (Grahamstown) in 1819 provided the pretext for the annexation of more African territory, to the Keiskamma River. Various Rharhabe-Xhosa groups were driven from their lands throughout the early 1830s. They counterattacked in December 1834, and Governor Benjamin D’Urban ordered a major invasion the following year, during which thousands of Rharhabe-Xhosa died. The British crossed the Great Kei River and ravaged territory of the Gcaleka-Xhosa as well; the Gcaleka chief, Hintsa, invited to hold discussions with British military officials, was held hostage and died trying to escape. The British colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, who disapproved of D’Urban’s policy, halted the seizure of all African land east of the Great Kei. D’Urban’s initial attempt to rule conquered Africans with European magistrates and soldiers was overturned by Glenelg; instead, for a time, Africans east of the Keiskamma retained their autonomy and dealt with the colony through diplomatic agents.

The British had chronic difficulties procuring enough labour to build towns and develop new farms. Indeed, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other countries to do the same, the British in Southern Africa continued to import some slaves into the Cape after that date, but in numbers insufficient to alleviate the labour problem. A ban in 1809 on Africans crossing into the Cape aggravated the labour shortage, and so the British, like the Dutch before them, made the Khoe serfs through the Caledon (1809) and Cradock (1812 ) codes.

Anglo-Boer commandos provided another source of African labour by illegally capturing San women and children (many of the men were killed) as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. Griqua raiding states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Kok, and Barend Barends captured more Africans from among people such as the Hurutshe, Rolong, and Kwena. Other people, such as those known as the Mantatees, were forced to become farmworkers, mainly in the eastern Cape. European farmers also raided for labour north of the Orange River.

Cape authorities overhauled their policy in 1828 in order to facilitate labour distribution and to align the region with the growing imperial antislavery ethos. Ordinance 49 permitted black labourers from east of the Keiskamma to go into the colony for work if they possessed the proper contracts and passes, which were issued by soldiers and missionaries. This was the beginning of the pass laws that would become so notorious in the 20th century. Ordinance 50 briefly ended the restrictions placed on the Khoe, including removing the requirement for passes, and allowed them to choose their employers, own land, and move more freely. Because an insufficient labour force still existed, Anglo-Boer armies (supported by Khoe, Tembu, Gcaleka, and Mpondo auxiliaries) acquired their own workers by attacking the Ngwane east of the Great Kei at Mbolompo in August 1828. The formal abolition of slavery took place in 1834–38, and control of African labourers became stricter through the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1841), which imposed criminal penalties for breach of contract and desertion of the workplace and increased the legal powers of settler employers.

The Delagoa Bay slave trade
While events were unfolding at the Cape, the slave trade at Delagoa Bay had been expanding since about 1810 in response to demands for labour from plantations in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands. During the late 1820s, slave exports from the Delagoa Bay area reached several thousand a year, in advance of what proved to be an ineffective attempt to abolish the Brazilian trade in 1830. After a dip in the early 1830s, the Bay slave trade peaked in the late 1840s.

The impact of the slave trade was increasing destabilization of hinterland societies as populations were forcibly removed. The Gaza, Ngoni, and other groups became surrogate slavers and joined the Portuguese soldiers in inland raiding. Along the Limpopo and Vaal river networks, Delagoa Bay slavers competed with Griqua slavers in supplying the Cape. After slavers burned crops and famines became common, many groups—including the Ngwane, Ndebele, and some Hlubi—fled westward into the Highveld mountains during the 1810s and ’20s. The Kololo, on the other hand, moved east out of Transorangia, where they ran into Bay slavers, and migrated west into Botswana. In 1826 they were attacked by an alliance of Ngwaketse and European mercenaries and ended up in Zambia in the 1850s exporting slaves themselves to the Arabs and Portuguese.

Emergence of the eastern states
Four main defensive African state clusters had emerged in eastern South Africa by the 1820s: the Pedi (led by Sekwati) in the Steelpoort valley, the Ngwane (led by Sobhuza) in the eastern Transvaal, the Mokoteli (led by Moshoeshoe) in the Caledon River region, and the Zulu (led by Shaka) south of the Swart-Mfolozi River. The Pedi received refugees from the Limpopo and coastal plains, and the Mokoteli absorbed eastern Transorangian refugees, which enabled them to defeat the Griqua and Korana raiders by the mid-1830s. By 1825 Shaka had welded the Chunu, Mthethwa, Qwabe, Mkhize, Cele, and other groups into a large militarized state with fortified settlements called amakhanda. Zulu amabutho (age sets or regiments) defended against raiders, provided protection for refugees, and, apparently, began to trade in ivory and slaves themselves.

From 1824 the Zulu began to clash with Cape colonists who came to Port Natal (renamed Durban in 1835) and organized mercenary armies. These groups were comparable to the Portuguese prazero armies along the Zambezi and to the warlord state set up by the Portuguese trader João Albasini in the eastern Transvaal in the 1840s, but they operated on a smaller scale. During the 1820s European raiders joined Zulu amabutho in attacking areas north of the Swart-Mfolozi River and south of the Mzimkulu River, where in the mid-1820s French ships exported slaves. Francis Farewell’s raiders, in alliance with Zulu groups, seized women and children in the same area in 1828.

Conflicts split the Zulu elite into rival factions and led to Shaka’s assassination in 1828. Shaka’s half brother Dingane became the Zulu leader, but his succession was accompanied by civil wars and by increasing interference in the Delagoa Bay trading alliances. By the mid-1830s a coalition of Cape merchants had begun planning for the formal colonization of Natal, with its superb agricultural soils and temperate climate. The British left the less-desirable malaria-ridden Delagoa Bay region to the Portuguese, who traded slaves out of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo, Mozam.) for another half century.

The expansion of European colonialism (c. 1835–70)

The Great Trek
A few Boer settlers had moved north of the Orange River before 1834, but after that the number increased significantly, a migration later known as the Great Trek. The common view that this was a bid to escape the policies of the British—i.e., the freeing of slaves—is difficult to sustain, as most of the former slave owners did not migrate (most trekkers came from the poorer east Cape), and the earlier labour shortage had been alleviated by 1835. Instead, the trek was more of an explosive culmination of a long sequence of colonial labour raids, land seizures, punitive commando raids, and commercial expansions. Europeans, who possessed technologically advanced weaponry, also had instructive examples of how small groups of raiders in Natal and Transorangia could cause disruption over large areas. Thus, the trekkers should not be seen as backward feudalists escaping the modern world, as some historians have maintained, but as energized people extending their frontier.

Several thousand Boers migrated with their families, livestock, retainers, wagons, and firearms into a region already destabilized and partially depopulated by Griqua and coastal raiders. They did encounter some Africans (such as the Ndebele), who in the early 1830s had moved from the southeastern to the western Transvaal. The Boers and their Rolong, Taung, and Griqua allies, however, crushed the Ndebele during 1837, taking their land and many cattle, women, and children. The remaining Ndebele fled north, where they resettled in southern Zimbabwe.

The trekkers had penetrated much of the Transvaal by the early 1840s. A grouping of commando states emerged based at Potchefstroom, Pretoria, and, from 1845, Ohrigstad-Lydenburg in the eastern Transvaal. Andries Hendrik Potgieter, Andries Pretorius, Jan Mocke, and others competed for followers, attacked weaker African chiefdoms, hunted elephants and slaves, and forged trading links with the Portuguese. Other Boers turned east into Natal and allied themselves with the resident British settlers. Farms developed slowly and, as had been the case in the Cape prior to the 1830s, depended on forced labour. Until the 1860s the Pedi and Swazi in the east and even the Kwena and Hurutshe in the west were strong enough to avoid being conscripted as labour and thus limited the labour supply.

The British in Natal
The appearance of thousands of British settlers in Natal in the 1840s and ’50s meant that for the first time Africans and European settlers lived together—however uneasily—on the same land. The Boers began to carve out farms in Natal as they had done along the eastern frontier, but further slave and cattle raids on the Bhaca south of the Mzimkulu provided the pretext for British annexation of Natal in 1843. Theophilus Shepstone received an appointment in 1845 as a diplomatic agent (later secretary for native affairs), and his position served as a prototype for later native commissioners. The Harding Commission (1852) set aside reserves for Africans, and missionaries and pliant chiefs were brought in to persuade Africans to work. After 1849 Africans became subject to a hut tax intended to raise revenue and drive them into labour. Roads were built, using forced labour, and Africans were obliged to pay rent on state land and European farms. To meet these burdens some African cultivators grew surplus crops to sell to the growing towns of Pietermaritzburg and Durban.

