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History
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Human history - or prehistory - probably began in South Africa. That, at least, is the story told by recent fossil finds, which show that
Homo sapiens
existed along Africa's southern coast over 50,000 years ago. The descendants of these nomadic Stone Age people - ochre-skinned San hunter-gatherers and Khoikhoi herders, still inhabited the Western Cape when the first European seafarers arrived in the fifteenth century. By the time of the first Dutch settlement at the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century, tall dark-skinned people, who had begun crossing the Limpopo around the time of Christ's birth, had occupied much of the eastern half of the country.
The stage was now set for the complex drama of South Africa's modern history, which in crude terms was a battle for the control of scarce and conflicting resources between the various indigenous people, African states and the European colonizers. The twentieth century saw the temporary victory of colonialism, the unification of South Africa and the attempts by whites to keep at bay black demands for civil rights, culminating with the implementation of South Africa's most notorious social invention - apartheid. The century ended with the ultimate victory of multiracialism and democracy Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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South Africa |