South Africa

South Africa the most southern portion of Africa is like no other. The system of Apartheid distances itself from other African nations. South Africa is a racially diverse nation where 80.7% are Black African, 8.8% Coloured, 7.9% White, and 2.6% Asian. Along with the diversity it has something different in terms of other nations of having three capitals: executive Pretoria, judicial Bloemfontein and legislative Cape Town. Prior to European settlement, the Bantu people occupied the region beginning in the 4^th and 5^th centuries with the evidence of iron tools being used around 1050. European exploration of Africa occurred around the same time Cristopher Columbus landed on the Island of Hispaniola in 1492.

Throughout that century, Portuguese mariners were probing further and further from Europe along the western coast of the African continent.! Eventually, in 1487, Bartholomeu Dias’s expedition of two fifty-ton caravels rounded the Cape peninsula in a storm, anchored in Mossel Bay 170 miles further east, arid sailed another 170 miles along the coast to Algoa Bay before returning to Lisbon. In 1497, five years after Christopher Columbus had crossed the Atlantic under Spanish patronage, Vasco da Gama led another Portuguese expedition that rounded the Cape, sailed along the east African coastline to Malindi (modern Mombasa), and then crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, India, returning to Portugal with two of his four ships after an absence of twenty-six months. These epic enterprises were longer, more hazardous, and in the short run far more rewarding than Columbus’s crossings of the Atlantic Ocean. As the American historian Daniel Boorstin remarks, they “changed the course of both Western and Eastern history,”

Thompson, L. (2000). The History of South Africa (3rd ed.). New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

After the Portuguese time in South Africa both the Dutch and the British laid settlements in the colony. The way the smaller in number colonist managed to overcome Africans were both by spreading disease that they were not immune to but technology as well.

Whites also possessed great technological advantages. Their firearms were far more effective than African spears; and although there were always traders who were willing to make a profit by selling guns to Africans, most of the guns they dispensed were poor-quality, obsolescent models, grossly inferior to those used by the British army and the colonists;’ Even where Africans gained the upper hand in the opening stages of a conflict, they lost it as time went on. They lacked the equipment to capture fortified positions or laagers composed of circles of wagons, and when Africans resorted to guerrilla tactics the invaders forced them into submission by attacking their food supplies. Time after time, Afrikaner commandos and British regiments brought Africans to their knees by systematically destroying their homes, crops, and grain reserves, seizing their livestock, and turning their women and children into refugees. With their superior economy, which can accumulate and store wealth in a variety of forms, they were able to feed themselves from commissariats carried in ox-drawn wagons.

Thompson, L. (2000). The History of South Africa (3rd ed.). New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

The Dutch finally began to depart the Cape Colony in the early 1800s where they began to be under British control. Numerous scrimmages occurred with various African tribes in the conquest to colonize South Africa, most notably would be with the Zulu Tribe. The Zulu’s clashed with the British long after Shaka Zulu’s assassination in 1828, the two clashed on numerous occasions. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1884 led to greater conflict, with the prospects of wealth the Boers, which are Dutch, began fighting with the British. During the same time wars between the Zulu’s and the British occurred as well. The Anglo-Zulu war began in 1879, although the Zulu’s won the Battle of Isandlwana, they ultimately lost the war.

The South African War

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.

Bundy, C. J. (2020, July 5). South Africa. From Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/place/South-Africa/Gold-mining#ref44078

On May 31, 1910 South Africa declared independence from Great Britain, three years later the Natives’ Land Act was in place which restricted the black population to only 7 percent of the country. In 1931 ties to the United Kingdom have been officially severed with the passing of the Statute of Westminster.

Apartheid was racial segregation that split people into three categories throughout South. The categories were White, Black, Coloured and later Indians from Asia were added. The most disturbing fact of apartheid is the non-native, European, colonizers were the minority in South Africa and managed to dictate rules and laws to the black majority. Steps toward the dismantlement of apartheid occurred in 1974 with the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith that created the peaceful transition for equality for all. In 1990 after 27 years in prison Nelson Mandela was freed by the government, three years later president F.W. de Klerk held bilateral discussions with Mandela for transition of government. In 1994 South Africa universal election leading to the election of Nelson Mandela as president, the first black president of the nation.

The Mandela government inherited a particularly intractable education situation: nineteen separate education departments-one for each race and one for each Homeland, and so on; immense disparities between the buildings and the equipment in schools created for Whites and those created for Blacks; a dearth of qualified teachers; and the inordinate cost of raising the “black” schools to anything like the level of the “white” schools. Moreover, the established syllabi and textbooks were devised under the apartheid regime, and there was an imbalance between the focus on the humanities and the national need for industrial skills. The higher education system had similar disparities and imbalances. The universities that the apartheid government created for African students were grossly inadequate. In 1994, 24 percent of the adult African population had no schooling at all, 37 percent had attended only primary school, 22 percent had some secondary education, and only 6 percent had some higher education. Africans had gained the dignity of full citizenship, but most of them were not equipped to prosper in the country where they now formed the political majority.:’

Thompson, L. (2000). The History of South Africa (3rd ed.). New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

A post-apartheid South Africa saw in influx of blacks moving to the middle class and upper class, however, an increase of unemployment also occurred. Whereas whites finally began to see some of the hardships that blacks seen during apartheid.

Culture

Music from South Africa is a fusion of tradition, jazz, Christian, and other genres of music from the United States. In the mid-1990s a new genre of music of was created soon after the fall of apartheid. Kwaito was and is the music of the post-apartheid generation, like hip hop music from the United States.

Art can be found dating back 26,000 years most are drawings of people and animals. During the colonial period gold sculptures of animals were discovered and more recently wooden statues from the Anglo-Zulu from 1879. (Cobbing, 2020)