Background on South
Africa
(Extracts from SA at a Glance 2001/2)
Beautiful and diverse, South Africa is home to over 40
million people comprising some 20 different ethnic groups. It is as large as Germany,
France and Italy put together. At 35° south latitude, Cape Town is about the same
distance from the equator as Sydney, Australia, or Los Angeles in the Northern Hemisphere.
The country’s 2,945 kilometre coastline is washed by
the cold Benguela current on the Atlantic and the warm Mozambique-Agulhas current on the
east. The climate is moderate and the topography ranges from highveld grasslands to
semi-desert to subtropical swamps, which are home to some of the world’s most diverse
animal and plant kingdoms. South Africa is the only country with an entire floral kingdom
- the Cape "fynbos" - within its borders.
Most people live in the eastern regions where the higher
rainfall, better soil and rich minerals offer more employment. Over a third of South
Africans live in the four high population areas of Johannesburg / Pretoria / Vereeniging
in Gauteng; Durban / Pinetown / Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal; the area around Cape
Town; and the Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage area in the eastern Cape.
South Africa boasts some of the earliest evidence of the
emergence of the human species. For the past 100,000 years this area has been populated by
San hunter-gatherers (Bushmen). Some 2,000 years ago the San turned to pastoralism,
acquiring livestock from Bantu-speaking people migrating southwards. The Khoikhoi migrated
down the west coast and were the first indigenous people to encounter Dutch settlers under
Jan van Riebeeck, who established a base for the East India Company at the Cape in 1652 to
provide ships with food, water and medical facilities.
The Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Ndebele) occupied present
day KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape; the Sotho (North, South) and Tswana populated the
central regions, while the Venda, Lemba and Shangaan-Tsonga remained in the north. In the
1860s indentured Indian labourers arrived to work on the sugar plantations on the east
coast. The white population grew substantialy in the 1800s with the arrival of large
groups of British settlers and, later, fortune-seekers on the mines. The whites,
"coloureds" and Indians comprise sizeable minority groups in today’s South
Africa.
After lengthy negotiations involving a wide range of
political parties, an interim constitution was accepted and South Africa went to the polls
on a one-man, one-vote basis for the first time in April 1994. The ANC won handily and
Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president on 10 May 1994.
In June 1999, the second democratic general elections
returned the ANC comfortably to office, only one seat short of a two-thirds majority in
the new parliament. Nelson Mandela retired as President and handed over the reins of
government to Thabo Mbeki on June 16.
"The rainbow nation" is a description coined by
Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the euphoric aftermath of the transition to democracy. The term
captures the extraordinary diversity of race, tribe, creed, language and landscape that
characterises South Africa. It is a term of hope and promise. But the after-effects of the
country’s divisive past are still with us and the goal of racial harmony remains
elusive. Yet the various tribes have learned to live with one another and even to
celebrate their differences.
The new South Africa has one of the most progressive
constitutions in the world and, like people in Eastern Europe, South Africans are still
learning to live with freedoms hitherto denied them.
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