The British were reluctant, though, to annex the Transorangian interior, where no strategic interests existed. Boer trade links with Delagoa Bay posed little threat because Portugal was virtually a client state of Britain. To the Boers fell the tasks of eroding African resistance and developing the land, although the policy never received clear enunciation or much financial backing. Britain halfheartedly attempted to protect some of its African client states, such as that of the Griqua and the Sotho state led by Moshoeshoe. However, after further fighting with the Rharhabe-Xhosa on the eastern frontier in 1846, Governor Colonel Harry Smith finally annexed, over the next two years, not only the region between the Great Fish and the Great Kei rivers (establishing British Kaffraria) but also a large area between the Orange and Vaal rivers, thus establishing the Orange River Sovereignty. These moves provoked further warfare in 1851–53 with the Xhosa (joined once more by many Khoe), with a few British politicians ineffectively trying to influence events.

A striking feature of this period was the capacity of the Sotho people to fend off military conquest by the British and Boers. After defeating and absorbing the rival Tlokwa in 1853–54, Moshoeshoe became the most powerful African leader south of the Vaal-Pongolo rivers. His soldiers utilized firearms and, in the cold Highveld, horses—which proved to be the keys to political and military survival there.

Attempts at Boer consolidation
Faced with these unprofitable conflicts, the British temporarily withdrew from the southern African interior, and the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boers gained independence through the Sand River and Bloemfontein conventions (1852 and 1854, respectively). Both Boer groups wrote constitutions and established Volksraade (parliaments), although their attempts at unification failed. For more than a decade, civil wars and the struggle with the environment hampered consolidation among the Boers. Nevertheless, the Orange Free State’s economy grew rapidly, and by the 1860s the Boers were exporting significant amounts of wool via Cape ports.

The Cape economy
Capitalist infrastructure came earlier to the Cape than to the Boer regions because of its older colonial history and its seacoast links to the British Empire. Banks, insurance companies, and limited-liability companies arose in the 1840s and ’50s, and a class of prosperous colonial shopkeepers, financiers, traders, and farmers emerged as Cape Town grew to more than 30,000 people in the 1850s. Port Elizabeth, established in 1820, also became an important trading centre and harbour. The British government granted the Cape settlers what was termed “representative government” in March 1853 (the Legislative Assembly had elected members, with an executive appointed from London) and “responsible government” in 1872 (the assembly appointed the executive). Franchise qualifications were relatively low, and even some Africans could vote, although their small number had no political impact. These nominal rights were reduced later in the century and abolished outright in 1936.

Between 1811 and 1858 colonial aggression deprived Africans of most of their land between the Sundays and Great Kei rivers and produced poverty and despair. From the mid-1850s British magistrates held political power in British Kaffraria, destroying the power of the Xhosa chiefs. Following a severe lung sickness epidemic among their cattle in 1854–56, the Xhosa killed many of their remaining cattle and in 1857–58 grew few crops in response to a millenarian prophecy that this would cause their ancestors to rise from the dead and destroy the whites. Many thousands of Xhosa starved to death, and large numbers of survivors were driven into the Cape Colony to work. British Kaffraria fused with the Cape Colony in 1865, and thousands of Africans newly defined as Fingo resettled east of the Great Kei, thereby creating Fingoland. The Transkei, as this region came to be known, consisted of the hilly country between the Cape and Natal. It became a large African reserve and grew in size when those parts that were still independent were annexed in the 1880s and ’90s (Pondoland lost its independence in 1894).

European missionaries and their African catechists worked unremittingly from the 1820s to Christianize indigenous communities and to introduce them to European manufactured goods they had previously done well without. Whatever intentions the missionaries may have had, their efforts undermined African worldviews and contributed to the destruction of traditional African communities throughout South Africa. For a time nevertheless, a small number of African peasant farmers used plows, paid rents and taxes, produced for the market, and sold surplus grain to the towns in competition with colonial farmers. The difficulty they encountered obtaining capital, however, as well as the legal and political discrimination they faced, drove most of them out of business in the decades following the South African War of 1899–1902.

The Cape economy, narrowly based on wine and wool, was not particularly prosperous. Wool exports, though soaring to some 6,000 tons in 1855, lagged far behind those of Australia and remained susceptible to drought and market slumps. African labour built roads, but only a few miles of railway were constructed before 1870. Various alternatives that would broaden the economic base were explored. Accumulations of guano (droppings of gannets and cormorants used as fertilizer) were exploited on off-coast islands; copper mining began in the southwestern party of the country; hunters operating as far north as the Zambezi sent back large quantities of ivory; and traders, hunters, missionaries, and full-time prospectors surveyed and sampled the rocks. The most potentially rewarding commodities were diamonds discovered in the Vaal valley and gold found in the Tati valley and in the northern and eastern Transvaal between 1866 and 1871.

Disputes in the north and east
To the north, colonial communities and African states alternately cooperated and competed with each other, with the advantage slowly moving to the colonists. The Swazi and Gaza supplied slaves both to the Transvaal Boers and to the Portuguese. During the 1850s the Swazi overran much of the Lowveld, where they absorbed many groups and exchanged captured children for firearms and horses with the Transvaal settlers. After the death of Soshangane (leader of the Gaza state) in 1856, a Gaza civil war broke out that also involved the Swazi, Boers, and Portuguese. After the Swazi gained control of land almost to Maputo in 1864, the Gaza (under the victorious Mzila) migrated northward into the Buzi River area of present-day eastern Zimbabwe.

Farther south the Zulu competed with the Swazi and the Boers to dominate the Pongolo and Ngwavuma valleys and with the Boers to control the Buffalo (Mziniathi) River area. The colonial administrator, Theophilus Shepstone, interfered not only in Zulu politics but also in Ndebele succession dispute (1869–72), attempting to oust the eventual leader (Lobengula) in favour of a pretender. Marthinus Pretorius, the Transvaal leader, annexed huge areas, at least on paper. To the irritation of settler farmers and plantation owners, few Zulu went south to work in Natal. Instead, a supply of Mozambican indentured labourers (some of them forced) entered the region. This eventually evolved into a steady flow of migrant workers in the following decades, but, because not enough labour appeared initially in the early 1860s, indentured labourers from India were brought in to work on the new sugar plantations.

The Sotho continued their tenacious hold on their lands along the Caledon River and for a time supplied the Boers of the Orange Free State with grain and cattle. The Sotho mobilized a force of 10,000 and defeated the Boers in 1858. The Boers, however, coveted the fertile Caledon valley and defeated the Sotho eight years later after the Boers regained their unity. The Sotho were forced to sign the Treaty of Thaba Bosiu (1866), and only British annexation of Sotho territory in 1868 prevented their complete collapse.

The Zulu after Shaka
The Zulu, although initially successful at repelling the Europeans, were, like the Ndebele, eventually overpowered by them in clashes such as the Battle of Blood (Ncome) River in 1838. Boer attacks on the Zulu between 1838 and 1839 precipitated a Zulu civil war between Dingane and Mpande. The latter allied himself with the Boer invaders and so split the kingdom. Between 1839 and 1840 the Boers seized large parts of the Zulu kingdom, including the area between the Tugela and the Swart-Mfolozi. When the British in turn evicted the Boers and annexed Natal in 1843, the southern region to the Tugela was restored to the Zulu. Mpande (reigned 1840–72), a formidable ruler, controlled territory between the Tugela in the south and, roughly, the Pongolo in the north, boundaries that were not seriously disturbed until 1879.

In 1856 the primary conflict in the Zulu civil war (the Battle of Ndondakasuka on the lower Tugela River, close to the sea) elevated Mpande’s younger son, Cetshwayo, over Mpande’s older son, Mbuyazi. Although Cetshwayo formally became ruler of Zululand only upon his father’s death in 1872, he had in fact effectively ruled the kingdom since the early 1860s.

By the late 1870s, colonial officials had identified the Zulu kingdom as a major obstacle to confederation, and in January 1879 British and colonial troops invaded Zululand (see Zulu War). During his rule Mpande had expanded Zulu military capacity, and Cetshwayo used this effectively against the British invaders at Isandhlwana in 1879. The annihilation of a large British force at Isandhlwana slowed the invasion, but imperial firepower ultimately prevailed (see Battles of Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift). For the Zulu, political dismemberment followed military defeat. British divide-and-rule policies precipitated another civil war in 1883, and Zululand was annexed in 1887.

The decline of the African states
As the 1860s came to an end, the great African states began to weaken. Not only did many important African leaders die during this period (Soshangane in 1858, Sekwati of the Pedi in 1861, Mswati in 1865, Mzilikazi in 1868, Moshoeshoe in 1870, and Mpande in 1872), but, increasingly, Europeans were determined to exploit Africans as a source of labour and to acquire the last large fertile areas controlled by them.

