The history of South Africa can be traced back to the direct ancestors of modern humankind millions of year ago. Cave paintings dating back over 20,000 years ago are scattered throughout the region with more recent archaeological evidence tracing the movement of the Bantu in their southward migration around 700 AD. The Bantu were the ancestors of today's main South African language groups, the Nguni, Sotho, Venda and Tsonga.

Modern European contact with South Africa began at the present Cape of Good Hope, roughly at the southern tip of Africa where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. The Portuguese arrived in 1488 during the search for faster trading routes to India. The Dutch merchant van Riebeeck founded the first European settlement in the mid-1600's at the foot of Table Mountain, thirty miles to the north, on the Atlantic coast at the place that is now the major city of Cape Town. The settlement attracted French Huguenot refugees, Dutch, and Germans who are now collectively known as "Afrikaners." Although this period marks the beginning of the struggle between indigenous Africans and Europeans settlers, it also saw considerable breeding across racial lines. As a result, a sizeable population of mixed race South Africans evolved in the Western Cape area. Under the segregationist racial laws of the Apartheid era, this population was classified as "Coloured," and was required to live separately from both Whites and Africans in the Cape region.

Cape settlers expanded their territory towards the north and the east in the beginning of the 18th century. The Trek Boers, who were white farmers, led the Great Trek branching out into the countryside in search of grazing land for their cattle. However, successful armed opposition from native peoples challenged the Boers. In particular, the Xhosa skirmished frequently with the eastward-moving settlers, with the first of several major wars along the Great Fish River occurring in the last quarter of the 18th century and continuing intermittently into the mid 19th century as Boers numbering in the thousands ventured out of Cape Town escaping economic problems within the settlement.

Initially, both colonial settlers and indigenous peoples engaged primarily in agriculture and small-scale craft work, but in the late nineteenth century, gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in the northeast region of the country, and the city of Johannesburg was established to exploit the resource. Mining became a major economic activity of South Africa, and remains so to the present day. European settlers and their descendants had from the beginning exploited forced indigenous labor on the farms. Now, African men were impressed to work in the mines.

At roughly the same time, settlers along the Indian Ocean coast around the city of Durban began importing large numbers of peasants from India to work on the sugar and rice plantations of Natal Province. Thus yet a third non-white racial grouping was created in South Africa, eventually numbering more than one million. The modern history of South Africa has been shaped by the fate of its four major racial groups, which, in order of their size in the population, are Africans [now about 85% of the total], Whites, Coloureds, and Indians. Central to this modern history has been the struggle of Africans, Coloureds, and Indians against the oppression and exploitation visited on them by the Whites. The White segment itself has been riven by continuing strife between the Afrikaaners and English, who are separated from one another by descent, by language, by religion, by culture, and even by their legal status, for while many Whites of English descent continue to hold dual passports, giving them the option at any time of returning to England, the Afrikaaners are, and think of themselves as, Africans who can trace their presence on the continent back more than three hundred years.

Organized resistance to the oppressive laws of the White governments began early in the twentieth century with the establishment in Natal of the South African Indian Congress [SAIC] and the African National Congress [ANC] in the Eastern Cape area. The SAIC initially adopted the passive resistance tactics and policies of Mahatma Gandhi, who lived for a number of years in South Africa before returning to his native India. The ANC was led in the 1950's by Chief Albert Luthuli, who eventually, in 1961, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in the anti-apartheid struggle. Around him in the organization were a number of younger men who went on to become world-renowned figures, including Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu.

The modern South African system of extreme segregation began in 1948 with the victory in the whites-only election of the Nationalist Party, representing the interests of the Afrikaaner segment of the White minority. The National Party leader, D. F. Malan, coined the term "Apartheid" [= separateness, in Afrikaans] for a series of laws designed to achieve a contradictory result: On the one hand, each racial grouping, as defined by the government, was in theory to be consigned to its own territory or area of South Africa. On the other hand, the agricultural interests, the burgeoning industrial sector, and the general White population needed the labor of the non-Whites. So an enormously complicated, socially destructive regime was put in place that more or less achieved these objectives. The Coloured population around Cape Town and the Indian population in Natal were required to live in segregated townships outside the city limits. The African population was divided into ten supposedly distinct cultural and linguistic groupings, and through forced relocations were assigned to rural areas that the government pretended were the "homelands" of these peoples. Whole communities were uprooted, in some cases families were split apart on the basis of the government's classification system. Thus, Zulu speaking people were relocated in the homeland of Zululand; those speaking Venda were assigned to the homeland of Venda, and so forth. Puppet governments were set up, elaborate bureaucratic duplications of government offices were carried out, and eventually the South African state even declared these homelands to be independent countries, while all the while controlling them through military force and the power of the budget.

