» View our adventures to South Africa
The San (Bushmen), nomadic hunter-gatherers, were the earliest people to inhabit southern Africa. DNA evidence suggests that the San lived here as long ago as 100,000 BC—very likely making them the oldest people in the world. If so, then we can all trace our genes to them. In the fourth or fifth century BC, the first Bantus arrived, bringing the first tribal structure to the region and taking over most of the arable land.
In the late 15th century, the Europeans arrived, first from Portugal, then from Holland. The latter settled here and took slaves from Madagascar, India, and Indonesia. The Dutch were losing their foothold by the late 18th century, leaving them vulnerable to the British, who set up a base in Cape Town as a pit stop en route to India and Australia. The British continued what the Dutch had started: They fought the native Xhosa people, pushing eastward to expand their reach and erecting fortresses along the Fish River.
The remaining Dutch Boer farmers escaped British control when they set off to establish their own colony in the north and the east of South Africa. But en route, they came across many deserted or decimated villages. Villagers they met were dazed and confused. The Boers would meet the culprits of this ransacking when they came upon the Zulu, who were running their campaign of terror to overtake land from surrounding tribes. With fierce struggle, the Boers faced them down and formed their own settlements, only to be confronted themselves by the British, who were bent on land acquisition. Then, a sea of diamonds appeared in the earth in nearby Kimberley, giving the Boers a more incentive to stay and to fight the British.
They resisted the British push with guerilla tactics in the First Boer War. But the British returned with greater force to defeat them in the Second Boer War at the turn of the 20th century. The formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 by the British and the Dutch-Afrikaaners set the stage for apartheid with its race-based policies, restrictions, and repression. Blacks were segregated to live in squalid backwaters known as “homelands.”
The white, ruling Afrikaaners paid plenty of lip service to the supposed self-sufficiency of these regions, but provided no means or opportunities for improvements. In the 1960s, blacks began to protest with strikes and marches. It wasn’t long before things turned violent: 69 were killed in Sharpeville and members of the African National Congress (ANC) were jailed, Nelson Mandela among them. Opposition against apartheid grew worldwide, and with the economic impacts of sanctions and divestments, the National Party’s FW de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and, 27 years after his imprisonment, released Nelson Mandela. In 1994, he won the country’s first multi racial election by a landslide and became president. Today, some of the disparities of apartheid still remain, but South Africa is far more optimistic than it once was.