Colonial troops tipped the balance decisively against societies that had previously withstood attempts to bring them under the settlers’ control. A century of military conflict on the Cape frontier ended with the Cape-Xhosa war of 1877–78 (see Cape Frontier Wars). Between 1878 and 1881 the Cape Colony defeated rebellions in Griqualand West, the Transkei, and Basutoland. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of the Cape and high commissioner for southern Africa from March 1877, rapidly decided that independent African kingdoms had to be tamed in order to facilitate political and economic integration of the region.

Governor George Grey had already proposed a federated South Africa in 1858, and in the late 1860s the discovery of gold and diamonds reactivated this idea. The annexation of Basutoland in 1868 began a series of movements toward consolidation that included the British seizure of the diamond fields from the competing Griqua, Tlhaping, and Boers in 1871 (the Keate Award), Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon’s more determined federation plan of 1875, Shepstone’s invasion of the Transvaal in 1877, and the British invasions of Zululand and Pediland in 1879. British troops also took part in an 1879 campaign that crushed Pedi military power in the northern Transvaal. With the collapse of Zulu resistance in the 1880s, the invasions of the Gaza and Ndebele kingdoms in 1893–96, and the crushing of Venda resistance in 1898, by 1900 no autonomous African societies remained in the region.

Julian R.D. Cobbing



 

Diamonds, gold, and imperialist intervention (1870–1902)

South Africa experienced a transformation between 1870, when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, when the South African War ended. Midway between these dates, in 1886, the world’s largest goldfields were discovered on the Witwatersrand. As the predominantly agrarian societies of European South Africa began to urbanize and industrialize, the region evolved into a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy; gold especially was urgently needed to back national currencies and ensure the continued flow of expanding international trade. British colonies, Boer republics, and African kingdoms all came under British control. These dramatic changes were propelled by two linked forces: the development of a capitalist mining industry and a sequence of imperialist interventions by Britain.

Diamonds and confederation
A chance find in 1867 had drawn several thousand fortune seekers to alluvial diamond diggings along the Orange, Vaal, and Harts rivers. Richer finds in “dry diggings” in 1870 led to a large-scale rush. By the end of 1871 nearly 50,000 people lived in a sprawling polyglot mining camp that was later named Kimberley.

Initially, individual diggers, black and white, worked small claims by hand. As production rapidly centralized and mechanized, however, ownership and labour patterns were divided more starkly along racial lines. A new class of mining capitalists oversaw the transition from diamond digging to mining industry as joint-stock companies bought out diggers. The industry became a monopoly by 1889 when De Beers Consolidated Mines (controlled by Cecil Rhodes) became the sole producer. Although some white diggers continued to work as overseers or skilled labourers, from the mid-1880s the workforce consisted mainly of black migrant workers housed in closed compounds by the companies (a method that had previously been used in Brazil).

The diamond zone was simultaneously claimed by the Orange Free State, the South African Republic, the western Griqua under Nicolaas Waterboer, and southern Tswana chiefs. At a special hearing in October 1871, Robert W. Keate (then lieutenant governor of Natal) found in favour of Waterboer, but the British persuaded him to request protection against his Boer rivals, and the area was annexed as Griqualand West.

The annexation of the diamond fields signaled a more progressive British policy under a Liberal ministry but fell short of the ambitious confederation policy pursued by Lord Carnarvon, the colonial secretary in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1874 Conservative government; he sought to unite the republics and colonies into a self-governing federation in the British Empire, a concept inspired by Theophilus Shepstone, who, as secretary for native affairs in Natal, urged a coherent regional policy with regard to African labour and administration.

Carnarvon concentrated at first on persuading the Cape and the Free State to accept federation, but a conference in London in August 1876 revealed how unreceptive these parties were to the proposal. With his southern gambit frustrated, Carnarvon embarked on a northern strategy. The South African Republic (Transvaal), virtually bankrupt, had suffered military humiliation at the hands of the Pedi, and support for President Thomas F. Burgers had declined because of this. Carnarvon commissioned Shepstone to annex the Transvaal, and, after encountering only token resistance at the beginning of 1877, he proclaimed it a British colony a few months later.

The new possession proved difficult to administer as empty coffers and insensitivity to Afrikaner resentments led to a clash over tax payments, and, under a triumvirate of Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert, and Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, the Transvaal Boers opted to fight for independence. British defeats, especially at Majuba in 1881, ended British insistence on the concept of confederation. By the London Convention of 1884, republican self-government was restored, subject to an imprecise British “suzerainty” over external relations.

Afrikaner and African politics in the Cape
The white population in the Cape numbered 240,000 by the mid-1870s and constituted about one-third of the colony’s population. Cape revenues accounted for three-fourths of the total income in the region’s four settler states in 1870, as the diamond discoveries created more revenue that could be used to build railways and public works. Although by this time some two-thirds of the settler population spoke Dutch or Afrikaans, political power rested largely with an English-speaking elite of merchants, lawyers, and landholders.

The conflict between Afrikaners and English speakers led to the establishment of the Afrikaner Bond in 1879. The Bond initially represented poorer farmers and espoused an anti-British Pan-Afrikanerism in the Cape and beyond, but, after its reorganization a few years later under Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, the group began to champion the Cape’s commercial interests and acquired a new base of support—mainly wealthier farmers and urban professionals. When Hofmeyr threw his support behind Cecil Rhodes in 1890, he enabled Rhodes to become prime minister of the Cape; their alliance stemmed from a mutual desire for northward economic expansion. A major cleavage, however, opened up between Bond politicians and the English-speaking voters loosely defined as Cape liberals. The latter, particularly those in constituencies in the eastern Cape that had a significant percentage of black male voters, were tactically friendly to the small enfranchised stratum of fairly prosperous black peasants, whereas the Bond and most English-speaking white voters were hostile toward the black farmers growing cash crops and pursued more-restrictive franchise qualifications.

The number of blacks in the colony greatly increased between 1872 and 1894 as heretofore independent territories were annexed to the Cape. As black farmers became more prosperous and as more blacks became literate clerks and teachers, many individuals qualified to vote. The rise of the Afrikaner Bond and new laws affecting franchise qualifications and taxes also stimulated more-vigorous black participation in electoral politics after 1884. New political and educational bodies came into existence in the eastern Cape, as did the first black newspapers and black-controlled churches. The period also witnessed the first political organizations among Coloureds in the Cape and Indians in Natal and the Transvaal.

Gold mining
Prospectors established in 1886 the existence of a belt of gold-bearing reefs 40 miles (60 km) wide centred on present-day Johannesburg. The rapid growth of the gold-mining industry intensified processes started by the diamond boom: immigration, urbanization, capital investment, and labour migrancy. By 1899 the gold industry attracted investment worth £75 million, produced almost three-tenths of the world’s gold, and employed more than 100,000 people (the overwhelming majority of them black migrant workers).

The world’s richest goldfield was also the most difficult to work. Although the gold ore was abundant, the layers of it ran extremely deep, and the ore contained little gold. To be profitable, gold mining had to be intensive and deep-level, requiring large inputs of capital and technology. A group system, whereby more than 100 companies had been arranged into nine holding companies, or “groups,” facilitated collusion between companies to reduce competition over labour and keep costs down. The gold mines rapidly established a pattern of labour recruitment, remuneration, and accommodation that left its stamp on subsequent social and economic relations in the country. White immigrant miners, because of their skills, scarcity, and political power, won relatively high wages. In contrast, the more numerous unskilled black migrants from throughout Southern Africa, especially from present-day Mozambique, earned low pay (at century’s end about one-ninth the wage of white miners). Migrant miners were housed in compounds, which facilitated their control and reduced overhead costs.

The road to war
Even before the discovery of gold, the South African interior was an arena of tension and competition. Germany annexed South West Africa in 1884. The Transvaal claimed territory to its west; Britain countered by designating the territory the Bechuanaland protectorate and then annexed it as the crown colony of British Bechuanaland. Rhodes secured concessionary rights to land north of the Limpopo River, founded the British South Africa Company, and in 1890 dispatched a pioneer column to occupy what became known as Rhodesia.

While these forces jostled for position in the region at large, the domestic politics of the Transvaal became unsettled. Paul Kruger’s government made strenuous efforts to accommodate the mining industry, but it was soon at loggerheads with Britain, the mine magnates, and the British and other non-Afrikaner Uitlander (“Outlander”) immigrants. British policy makers expressed concern about the Transvaal’s potential as an independent actor, and deep-level-mine owners chafed at mine bosses’ corruption and inefficiency. The grievances of the Uitlanders, largely excluded from the vote, provided both cause and cover for a conspiracy between British officials and mining capitalists. An Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg was to be supported by an armed invasion from Bechuanaland, headed by Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’s lieutenant, who would intervene to “restore order.”

