If the history
of South Africa is in large part one of increasing racial divisiveness, today it
can also be seen as the story of - eventually - a journey through massive
obstacles towards the creation, from tremendous diversity, of a single nation
whose dream of unity and common purpose is now capable of realization.
representatives of that diversity - at least the earliest we can name - were the
San and Khoekhoe peoples (otherwise known individually as the Bushmen and
Hottentots or Khoikhoi; collectively called the Khoisan). Both were resident in
the southern tip of the continent for thousands of years before its written
history began with the arrival of European seafarers.
that, modern human beings had lived here for more than 100 000 years - indeed,
the country is an archaeological treasure chest.
hunter-gatherer San ranged widely over the area; the pastoral Khoekhoe lived in
those comparatively well-watered areas, chiefly along the southern and western
coastal strips, where adequate grazing was to be found. So it was with the
latter that the early European settlers first came into contact - much to the
disadvantage of the Khoekhoe.
As a result of
diseases such as smallpox imported by the Europeans, of some assimilation with
the settlers and especially with the slaves who were to arrive in later years,
and of some straightforward extermination, the Khoekhoe have effectively
disappeared as an identifiable group.
inhabitants of the area that was to become South Africa were the Bantu-speaking
people who had moved into the north-eastern and eastern regions from the north,
starting at least many hundreds of years before the arrival of the Europeans.
site in the northern Kruger National Park is estimated to have been first
occupied in the 13th century. The ruins of Mapungubwe, where artifacts from as
far away as China have been found, are the remains of a large trading settlement
thought to stretch back to the 12th century. Agro-pastoralists, these people
brought with them an Iron Age culture and sophisticated socio-political systems.
One of the
famous gold rhinos found at Mapungubwe (Image:
University of Pretoria)
was of little import to Jan van Riebeeck and the 90 men who landed with him in
1652 at the Cape of Good Hope, under instructions by the Dutch East India
Company to build a fort and develop a vegetable garden for the benefit of ships
on the Eastern trade route.
relationship with the Khoekhoe was initially one of bartering, but a mutual
animosity developed over issues such as cattle theft - and, no doubt, the
growing suspicion on the part of the Khoekhoe that Van Riebeeck's outpost was
becoming a threat to them.
first sign that the threat was to be realised came in 1657 when nine men,
released from their contracts, were given land to farm. In the same year the
first slaves were imported. By the time Van Riebeeck left in 1662, 250 white
people lived in what was beginning to look like a developing colony.
encouraged immigration, and in the early 1700s independent farmers called
trekboers began to push north and east. Inevitably, the Khoisan started
literally losing ground, in addition to being pressed by difficult circumstances
into service for the colonists.
colonists began moving east they encountered the Xhosa-speaking people living in
the region that is today's Eastern Cape. A situation of uneasy trading and more
or less continuous warfare began to develop. By this time, the second half of
the 18th century, the colonists - mainly of Dutch, German and French Huguenot
stock - had begun to lose their sense of identification with Europe. The
Afrikaner nation was coming into being.
As a result of
developments in Europe the British took the Cape over from the Dutch in 1795.
Seven years later the colony was returned to the Dutch government, only to come
under British rule again in 1806, recaptured because of the alliance between
Holland and Napoleon. The initial somewhat cautious regulations aimed at
ameliorating the conditions under which, for instance, Khoi servants were
employed, caused discontent and even open rebellion among the colony's white
inhabitants. At the same time, British military strength began to tell in the
conflict with the Xhosa.
In 1820 some 5
000 newly arrived British settlers were placed on the eastern frontier as a
supposed defensive buffer against the Xhosa - a strategy that failed when many
of them gave up the struggle with uncooperative land and turned to other
occupations in Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown. The Xhosa reacted with heroic
defiance at the additional pressure on their land and independence.
But this ended
tragically with the mass starvation that followed an 1857 prophecy that the
whites would return to the sea if the Xhosa slaughtered their cattle and
destroyed their crops.
philanthropist missionaries had begun arriving, their liberalizing influence
reaching its high point in the activities of John Philip, friend of the British
abolitionist William Wilberforce and local superintendent of the London
Missionary Society. This development and, in particular, the emancipation of
slaves in 1834 had dramatic effects on the colony, precipitating the Great Trek,
an emigration north and east of about 12 000 discontented Afrikaner farmers, or
Boers. These people were determined to live independently of colonial rule and
what they saw as unacceptable racial egalitarianism.
decades of the century had seen another event of huge significance: the rise to
power of the great Zulu king, Shaka. His wars of conquest and those of Mzilikazi
- a general who broke away from Shaka on a northern path of conquest - caused a
calamitous disruption of the interior known as the mfecane. Ironically, it was
this that denuded much of the area into which Trekkers now moved, enabling them
to settle there with a belief that they were occupying vacant territory. But
this belief was by no means accompanied by an absence of conflict with the Zulu
armies and others.
Trekkers moved east into the Natal area, today the province of KwaZulu-Natal,
under the leadership of Piet Retief. Intending to negotiate for land, Retief was
murdered with a party of followers and servants at the kraal of Dingane, Shaka's
the war that followed the Boers won victory at the Battle of Blood River. They
began to settle in Natal, but smaller conflicts followed and the British -
fearing repercussions in the Cape Colony - annexed Natal, where a small British
settlement called Port Natal (later Durban) had already been established. On the
highveld, however, two Boer republics were formed: the central Orange Free State
and South African Republic (Transvaal or ZAR - Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) to
mid-1800s the tiny refreshment post at the Cape of Good Hope had grown into an
area of white settlement that stretched over virtually all of what is today
South Africa. In some areas the indigenous Bantu-speakers maintained their
independence, most notably in the northern Natal territories which were still
unmistakably the kingdom of the Zulu. Almost all were eventually to lose the
struggle against white overlordship - British or Boer. One territory that was to
retain independence was the mountain fastness where king Moshoeshoe had forged
the Basotho nation by offering refuge to tribes fleeing the mfecane. Clashing
with the Free Staters, he asked Britain to annex Basotholand, which was done in
1868. Known today as Lesotho, this country is entirely surrounded by South
Africa, but has never been a part of it.