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.