The plot was botched. The Uitlander rising did not take place, but Jameson went ahead with his incursion in December 1895, and within days he and his force had been rounded up. While Rhodes had to resign as prime minister of the Cape, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain managed to conceal his complicity. The Jameson Raid polarized Anglo-Boer sentiment in South Africa, simultaneously exacerbating republican suspicions, Uitlander agitation, and imperial anxieties.

In February 1898 Kruger was elected to a fourth term as president of the Transvaal. He entered a series of negotiations with Sir Alfred Milner (who became high commissioner and governor of the Cape in 1897) over the issue of the Uitlander franchise. Milner declared in private early in 1898 that “war has got to come” and adopted intransigent positions. The Cape government, headed by William P. Schreiner, attempted to mediate, as did Marthinus Steyn, the president of Free State, even while he attached his cause to Kruger’s. In September 1899 the two Boer republics gave an ultimatum to Britain, and, when it expired on October 11, Boer forces invaded Natal.

The South African War (1899–1902)

While the government of Lord Salisbury in Britain went to war to secure its hegemony in Southern Africa, the Boer republics did so to preserve their independence. The expensive and brutal colonial war lasted two and a half years and pitted almost 500,000 imperial troops against 87,000 republican burghers, Cape “rebels,” and foreign volunteers. The numerical weakness of the Boers was offset by their familiarity with the terrain, support from the Afrikaner populace, and the poor leadership and dated tactics of the British command. Although often styled a “white man’s war,” both sides used blacks extensively as labour, and at least 10,000 blacks fought for the British.

In the first phase of the war, Boer armies took the offensive and punished British forces at Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein in December 1899 (“Black Week”). During 1900 Britain rushed reinforcements to the front, relieved sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and took Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. In the third phase, Boer commandos avoided conventional engagements in favour of guerrilla warfare. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, devised a scorched-earth policy against the commandos and the rural population supporting them, in which he destroyed arms, blockaded the countryside, and placed the civilian population in concentration camps. Some 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died of disease and malnutrition in these camps, while 14,000 blacks died in separate camps. In Britain the Liberal opposition vehemently objected to the government’s methods for winning the war.

Boer forces, which at the end consisted of about 20,000 exhausted and demoralized troops, sued for peace in May 1902. The Treaty of Vereeniging reflected the conclusive military victory of British power but made a crucial concession. It promised that the “question of granting the franchise to natives [blacks]” would be addressed only after self-government had been restored to the former Boer republics. The treaty thus allowed the white minority to decide the political fate of the black majority.

Reconstruction, union, and segregation (1902–29)

The Union of South Africa was born on May 31, 1910, created by a constitutional convention (in Durban in 1908) and an act of the British Parliament (1909). The infant state owed its conception to centralizing and modernizing forces generated by mineral discoveries, and its character was shaped by eight years of “reconstruction” between 1902 and 1910. During that period, efficient administrative structures were created, and a relationship developed between Afrikaner politicians and mining capitalists that consolidated the economic dominance of gold. Reconstruction also ensured that settler minorities would prevail over the black majority. Black societies were policed and taxed more effectively, and the new constitution excluded blacks from political power. Racial segregation was further developed through policies proposed during reconstruction and solidified after 1910.

Both Afrikaner and black nationalism utilized new political vehicles. Syndicalist white workers and Afrikaner republican diehards fought against employers and government, their clashes culminating in the Rand Revolt of 1922. Black protests against the new order ranged from genteel lobbying and passive resistance to armed rural revolt, strikes, and mass mobilization.

Milner and reconstruction
High Commissioner Milner transferred his headquarters from Cape Town to Pretoria in 1902. The move symbolized the centrality of the Transvaal to his mission of constructing a new order in South Africa. When Milner departed in 1905, his vision of a country politically dominated by English-speaking whites had failed. Schemes to flood the rural Transvaal with British settlers yielded only a trickle, and, worse yet, compulsory Anglicization of education only intensified feelings of Afrikaner nationalism. Opposition to “Milnerism” defined the emergent political groups led by former Boer generals Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, and J.B.M. (Barry) Hertzog. Milner had hoped to withhold self-rule from whites in South Africa until “there are three men of British race to two of Dutch.” But, when Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal ministry granted responsible government to the former republics in 1907, Afrikaner parties won elections in the Transvaal.

Yet, if Milner’s political design failed to take shape, he did largely realize his blueprint for economic and social engineering. Served by a group of handpicked young administrators, he made economic recovery a priority because it was imperative to restore the mines to profitability. He lowered rail rates and tariffs on imports and abolished the expensive concessions granted by the Kruger regime. Milner also made strenuous efforts to ensure cheap labour to the mines. To achieve this goal, he authorized the importation of some 60,000 Chinese indentured labourers when black migrants resisted wage cuts. Chinese miners, who would mostly return home by 1910, performed only certain tasks, but their employment set a precedent for a statutory colour bar in the gold mines. Although this experiment provoked political outcries in the Transvaal and in Britain, it succeeded in undercutting the bargaining power of black workers. The value of gold production swelled from £16 million in 1904 to £27 million by 1907.

The administration worked to remodel the Transvaal as a stable base for agricultural, industrial, and finance capital, spending some £16 million to return Afrikaners to their farms and equip them. It established a land bank, promoted scientific farming methods, and developed more-efficient tax-collection methods, which increased pressures on black peasants to work for white farmers. Especially on the Witwatersrand, the young administrators tackled town planning, public transport, housing, and sanitation, and in each of these spheres a new urban geography proceeded from the principle of separating white and black workers.

The South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) was appointed to provide comprehensive answers to “the native question.” Its report (1905) proposed territorial separation of black and white landownership, systematic urban segregation by the creation of black “locations,” the removal of black “squatters” from white farms and their replacement by wage labourers, and the segregation of blacks from whites in the political sphere. These (and other SANAC recommendations) provided the basis for laws passed between 1910 and 1936.

Convention and union
Concern in London over the electoral victory by the Afrikaner party Het Volk evaporated as soon as it became clear that both Botha and Smuts understood the economic preeminence of mining capital. A policy of reconciliation between Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites was also promoted.

A national convention, which met in Durban in 1908–09, drafted a constitution. Afrikaner leaders and Cape Premier John X. Merriman opted for a unitary state with Dutch and English as official languages and with parliamentary sovereignty. Executive authority was vested in a governor-general who would be advised by a cabinet from the governing party. Two “entrenched” clauses, on language and franchise, could be amended only by a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament. While Cape delegates favoured a colour-blind franchise, those from the Transvaal and Orange Free State demanded an exclusively white electorate. A compromise simply confirmed existing electoral arrangements. The former republics retained white male adult suffrage and did not consider female suffrage (white women finally won the right to vote in 1930). In 1910, 85 percent of Cape voters were white, 10 percent Coloured, and 5 percent black. Representation was further limited on racial lines: even in the Cape, only whites could stand for Parliament.

Black, Coloured, and Indian political responses
The South African War occurred at a time when many black communities suffered under great hardship. During the 1890s, drought and cattle disease (particularly rinderpest) impoverished pastoralists, while competition increased for black land and labour. During the war, most black South Africans identified with the British cause because imperial politicians assured them that “equal laws, equal liberty” for all races would prevail after a Boer defeat.

However, the Treaty of Vereeniging (see Vereeniging, Peace of ) withdrew such promises, and a sense of betrayal stimulated political protest, especially among mission-educated blacks. Various organizations arose to counter the impending union of white-ruled provinces by ethnically and regionally uniting blacks. In response to the constitutional convention, blacks held their own (the South African Native Convention) in Bloemfontein. This provided an important step toward the formation of a permanent national black political organization. Such an organization was finally founded on Jan. 8, 1912, when the South African Native National Congress (from 1923 the African National Congress; ANC) came into existence. Not all black protest occurred through the new middle-class organizations, however. Some black farmers from Natal refused to pay a poll tax in 1906, and their resistance developed into an armed rising led by Bambatha, a Zulu chief. At the end of this “reluctant rebellion,” between 3,000 and 4,000 blacks had been killed and many thousands imprisoned.