At the same time, single-sex dwellings near the big cities were created for the African men working in the mines and factories. The men were forced to leave their wives and children in the homelands for months on end. Around each of the White cities there sprang up both townships, for the African, Coloured, or Indian population. The best known of these communities is the SOuthWEst TOwnship [or SOWETO] near Johannesburg. In addition to the official segregated communities, there also arose a large number of unofficial collections of tiny ramshackle dwellings cobbled together from cardboard, wood, and corrugated tin. These "informal settlements" came eventually to serve as the homes of millions of South Africans. The rigid Apartheid laws banned non-whites from the cities at night, with the result that hundreds of thousands of men and women were forced to travel long hours each morning from their townships or shacks into the cities where they worked, and then to return by the same route each night, lest they be found by the police after dark.

Thus in the middle and late twentieth century, South Africa developed into two nations, joined by labor, by oppression, by law, and often by unacknowledged ties of personal sympathy and antipathy. In this way, the modern South Africa came to resemble the United States both during the two and a half centuries of slavery and during the century of Jim Crow. One nation was White, wealthy, modern, technologically advanced, eager to be a part of the global economy; the other nation was non-White, poor, technologically backward, forced to supply the labor for the first South Africa but barred from enjoying the fruits of that labor.

For much of the twentieth century, all three oppressed segments of the South African population fought against the injustices of the White regime, first passively and through non-violent means, then increasingly through a combination of labor organizing, political organizing, and armed struggle. In this effort, stretching across three-quarters of a century, South Africans managed to overcome the separation imposed upon them by the state and forge a genuinely multi-racial movement, including within its ranks Africans, Coloureds, Indians, and Whites.

In 1963, the government arrested, tried, convicted and jailed many of the leaders of the ANC, including Mandela. A number of movement figures were imprisoned on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, and many more fled into exile. The organization itself was banned, or outlawed. The struggle then evolved into a two-pronged attack, both from outside the country and from within. A world-wide effort was launched to pressure the South African government into easing or eliminating its oppressive Apartheid system. Activists in Europe and the United States adopted the tactic of pressuring business interests to cease doing business in South Africa ["disinvestment"] and also pressuring institutional investors to sell their holdings in companies that continued to do business in South Africa ["divestment"]. These tactics had so serious an effect on the South African economy that in 1990, the National Party leader, F. W. de Klerk, struck a deal with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela that led to the freeing the Mandela and the remaining Robben Island inmates, and the unbanning of the ANC and allied anti-Apartheid organizations.

Four years later, after long and difficult negotiations, South Africa's first genuinely free elections were held. The ANC swept to victory, and Nelson Mandela was named the first President of a new, democratic South Africa. He served until 1999, and was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki, the son of his old comrade and fellow prisoner, Govan Mbeki.

South Africa today is a free and democratic nation, but it still bears the scars of its long apartheid past. The economic inequality fostered over several centuries by the Whites continues today, and even the extreme residential segregation of the Apartheid era has only been slightly diminished. The townships are still entirely segregated, as are the shack settlements. But in the big cities, one sees large numbers of non-Whites who have prospered under the new dispensation and have become part of the First World economy that was previously reserved for Whites.

For more information about the history of South Africa, visit the following web sites:

An exhaustive, highly-detailed chronology of South African history from BCs until today, including Dutch colonization, British rule, Xhosa and Zulu battles, the Apartheid, and the eventual democratization of the nation.An exhaustive, highly-detailed chronology of South African history from BCs until today, including Dutch colonization, British rule, Xhosa and Zulu battles, the Apartheid, and the eventual democratization of the nation.

The SA Military History Society is a non-profit society of enthusiasts dedicated to the study, recording and dissemination of military aspects of South Africa's history.

List of links to history, genealogical information, educational institutions, historical and cultural societies.

Overview of s. Africa history from pre-history times until 21st century, focusing mostly on 15th century onward with a large section on the movement for independence including anti-apartheid history.

Illustrated chronology of South AfricaÕs history in several sections, including the Portuguese settling and colonization in the Cape, the Xhosa and Zulu Nations, The Battle of Blood River, the Anglo-Boer war, the Apartheid Era, and the advent of democracy in South Africa era.

Covering one of the most significant events in the history of South Africa; the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.Include a chronology of events plus information about the war museum itself.

Overview of major events in the Anglo-Boer war.

An overview of South African history from colonization until the late 20th century.