South Africa

South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa is a country located at the southern tip of Africa. It has 2,798 kilometres (1,739 mi) of coastline that stretches along the South Atlantic and Indian oceans. South Africa borders Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe to the north, Mozambique and Swaziland to the east, and within its territory lies Lesotho.

South Africa has experienced a significantly different evolution that most nations on the African continent for two reasons. First, immigration from Europe reached levels not found in other African nations. Second, the importance of the route around the Cape of Good Hope, as emphasised by the closure of the Suez Canal during the Six-Day War, and the abundance of gold and diamonds made the country exremely important to Western interests. As a result of the former, South Africa is one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world, with white South Africans composing about 8.9 percent of the population. South Africa also has the largest community of mixed-race peoples (called "Coloureds") and Asians in the African continent. Black South Africans make up about 80 percent of the population and speak a variety of Bantu languages, nine of which have official status.

South Africa is one of the few nations in Africa to have never experienced a coup d'état, and democratic elections were held regularly since 1910. However, the black majority were not enfrachised until 1994. South Africa has the largest and most developed economy on the African continent.

South Africa is often referred to as the "Rainbow Nation", a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and later applied by then-President Nelson Mandela to describe the multicultural diversity of the nation in wake of apartheid.

Prehistoric Finds and European Discovery
South Africa contains some of the oldest archaeological sites in Africa. Extensive fossil remains at the Sterkfontein, Kromdraai and Makapansgat caves suggest that various australopithecines existed in South Africa from about three million years ago. These were succeeded by various species of Homo, including Homo habilis, Homo erectus and modern man, Homo sapiens. Bantu-speaking peoples (the term Bantu is a linguistic term not an ethnic one), iron-using agriculturists and herdsmen, moved south of the Limpopo River into modern-day South Africa by the 4th or 5th century (the Bantu expansion) displacing the original Khoi and San speakers. They slowly moved south and the earliest ironworks in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal Province are believed to date from around 1050. The southernmost group was the Xhosa people, whose language incorporates certain linguistic traits from the earlier Khoi and San people, reaching the Fish River, in today's Eastern Cape Province. These Iron Age populations displaced earlier hunter-gatherer peoples as they migrated.

The written history of South Africa begins with the accounts of European navigators passing South Africa on the East Indies trade routes. Subsequent to the first circumnavigation of the Cape in 1488 by the Portuguese Explorer Bartolomeu Dias a number of shipwrecks occurred along the Southern African coast. Along with the accounts of the early navigators, the accounts of shipwreck survivors provide the earliest written accounts of Southern Africa. In the two centuries following 1488 a number of small fishing settlements were made along the coast by Portuguese sailors, but no written account of these settlements survives.

Dutch Rule in the Cape
In 1652, a refreshment station was established by Jan van Riebeeck on the Cape of Good Hope, at what would eventually become Cape Town, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch transported slaves from Indonesia, Madagascar, and India as labour and troublesome leaders, often of royal dissent, were banished to the Dutch Cape Colony. The dissendants of the slaves brought to the Cape became known as Cape Malays.

A series of wars, called the Cape Frontier Wars ensued throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, mostly as a result of conflicting land interests between the Dutch settlers and the Xhosa people.

British Annexation and the Great Trek
Great Britain seized the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch after the Dutch East India Company had declared bankruptcy in 1787. The British shortly afterwards returned the Cape Colony back to the Dutch, but later formally annexed the area and declared it to be the British Cape Colony in 1805. The British continued the wars against the Xhosa, pushing the frontier eastward towards the Fish River and encouraged British settlement in the area.

Due to pressure from abolitionist societies, Britain stopped the slave trade in 1806 and formally abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1833. In the Cape in particular, the colonial government's Ordinance 50 passed in 1828 overrode existing labour controls on the colony's Coloured population. Because of this and other liberalizing policies, thousands of Afrikaners (dissendants of Dutch, Flemish, German, and French settlers) emigrated from the Cape Colony in a mass migration called the Great Trek. The Voortrekers clamed land north-east of the Cape Colony and founded their own countries called the Orange Free State, the South African Republic (also called the Transvaal), and the Natalia Republic.

The Mineral Revolution and the Anglo-Boer Wars
The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 encouraged economic growth and immigration, intensifying the subjugation of the natives. The Boers (another name for Afrikaners) successfully resisted British encroachments during the First Anglo-Boer War (1880–1881) using tactics much better suited to local conditions. For example, the Boers wore khaki clothing, which was the same colour as the earth, whereas the British wore bright red uniforms, making them easy targets for Boer sharpshooters. The British returned in greater numbers without their red jackets in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), which was largely opposed by the Liberal Party in the British Parliament. The Boers' attempt to ally themselves with German South-West Africa provided the British with yet another excuse to take control of the Boer Republics.