Parallel developments took place among politically conscious Coloureds and Indians. Their first nationally based organization was the African Political (later People’s) Organization, founded in Cape Town in 1902. Under the presidency of Abdullah Abdurahman, this body lobbied for Coloured rights and had links at times with other black political groups. Indians in the Transvaal, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, also resisted discriminatory legislation. Gandhi spent the years 1893 to 1914 in South Africa as a legal agent for Indian merchants in Natal and the Transvaal. Between 1906 and 1909, in protest against a Transvaal registration law requiring Indians to carry passes, Gandhi first implemented the methods of satyagraha (nonviolent noncompliance), which he later used with great effect in India.

Union and disunity
Supported by the majority party in each province and by the British government, Louis Botha formed the first union government in May 1910. The Botha administration entered a period of continuous change and violent conflict as tensions arose from issues left unresolved by the constitution, from rapid but uneven economic growth, and from the legacy of conquest and dispossession of the indigenous peoples.

One source of conflict was the relationship between employers and organized white workers. The Chamber of Mines and miners’ trade unions on the Witwatersrand engaged in combat for a decade and a half. Whenever violent confrontations flared up—as they did in 1907, 1913, and 1914—the government deployed troops to end the strikes. White workers suspended strike action during World War I, but militancy returned in 1919, this time fueled by inflation. The Chamber of Mines announced in December 1921 that, because of rising costs and a falling gold price, it planned on replacing semiskilled white workers with lower-paid blacks. A miners’ protest stoppage in January 1922 became a general strike, and in March it developed into an armed rising, with strikers organized as commandos. Jan Smuts, prime minister since Botha’s death in 1919, used artillery and aircraft to crush what became known as the Rand Revolt, at a cost of some 200 lives. This intense conflict between white unions and employers ended with the passage of the Industrial Conciliation Act in 1924, which set up new state structures for regulating industrial conflicts.

Black workers also engaged in sporadic strikes before, during, and after World War I, giving rise to the first black trade unions. More than 70,000 African gold miners halted production for a week when they struck for higher wages in February 1920. Soldiers and police broke the strike, but not before 11 miners died and more than 100 were injured. This strike was part of a wave of protest in several cities as inflation eroded the real wages of black workers.

Afrikaner rebellion and nationalism
When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, South Africa’s dominion status meant that it was automatically at war, and its troops mobilized to invade German South West Africa. This sparked a rebellion led by former Boer generals, who held high-ranking positions as officers in the Union Defence Force. Some 10,000 soldiers, mainly poverty-stricken rural Afrikaners, joined the rising. The government used 32,000 troops to suppress it, and more than 300 men lost their lives in the fighting.

The rebellion, though, was an atypical episode in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism as a political force. More-telling responses came from those Afrikaners who had been profoundly affected by economic change, war, and reconstruction. After 1902, thousands of landless families streamed into the cities, indicating the extent to which the prewar rural social order had crumbled. One response to the threat of further disintegration was a “second language movement” spearheaded by teachers, clergymen, journalists, and lawyers who felt deeply threatened by the cultural dominance of English speakers. It succeeded in its immediate aim when Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language in 1925.

J.B.M. Hertzog founded the National Party in 1914, with support mainly from “poor whites” and militant intellectuals. The general election of 1915 gave the National Party 30 percent of the vote, with Afrikaners deserting the South African Party led by Botha and Smuts. Hertzog’s party won a majority of both seats and votes in 1920 on a platform of republicanism and separate school systems for Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites. The June 1924 election propelled Hertzog to the position of prime minister through a coalition between the National and Labour parties known as the Pact government.

Segregation

In the first two decades of the union, segregation became a distinctive feature of South African political, social, and economic life as whites addressed the “native question.” Blacks were “retribalized” and their ethnic differences highlighted. New statutes provided for racial separation in industrial, territorial, administrative, and residential spheres. This barrage of legislation was partly the product of reactionary attitudes inherited from the past and partly an effort to regulate class and race relations during a period of rapid industrialization when the black population was growing steadily.

The 1911 Mines and Works Act and its 1926 successor reserved certain jobs in mining and the railways for white workers. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 defined less than one-tenth of South Africa as black “reserves” and prohibited any purchase or lease of land by blacks outside the reserves. The law also restricted the terms of tenure under which blacks could live on white-owned farms. The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 segregated urban residential space and created “influx controls” to reduce access to cities by blacks. Hertzog proposed increasing the reserve areas and removing black voters in the Cape from the common roll in 1926, aims that were finally realized through the Representation of Natives Act (1936). Blacks now voted on a separate roll to elect three white representatives to the House of Assembly.

The Pact years (1924–33)

Hertzog’s Pact government strengthened South Africa’s autonomy, aided local capital, and protected white workers against black competition. Hertzog also played a leading role at the Imperial Conference in London that issued the Balfour Report (1926), establishing autonomy in foreign affairs for the dominions. When he returned from Britain, Hertzog turned his attention to creating the symbols of nationalism—flag and anthem. Economic nationalism included protective tariffs for local industry, subsidies to facilitate agricultural exports, and a state-run iron and steel industry. White trade unions grew more bureaucratic and less militant, although their members enjoyed at best modest material gains. Unskilled and nonunionized whites who received support through sheltered employment in the public sector and through prescribed minimum wages in the private sector gained more directly. Although the overall level of white poverty remained high, through these policies the manufacturing sector absorbed white labour nearly twice as fast as black.

Blacks gained little during this period and continued to lose earlier benefits. For them, segregation meant restricted mobility, diminished opportunities, more-stringent controls, and a general sense of exclusion. Economic conditions in the reserves continued to deteriorate; the terms of tenancy became more onerous on white-owned farms; and the urban slums provided a harsh alternative for those who left the land.

The first mass-based black political organization, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), flourished in response to deteriorating conditions. Until 1926 the ICU was a Cape-based organization with black and some Coloured members drawn mainly from urban areas. As a broadly based vehicle of rural protest, it had many thousands of supporters among black tenants on white farms. The ICU linked innumerable local rural grievances with a generalized call for land and liberation, but by 1929 its influence had declined. However, other organizations built on its base. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1921, was at first active almost solely within white trade unions, but from 1925 it recruited black members more energetically, and in 1928–29 it called for black majority rule and closer cooperation with the ANC. Its connection to the ANC occurred most prominently with Josiah Gumede (president 1927–30), whose political views moved leftward in the late 1920s. This led to a split in the ANC in 1930 as the more moderate members expelled the more radical ones.

The 1929 general election reflected the political challenges to white supremacy. For the first time since union, questions of “native policy” dominated white electoral politics. Afrikaner nationalists made “black peril” and “communist menace” their rallying cries. It was not to be the last such occasion.

Colin J. Bundy
Julian R.D. Cobbing



 

The apartheid years

The intensification of apartheid in the 1930s
The Hertzog government achieved a major goal in 1931 when the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, which removed the last vestiges of British legal authority over South Africa. Three years later the South African Parliament secured that decision by enacting the Status of the Union Act, which declared the country to be “a sovereign independent state.”

Although Hertzog’s National Party held a majority of the seats in the House of Assembly and dominated the South African cabinet in the early 1930s, its mismanagement of problems created by the Great Depression led him to form a coalition with his rival Smuts in 1933. Smuts was the leader of the South African Party, whose support came from the major industrialists and which was the party of most of the English-speaking whites (who made up less than half of the white population). In contrast, the National Party derived its main support from Afrikaner farmers and intellectuals. By 1934 the two organizations had merged to form the United Party, with Hertzog as prime minister and Smuts his deputy. The two parties and the two leaders had a common interest in favouring the enfranchised population, nearly all of whom were white, over the unenfranchised, all of whom were black. They agreed to provide massive support for white farmers, to assist poor whites by providing them with jobs protected from black competition, and to curb the movement of blacks from the reserves into the towns. Meanwhile, National Party member Daniel F. Malan disagreed with the merger of the parties and chose to keep the National Party functioning.

The earnings from South Africa’s gold exports increased sharply after Britain and the United States abandoned the gold standard in the early 1930s. White farmers prospered; new secondary industries were established; and South Africans of all races continued to flock to the towns. South Africa changed from a predominantly rural country that exported raw materials and imported manufactured consumer goods into a country with a diverse economy. Although the standard of living for most whites improved greatly from this expansion, the lives of Coloureds, blacks, and Indians were hardly affected. The government did add some land to the reserves in 1936, but it never exceeded 13 percent of the area of the country. Until the end of apartheid, almost nine-tenths of South Africa—including the best land for agriculture and the bulk of the mineral deposits—belonged exclusively to whites. Unsurprisingly, conditions on the native reserves became progressively worse through overpopulation and soil erosion. The government attempted to resolve these problems through a series of programs called Betterment Schemes, which involved keeping tight control over land use in the reserves, often drastically culling cattle, and enforcing the building of contour ridges to reduce soil erosion. Overcrowding in the reserves made it necessary for a high proportion of the men to work for wages elsewhere—on white farms or in the towns, where they lived in a hostile world. Black and Coloured farm labourers, scattered in small groups throughout the agricultural areas, were isolated, and in the towns life was insecure and wages low. In the gold-mining industry the real wages of blacks declined by about one-seventh between 1911 and 1941; white miners received 12 times the salary of blacks.

