South Africa

From the cradle of humankind and the early San, Khoekhoe and Bantu-speaking kingdoms, through Dutch and British colonisation, the trauma of apartheid, and the birth of a non-racial democracy in 1994.

South Africa holds one of the deepest human pasts on Earth: the limestone caves of the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg have yielded hominin fossils millions of years old, and the San and Khoekhoe peoples have inhabited the subcontinent for tens of thousands of years. From the early centuries of the Common Era, Bantu-speaking farmers and herders spread across the eastern half of the region, building societies that culminated in states such as Mapungubwe. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company planted a refreshment station at the Cape, beginning a long history of European settlement, dispossession, and slavery. Britain seized the Cape in the early nineteenth century; the Mfecane convulsed the interior as the Zulu kingdom rose under Shaka; Voortrekkers founded Boer republics; and the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1867 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 transformed the region, leading to the devastating South African War and, in 1910, the Union of South Africa. After 1948 the National Party built the brutal system of apartheid, met by a long liberation struggle marked by Sharpeville, Soweto, and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. That struggle culminated in the first democratic, non-racial election of April 1994, when Mandela became president of a free South Africa governed today under one of the world's most admired constitutions.