The Boers resisted fiercely, but the British eventually overwhelmed the Boer forces, using their superior numbers and external supply chains and concentration camps as well as the controversial scorched earth tactic. The Treaty of Vereeniging specified full British sovereignty over the South African republics, and the British government agreed to assume the £3,000,000 war debt owed by the Afrikaner governments. One of treaty's main provisions was that Africans would not be allowed to vote, except in the Cape Colony.

The Union of South Africa
Eight years after the end of the Second Boer War and after four years of negotiation, the Union of South Africa was formed. The newly created Unon of South Africa was composed of the former British colonies of the Cape of Good Hope and Natal, along with the former Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and was a dominion within the British Empire.

The Natives' Land Act of 1913 severely restricted the ownership of land by blacks to only 7%. The amount of land reserved for indigenous peoples was later increased.

In 1931 the union was fully sovereign from the United Kingdom with the passage of the Statute of Westminster, which abolishes the last powers of the British Government on the country. In 1934, the South African Party and National Party merged to form the United Party, seeking reconciliation between Afrikaners and English-speaking "Whites". In 1939 the party split over the entry of the Union into World War II as an ally of the United Kingdom, a move which the National Party followers strongly opposed.

The Apartheid Era
In 1948, the National Party was voted into power and began strengthening the policy of racial segregation that began under Dutch and British colonial rule. In 1950, the Population Registration Act was passed, which classified South Africans into four racial groups: "White", "Black", "Coloured" (mixed-race), and "Asian". The Whites enjoyed a high standard of living, comparable to First World nation at the expense of the non-White majority, who were denied all political and economic privilages by the White Nationalist government. This system of racial discrimination was called apartheid. The Freedom Charter, adopted in 1955 by the Congress Alliance, demanded an end to apartheid and a non-racial society.

On 31 May 1961, South Africa became a republic following a referendum in which voters narrowly voted in favour of a republic. Queen Elizabeth II was stripped of the title Queen of South Africa and the last Governor-General, namely Charles Robert Swart, became the first State President of South Africa. The country was parliamentary republic, with the position of State President being a mostly cerimonial position until Prime Minister P.W. Botha passed a new constitution in 1983, which eliminated the office of Prime Minister in favour of an executive State Presidency and created a "Tricameral Parliament", composed of a House of Assembly for the Whites, a House of Representatives for the Coloureds, and a House of Delegates for the Asians.

Not surprisingly, Apartheid became increasing controversial, which lead to opposition from within and outside the country. The African National Congress (ANC) was a major resistance movement, using marches, strikes, protests, and sabotage by bombing and other means. The government harshly oppresed resistance movements to apartheid within South Africa. Some Western nations and institutions began to boycott doing buisiness with South Africa because of its racial policies and violent oppression of civil rights. International sanctions and disinvestment of holding accompanied further unrest in South Africa.

In 1990, State President F.W. de Klerk and the National Party government began to dismantle apartheid. The ban on the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party, and other anti-apartheid organisations were lifted. Nelson Mandela, an anti-aprtheid leader who had been imprisoned in 1964 for acts of sabotage, was released from prison and negotiations for a non-racial South Africa began. The last apartheid legislation was repealled in 1993, and the South African government began to dismantle its nuclear weapons arsenal. Universal elections were finally held in 1994, with Nelson Mandela winning the majority of votes and was inaugurated as the first black President of South Africa.

The Post-Apartheid Era
In post-apartheid South Africa, the rates of unemployment and crime have become really high and the country has struggled with many changes. While many Blacks have risen to middle or upper classed, poverty among most of the Black community has worsened between 1994 and 2003. Poverty among the White community, while previously rare, has increased. In addition, the current government has struggled to achieve the fiscal discipline for both redistribution of wealth and economic growth. Since 1994, the United Nations Human Development Index for South Africa has fallen, while it was steadly rising until the mid-1990s. Some may be attributed to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the failure of the government to take steps to address it in the early years.

In May 2008, riots left over sixty people dead. The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates over 100,000 people were driven from their homes. The targets were mainly migrants and refugees seeking asylum, but a third of the victims were South African citizens. In a 2006 survey, the South African Migration Project concluded that South Africans are more opposed to immigration than anywhere else in the world. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2008 reported over 200,000 refugees applied for asylum in South Africa, almost four times as many as the year before. These people were mainly from Zimbabwe, though many also come from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Competition over jobs, business opportunities, public services and housing has led to tension between refugees and host communities. While xenophobia is still a problem, recent violence has not been as widespread as initially feared.

South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It was the first time the tournament was held in Africa.

Geography
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