Education for blacks was left largely to Christian missions, whose resources, even when augmented by small government grants, enabled them to enroll only a small proportion of the black population. Missionaries did, however, run numerous schools, including some excellent high schools that took a few pupils through to the university level; and missionaries were the dominant influence at the South African Native College at Fort Hare (founded 1916), which included degree courses. These institutions educated a small but increasing number of blacks, who secured teaching jobs and positions in the lower reaches of the civil service or functioned as clergy (especially in the independent churches that had broken away from mainstream white churches).

Educated blacks were frustrated by the fact that whites did not treat them as equals, and some of them took part in opposition politics in the ANC. However, the ANC and two parallel movements—the African Political Organization (a Coloured group) and the South African Indian Congress—had little popular support and exerted little influence during this period. Their leaders were mission-educated men who had liberal goals and used strictly constitutional methods, such as petitions to the authorities. The radical African ICU had collapsed by 1930, and the CPSA made little headway among blacks.

World War II
When Britain declared war on Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, the United Party split. Hertzog wanted South Africa to remain neutral, but Smuts opted for joining the British war effort. Smuts’s faction narrowly won the crucial parliamentary debate, and Hertzog and his followers left the party, many rejoining the National Party faction Malan had maintained since 1934. Smuts then became the prime minister, and South Africa declared war on Germany.

South Africa made significant contributions to the Allied war effort. Some 135,000 white South Africans fought in the East and North African and Italian campaigns, and 70,000 blacks and Coloureds served as labourers and transport drivers. South African platinum, uranium, and steel became valuable resources, and, during the period that the Mediterranean Sea was closed to the Allies, Durban and Cape Town provisioned a vast number of ships en route from Britain to the Suez.

The war proved to be an economic stimulant for South Africa, although wartime inflation and lagging wages contributed to social protests and strikes after the end of the war. Driven by reduced imports, the manufacturing and service industries expanded rapidly, and the flow of blacks to the towns became a flood. By the war’s end, more blacks than whites lived in the towns. They set up vast squatter camps on the outskirts of the cities and improvised shelters from whatever materials they could find. They also began to flex their political muscles. Blacks boycotted a Witwatersrand bus company that tried to raise fares, they formed trade unions, and in 1946 more than 60,000 black gold miners went on strike for higher wages and improved living conditions.

Although the 1946 strike was brutally suppressed by the government, white intellectuals did propose a series of reforms within the segregation framework. The government and private industry made a few concessions, such as easing the industrial colour bar, increasing black wages, and relaxing the pass laws, which restricted the right of blacks to live and work in white areas. The government, however, failed to discuss these problems with black representatives.

Afrikaners felt threatened by the concessions given to blacks and created a series of ethnic organizations to promote their interests, including an economic association, a federation of Afrikaans cultural associations, and the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret society of Afrikaner cultural leaders. During the war many Afrikaners welcomed the early German victories, and some of them even committed acts of sabotage.

The United Party, which had won the general election in 1943 by a large majority, approached the 1948 election complacently. While the party appeared to take an ambiguous position on race relations, Malan’s National Party took an unequivocally pro-white stance. The National Party claimed that the government’s weakness threatened white supremacy and produced a statement that used the word apartheid to describe a program of tightened segregation and discrimination. With the support of a tiny fringe group, the National Party won the election by a narrow margin.

The National Party and apartheid
After its victory the National Party rapidly consolidated its control over the state and in subsequent years won a series of elections with increased majorities. Parliament removed Coloured voters from the common voters’ rolls in 1956. By 1969 the electorate was exclusively white: Indians never had any parliamentary representation, and the seats for white representatives of blacks and Coloureds had been abolished.

One plank of the National Party platform was for South Africa to become a republic, preferably outside the Commonwealth. The issue was presented to white voters in 1960 as a way to bring about white unity, especially because of concern with the problems that the Belgian Congo was then experiencing as it became independent. By a simple majority the voters approved the republic status. The government structure would change only slightly: the governor-general would be replaced by a state president, who would be chosen by Parliament. At a meeting in London in March 1961, South Africa had hoped to retain its Commonwealth status, but, when other members criticized it over its apartheid policies, it withdrew from the organization and on May 31, 1961, became the Republic of South Africa.

The government vigorously furthered its political goals by making it compulsory for white children to attend schools that were conducted in their home language, either Afrikaans or English (except for the few who went to private schools). It advanced Afrikaners to top positions in the civil service, army, and police and in such state corporations as the South African Broadcasting Corporation. It also awarded official contracts to Afrikaner banks and insurance companies. These methods raised the living standard of Afrikaners closer to that of English-speaking white South Africans.

Following a recession in the early 1960s, the economy grew rapidly until the late 1970s. By that time, owing to the efforts of public and private enterprise, South Africa had developed a modern infrastructure, by far the most advanced in Africa. It possessed efficient financial institutions, a national network of roads and railways, modernized port facilities in Cape Town and Durban, long-established mining operations producing a wealth of diamonds, gold, and coal, and a range of industries. De Beers Consolidated Mines and the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, dominated the private sector, forming the core of one of the world’s most powerful networks of mining, industrial, and financial companies and employing some 800,000 workers on six continents. State corporations (parastatals) controlled industries vital to national security. South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation (SASOL) was established in 1950 to make South Africa self-sufficient in petroleum resources by converting coal to gasoline and diesel fuel. After the United Nations (UN) placed a ban on arms exports to South Africa in 1964, Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) was created to produce high-quality military equipment.

The man who played a major part in transforming apartheid from an election slogan into practice was Hendrik F. Verwoerd. Born in the Netherlands, Verwoerd immigrated with his parents to South Africa when he was a child. He became minister of native affairs in 1950 and was prime minister from 1958 until 1966, when Dimitri Tsafendas, a Coloured man, assassinated him in Parliament. (Tsafendas was judged to be insane and was confined to a mental institution after the murder.) Verwoerd’s successor, B.J. Vorster, had been minister of justice, police, and prisons, and he shared Verwoerd’s philosophy of white supremacy. In Verwoerd’s vision, South Africa’s population contained four distinct racial groups—white, black, Coloured, and Asian—each with an inherent culture. Because whites were the “civilized” group, they were entitled to control the state.

The all-white Parliament passed many laws to legalize and institutionalize the apartheid system. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism and its aims broadly to include any opposition to the government and empowered the government to detain anyone it thought might further “communist” aims. The Indemnity Act (1961) made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture, or to kill in the pursuit of official duties. Later laws gave the police the right to arrest and detain people without trial and to deny them access to their families or lawyers. Other laws and regulations collectively known as “petty apartheid” segregated South Africans in every sphere of life: in buses, taxis, and hearses, in cinemas, restaurants, and hotels, in trains and railway waiting rooms, and in access to beaches. When a court declared that separate amenities should be equal, Parliament passed a special law to override it.

“Grand apartheid,” in contrast, related to the physical separation of the racial groups in the cities and countryside. Under the Group Areas Act (1950) the cities and towns of South Africa were divided into segregated residential and business areas. Thousands of Coloureds, blacks, and Indians were removed from areas classified for white occupation.

Blacks were treated like “tribal” people and were required to live on reserves under hereditary chiefs except when they worked temporarily in white towns or on white farms. The government began to consolidate the scattered reserves into 8 (eventually 10) distinct territories, designating each of them as the “homeland,” or Bantustan, of a specific black ethnic community. The government manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Arguing that Bantustans matched the decolonization process then taking place in tropical Africa, the government devolved powers onto those administrations and eventually encouraged them to become “independent.” Between 1976 and 1981 four accepted independence—Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei—though none was ever recognized by a foreign government. Like the other homelands, however, they were economic backwaters, dependent on subsidies from Pretoria.

Conditions in the homelands continued to deteriorate, partly because they had to accommodate vast numbers of people with minimal resources. Many people found their way to the towns; but the government, attempting to reverse this flood, strengthened the pass laws by making it illegal for blacks to be in a town for more than 72 hours at a time without a job in a white home or business. A particularly brutal series of forced removals were conducted from the 1960s to the early ’80s, in which more than 3.5 million blacks were taken from towns and white rural areas (including lands they had occupied for generations) and dumped into the reserves, sometimes in the middle of winter and without any facilities.

The government also established direct control over the education of blacks. The Bantu Education Act (1953) took black schools away from the missions, and more state-run schools—especially at the elementary level—were created to meet the expanding economy’s increasing demand for semiskilled black labour. The Extension of University Education Act (1959) prohibited the established universities from accepting black students, except with special permission. Instead, the government created new ethnic university colleges—one each for Coloureds, Indians, and Zulus and one for Sotho, Tswana, and Venda students, as well as a medical school for blacks. The South African Native College at Fort Hare, which missionaries had founded primarily but not exclusively for blacks, became a state college solely for Xhosa students. The government staffed these ethnic colleges with white supporters of the National Party and subjected the students to stringent controls.

Resistance to apartheid

Apartheid imposed heavy burdens on most South Africans. The economic gap between the wealthy few, nearly all of whom were white, and the poor masses, virtually all of whom were black, Coloured, or Indian, was larger than in any other country in the world. While whites generally lived well, Indians, Coloureds, and especially blacks suffered from widespread poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Most South Africans struggled daily for survival despite the growth of the national economy.

After the ANC Youth League emerged in the early 1940s, the ANC itself came to life again under a vigorous president, Albert Luthuli, and three younger men—Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Nelson Mandela (the latter two briefly had a joint law practice in Johannesburg). The South African Indian Congress, which had also been revitalized, helped the ANC organize a defiance campaign in 1952, during which thousands of volunteers defied discriminatory laws by passively courting arrest and burning their pass books. A mass meeting held three years later, called Congress of the People, included Indians, Coloureds, and sympathetic whites. The Freedom Charter was adopted, asserting that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white, and no Government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.” The government broke up the meeting, subsequently arrested more than 150 people, and charged them with high treason. Although the trial did not result in any guilty verdicts, it dragged on until 1961. To prevent further gatherings, the government passed the Prohibition of Political Interference Act (1968), which banned the formation and foreign financing of nonracial political parties.

Robert Sobukwe, a language teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand, led a group of blacks who broke away from the ANC in 1959 and founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) because they believed that the ANC’s alliance with white, Coloured, and Indian organizations had impeded the struggle for black liberation. The PAC launched a fresh antipass campaign in March 1960, and thousands of unarmed blacks invited arrest by presenting themselves at police stations without passes. At Sharpeville, a black township near Johannesburg, the police opened fire on the crowd outside a police station. At least 67 blacks were killed and more than 180 wounded, most of them shot in the back. Thousands of workers then went on strike, and in Cape Town some 30,000 blacks marched in a peaceful protest to the centre of the city. Rebellion in rural areas such as Pondoland also erupted at this time against the controls of homeland authorities. The government reestablished control by force by mobilizing the army, outlawing the ANC and the PAC, and arresting more than 11,000 people under emergency regulations.

After Sharpeville the ANC and PAC leaders and some of their white sympathizers came to the conclusion that apartheid could never be overcome by peaceful means alone. PAC established an armed wing called Poqo, and the ANC set up its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), in 1961. Although their military units detonated several bombs in government buildings during the next few years, the ANC and PAC did not pose a serious threat to the state, which had a virtual monopoly on modern weaponry. By 1964 the government had captured many of the leaders, including Mandela and Sobukwe, and they were sentenced to long terms at the prison on Robben Island in Table Bay, off Cape Town. Other perpetrators of acts of sabotage, including John Harris (who was white), were hanged. Hundreds of others fled the country, and Tambo presided over the ANC’s executive headquarters in Zambia.

The unraveling of apartheid
The government was successful at containing opposition for almost a decade, and foreign investment that had been briefly withdrawn in the early 1960s returned. Such conditions proved to be only temporary, however.

A new phase of resistance began in 1973 when black trade unions organized a series of strikes for higher wages and improved working conditions. Stephen Biko and other black students founded the Black Peoples Convention (BPC) in 1972 and inaugurated what was loosely termed the Black Consciousness movement, which appealed to blacks to take pride in their own culture and proved immensely attractive.

On June 16, 1976, thousands of children in Soweto, an African township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the government’s insistence that they be taught in Afrikaans rather than in English. When the police opened fire with tear gas and then bullets, the incident initiated a nationwide cycle of protest and repression. Using its usual tactics, the government banned many organizations such as the BPC, and within a year the police had killed more than 500, including Biko. These events focused worldwide attention on South Africa. The UN General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973; four years later the UN Security Council voted unanimously to impose a mandatory embargo on the export of arms to South Africa.

The illusion that apartheid would bring peace to South Africa had shattered by 1978. Most of the homelands proved to be economic and political disasters: labour was their only significant export, and most of their leadership was corrupt and unpopular. The national economy entered a period of recession, coupled with high inflation, and many skilled whites emigrated. South Africa, increasingly isolated as the last bastion of white racial domination on the continent, became the focus of global denunciation.

At that time the leadership of the National Party passed to a new class of urban Afrikaners—business leaders and intellectuals who, like their English-speaking white counterparts, believed that reforms should be introduced to appease foreign and domestic critics. Pieter W. Botha succeeded B.J. Vorster as prime minister in August 1978, and his government introduced some reforms, but it also increased state controls. It repealed the bans on interracial sex and marriage, desegregated many hotels, restaurants, trains, and buses, removed the reservation of skilled jobs for whites, and repealed the pass laws. Provided that black trade unions registered, they received access to a new industrial court, and they legally could strike. A new constitution was promulgated that created separate parliamentary bodies for Indians and for Coloureds, but it also vested great powers in an executive president, namely Botha.

The Botha reforms, however, stopped short of making any real change in the distribution of power. The white parliamentary chamber could override the Coloured and Indian chambers on matters of national significance, and all blacks remained disenfranchised. The Group Areas Act and the Land Acts maintained residential segregation. Schools and health and welfare services for blacks, Indians, and Coloureds remained segregated and inferior, and most nonwhites, especially blacks, were still desperately poor. Moreover, Botha used the State Security Council, which was dominated by military officers, rather than the cabinet as his major policy-making body, and he embarked on a massive military buildup. Military service for white males, already universal, increased from nine months to two years and included annual reserve duty.

South Africa’s black neighbours formed the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference in 1979 in an effort to limit South Africa’s economic domination of the region, but it made little progress. Most of the export trade from the region continued to pass through the country to South African ports, and South Africa provided employment for some 280,000 migrant workers from neighbouring countries. Botha also used South Africa’s military strength to restrain its neighbours from pursuing antiapartheid policies. The South African Defense Force (SADF) assisted the Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance) rebels in Mozambique and the UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) faction in Angola’s civil war. SADF troops entered Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Mozambique in order to make preemptive attacks on ANC groups and their allies in these countries. Botha kept what was then called South West Africa/Namibia under South African domination in defiance of the UN, which had withdrawn the mandate it had granted to South Africa over the region. The country even produced a few nuclear weapons, the testing of which was detected in 1979. Increasingly, South African dissidents from all race groups were harassed, banned, or detained in prison without necessarily being charged under renewable 90-day detention sentences.

During the 1980s the conservative administrations of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States faced increasingly insistent pressures for sanctions against South Africa. A high-level Commonwealth mission went to South Africa in 1986 in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the government to suspend its military actions in the townships, release political prisoners, and stop destabilizing neighbouring countries. Later that year American public resentment of South Africa’s racial policies was strong enough for the U.S. Congress to pass—over a presidential veto—the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which banned new investments and loans, ended air links, and prohibited the importation of many commodities. Other governments took similar actions.

The struggle intensified during the early 1980s and became further polarized. The new constitution of 1983 attempted to split the opposition to apartheid by meeting Indian and Coloured grievances while at the same time giving blacks no political rights except in the homelands. In response, more than 500 community groups formed the United Democratic Front, which became closely identified with the exiled ANC. Strikes, boycotts, and attacks on black police and urban councillors began escalating, and a state of emergency was declared in many parts of the country in 1985; a year later the government promulgated a nationwide state of emergency and embarked on a campaign to eliminate all opposition. For three years policemen and soldiers patrolled the black townships in armed vehicles. They destroyed black squatter camps and detained, abused, and killed thousands of blacks, while the army continued its forays into neighbouring countries. Rigid censorship laws tried to conceal those actions by banning television, radio, and newspaper coverage.

The brute force used by the government did not halt dissent. Long-standing critics such as Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, defied the government, and influential Afrikaner clerics and intellectuals withdrew their support. Resistance by black workers continued, including a massive strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, and saboteurs caused an increasing number of deaths and injuries. The economy suffered severe strain from the costs of sanctions, administering apartheid, and military adventurism, especially in Namibia and Angola. The gross domestic product decreased; annual inflation rose above 14 percent; and investment capital became scarce. Moreover, in 1988 the army suffered a military setback in Angola, after which the government signed an accord paving the way for the removal of Cuban troops that had been sent to Angola and for the UN-supervised independence of Namibia in 1990. Given these circumstances, many whites came to realize that there was no stopping the incorporation of blacks into the South African political system.

Government officials held several discussions with imprisoned ANC leader Mandela as these events unfolded, but Botha balked at the idea of allowing blacks to participate in the political system. National Party dissent against Botha in 1989 forced him to step down as both party leader and president. The National Party parliamentary caucus subsequently chose F.W. de Klerk, the party’s Transvaal provincial leader, as his successor. More than 20 years younger than Botha, de Klerk exhibited more sensitivity to the dynamics of a world where, as democracy arose in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the blatant racism that still existed in South Africa could no longer be tolerated. De Klerk announced a program of radical change in a dramatic address to Parliament on Feb. 2, 1990; nine days later Mandela was released from prison. During the next year Parliament repealed the basic apartheid laws, lifted the state of emergency, freed many political prisoners, and allowed exiles to return to South Africa.

Postapartheid South Africa

The Mandela presidency

Transition to majority rule
Mandela was elected president of the ANC in 1991, succeeding Tambo, who was in poor health and died two years later. Mandela and de Klerk, who both wanted to reach a peaceful solution to South Africa’s problems, met with representatives of most of the political organizations in the country, with a mandate to draw up a new constitution. These negotiations took place amid pervasive and escalating violence, especially in the southern Transvaal, the industrial heart of the country, and in Natal. Most of the conflicts in the Transvaal occurred between Zulu migrant workers, who were housed in large hostels, and the residents of the adjacent townships. The conflicts in Natal existed mainly between Zulu supporters of the ANC and members of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a Zulu movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland.

As the bargaining continued, both Mandela and de Klerk made concessions, with the result that both of them ran the risk of losing the support of their respective constituencies. While whites were loath to forfeit their power and privileges, blacks had hoped to win complete control of the state. A majority of white voters endorsed the negotiating process in a referendum in 1992, but both white and black extremists tried to sabotage the process through various acts of terror.

Mandela and de Klerk finally reached a peaceful agreement on the future of South Africa at the end of 1993, an achievement for which they jointly received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. In addition, leaders of 18 other parties endorsed an interim constitution, which was to take effect immediately after South Africa’s first election by universal suffrage, scheduled for April 1994. A parliament to be elected at that time would oversee the drafting of a permanent constitution for the country. The temporary constitution enfranchised all citizens 18 and older, abolished the homelands, and divided the country into nine new provinces, with provincial governments receiving substantial powers. It also contained a long list of political and social rights and a mechanism through which blacks could regain ownership of land that had been taken away under apartheid.

The ANC won almost two-thirds of the 1994 vote, the National Party slightly more than one-fifth, and the IFP most of the rest; all three received proportional cabinet representation. The ANC also became the majority party in seven of the provinces, but the IFP won a majority in KwaZulu-Natal, and the National Party—supported by mixed-race (people formerly classified as “Coloured” under apartheid) as well as white voters—won a majority in Western Cape. Mandela was sworn in as president of the new South Africa on May 10 before a vast jubilant crowd that included the secretary-general of the UN, 45 heads of state, and delegations from many other countries. Thabo Mbeki, a top official in the ANC, and de Klerk both became deputy presidents.

The new, multiparty “government of national unity” aimed to provide Africans with improved education, housing, electricity, running water, and sanitation. Recognizing that economic growth was essential for such purposes, the ANC adopted a moderate economic policy, dropping the socialist elements that had characterized its earlier programs. Mandela and his colleagues campaigned vigorously for foreign aid and investment, but capital investment entered the new South Africa slowly.

The government also had to grapple with a host of daunting institutional problems associated with the transition to a postapartheid society. Blacks joined the civil service; antiapartheid guerrillas became members of the police and the army; and new municipal governments that embraced both the old white cities and their black township satellites sprang into existence. Labour disputes, criminal violence, and conflict between Zulu factions, especially in KwaZulu-Natal, continued. The IFP (which supported a new provincial constitution that granted a sweeping autonomy to KwaZulu-Natal but was struck down by the Constitutional Court) refused to participate in the process that resulted in the creation of the new national constitution that Parliament passed in May 1996. Parliament revised the constitution in October after it was reviewed by the Constitutional Court; Mandela signed it into law in December of the same year. Also in 1996, the National Party left the government to form a “dynamic but responsible” opposition.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The most important domestic agency created during Mandela’s presidency was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established to review atrocities committed during the apartheid years. It was set up in 1995 under the leadership of Archbishop Tutu and was given the power to grant amnesty to those found to have committed “gross violations of human rights” under extenuating circumstances. By the time the TRC delivered its five-volume report in 1999, more than 7,000 applications for amnesty had been reviewed; of those, about 150 had been granted. Applicants not given amnesty were subject to further legal proceedings.

The TRC was the target of widespread criticism: whites saw it as selectively targeting them, and blacks viewed its actions as a charade that allowed perpetrators of heinous crimes to go free. Former president P.W. Botha refused to answer a summons to give testimony to the commission and received a fine and a suspended sentence, although the sentence was later appealed and overturned. Nonetheless, the TRC uncovered information that otherwise would have remained hidden or taken longer to surface. For example, details of the murders of numerous ANC members were exposed, as were the operations of the State Counterinsurgency Unit at Vlakplaas; its commander, Colonel Eugene de Kock, was subsequently sentenced to a long prison term. The commission also investigated those opposed to apartheid. One of the most prominent was Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, who served briefly as a deputy minister in 1994–95. Her attempts to attain other offices ended when the TRC report indicated that she had been involved in apartheid-era violence. The report also allowed many to finally learn the fate of relatives or friends who had “disappeared” at the hands of the authorities.

 

South Africa since Mandela
Mbeki replaced Mandela as president of the ANC in December 1997 and became president of the country after the ANC’s triumphant win in the June 1999 elections. Mbeki pledged to address economic woes and the need to improve the social conditions in the country. The ANC was again victorious in the April 2004 elections, and Mbeki was elected to serve another term. South Africa had entered the 21st century with enormous problems to resolve, but the smooth transition of power in a government that represented a majority of the people—something unthinkable less than a decade earlier—provided hope that those problems could be addressed peaceably.

Leonard Monteath Thompson
Julian R.D. Cobbing

In March 2005 deputy president Jacob Zuma—who was widely held to be Mbeki’s successor as president of the ANC and, eventually, as president of the country—was dismissed by Mbeki amid charges of corruption and fraud; the next year Zuma stood trial for an unrelated charge of rape. He was acquitted of rape in May 2006, and the corruption charges were dropped later that year. Despite the repeated allegations of wrongdoing, which his supporters claimed were politically motivated, Zuma remained a popular figure within the ANC and was selected over Mbeki to be party president at the ANC conference in December 2007, in what was one of the most contentious leadership battles in the party’s history. Later that month Zuma was recharged with corruption and fraud, and additional charges were brought against him. All charges were eventually dismissed in September 2008 on a legal technicality, but prosecutors from the National Prosecuting Agency (NPA) vowed to appeal the ruling.

Ironically, it was perhaps Mbeki rather than Zuma who was most politically harmed by the controversy surrounding Zuma’s corruption charges. Following an allegation by a High Court judge that there had been political interference (allegedly by Mbeki or at his behest) in Zuma’s prosecution on corruption-related charges, on Sept. 20, 2008, Mbeki was asked by the ANC to resign from the South African presidency, which he agreed to do once the relevant constitutional requirements had been fulfilled. On September 25 he was succeeded by Kgalema Motlanthe, who was selected by the National Assembly to serve as interim president until elections could be held in 2009.

As the 2009 general election drew near, the spotlight was once again on the corruption-related charges against Zuma and the allegations of political interference, culminating in an announcement by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) on April 6, 2009, that the charges would be withdrawn. Although prosecutors stated that they felt the charges had merit, they noted evidence of misconduct in the handling of Zuma’s case. Opposition parties condemned the announcement, alleging that the NPA bowed to pressure from the ANC to drop the charges before the election, and complained that the NPA’s actions left the question of Zuma’s innocence unresolved. The ANC, however, was unscathed by the pre-election drama. It finished far ahead of the other parties in the April 22 general election, winning almost 66 percent of the vote, and Zuma was poised to become the country’s next president. He was officially elected to the presidency in a National Assembly vote, held on May 6; he was inaugurated on May 9.

Ed.