The Epic Story of South Africa: From Ancient Origins to the Rainbow Nation 🌍

The Portuguese, and also some British, French, Americans, and Arabs traded beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms along the southeast coast in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, wax, and skins. During the late 18th century, large volumes of ivory were exported annually from Delagoa Bay, and slaves were taken from the Kamadi and Usutu, a major tributary of the Maputo River regions, and sent to the Mascarine Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil to work on sugarcane and coffee plantations. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay and coastal trade routes with the central interior. European trade precipitated structural transformation within societies inland of Delagoa Bay. Warlords reorganized military institutions to hunt elephants and slaves. Profits from this trade enhanced the warlord's ability to disperse patronage, attract followers, and raise military potential, and, in turn, their capacity to dominate land, people, and cattle. Near the bay, Tembe and Maputo were already powerful states by the 1790s. To the west of the coastal lowlands emerged the Maritangue of Thulari, the Dlamini of Unvungunye, and the Hlubi of Bungane. Between the Pangola and Tagela rivers evolved the Methetwa of Dingiswayo, south of Lake St. Lucia, the Ndwandwe of Zwide, the Kwabi of Fakatwayo, the Chunu of Mackingwayne, and south of the Tugela, the Sele and Thuli. Several groups, for example, the Methetwa, Ndwandwe, and Kwabe, later merged with the Zulu. These groups competed to dominate trade and became more militarized the closer they were to the Portuguese base. The Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal by the 1860s. European settlement advanced to the edges of the Kalahari region in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the Setzfly and Mosquito-Ridden Lowveld, along the Limpopo River Valley in the northeast. Armed clashes erupted over land and cattle, such as those between the Boers and various Xhosa groups in the southeast beginning in the 1780s, and Africans lost most of their land and were henceforth forced to work for the settlers. The population of European settlers increased from some 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. Although it is difficult to accurately estimate the African population, it probably numbered somewhere between 2 and 4 million. Increased European Presence c. 1810–35 British Occupation of the Cape When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries tried to capture the Cape so as to control the important sea route to the east. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending the Dutch East India Company's role in the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens, 1802, they re-annexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The Cape became a vital base for Britain prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Cape's economy was meshed with that of Britain. To protect the developing economy there, Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market until the mid-1820s. Merino sheep were introduced, and intensive sheep farming was initiated in order to supply wool to British textile mills. The infrastructure of the colony began to change. English replaced Dutch as the language of administration, the British pound sterling replaced the Dutch riksdaler, and newspaper publishing began in Cape. Town in 1824 After Britain began appointing colonial governors, an advisory council for the governor was established in 1825, which was upgraded to a legislative council in 1834 with a few unofficial settler representatives. A virtual freehold system of land ownership gradually replaced the existing Dutch tenant system, under which European colonists had paid a small annual fee to the government but had not acquired land ownership. A large group of British settlers arrived in 1820. This, together with a high European birth rate and wasteful land usage, produced an acute land shortage, which was alleviated only when the British acquired more land through massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s, the British vision of the colony did not include African citizens, referred to pejoratively by the British as kafirs. So, as Africans lost their land, they were expelled across the Great Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony. The first step in this process included attacks in 1811-12 by the British army on the Xhosa groups, the Amakunukwebe and Ndlambe. An attack by the Rarhabi Xhosa on Grahamstown, Grahamstown, now Makonda, in 1819 provided the pretext for the annexation of more African territory to the Kiskama River. Various Rarhabi Xhosa groups were driven from their lands throughout the early 1830s. They counter-attacked in December 1834, and Governor Benjamin Durbin ordered a major invasion the following year, during which thousands of Rarhabi Xhosa died. The British crossed the Great Kay River and ravaged territory of the Galaika Xhosa as well. The Galaika chief, Hintza, invited to hold discussions with British military officials, was held hostage, and died trying to escape. The British colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, who disapproved of Durbin's policy, halted the seizure of all African land east of the Great Key. Durbin's initial attempt to rule conquered Africans with. European magistrates and soldiers was overturned by Glenelg. Instead, for a time, Africans east of the Kiskama retained their autonomy, and dealt with the colony through diplomatic agents. The British had chronic difficulties procuring enough labor to build towns and develop new farms. Indeed, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other countries to do the same, the British in southern Africa continued to import some slaves into the Cape after that date, but in numbers insufficient to alleviate the labor problem. A ban in 1809 on Africans crossing into the Cape aggravated the labor shortage, and so the British, like the Dutch before them, made the co-serfs through the Caledon 1809 and Craddock 1812 codes. Anglo-Boer commandos provided another source of African labor by illegally capturing San women and children. Many of the men were killed, as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. Greco-Rading states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Cocke, and Berand Berens captured more Africans from among people such as the Huruchi, Rolong, and Quena. Other people, such as those known as the Mantatees, were forced to become farmworkers, mainly in the eastern Cape. European farmers also raided for labor north of the Orange River. Cape authorities overhauled their policy in 1828 in order to facilitate labor distribution and to align the region with the growing imperial anti-slavery ethos. Ordinance 49 permitted Black laborers from east of the Kaiskama to go into the colony for work if they possessed the proper contracts and passes, which were issued by soldiers and missionaries. This was the beginning of the pass laws that would become so notorious in the 20th century. Ordinance 50 briefly ended the restrictions placed on the code, including removing the requirement for passes, and allowed them to choose their employers, own land, and move more freely. Because an insufficient labor force still existed, Anglo-Boer armies, supported by Koh, Tembu, Kalaika, and Mpondo auxiliaries, acquired their own workers by attacking the Niwane east of the Great K, at Mbalompo, in August 1828. The formal abolition of slavery took place in 1834-38, and control of African laborers became stricter through the masters and servants. Ordinance 1841, which imposed criminal penalties for breach of contract and desertion of the workplace, and increased the legal powers of settler employers. The Delagoa Bay Slave Trade. While events were unfolding at the Cape, the slave trade at Delagoa Bay had been expanding since about 1810, in response to demands for labor from plantations in Brazil and on the Mascarine Islands. During the late 1820s, slave exports from the Delagoa Bay area reached several thousand a year, in advance of what proved to be an ineffective attempt to abolish the Brazilian trade in 1830. After a dip in the early 1830s, the Bay Slave Trade peaked in the late 1840s. The impact of the slave trade was increasing destabilization of hinterland societies, as populations were forcibly removed. The Gaza, Ngoni, and other groups became surrogate slavers, and joined the Portuguese soldiers in inland raiding. Along the Limpopo and Val River networks, Delagoa Bay slavers competed with Grécois slavers in supplying the Cape. After slavers-burned crops and famines became common, many groups, including the Inuan, Ndebele, and some Hlubi, fled westward into the Highveld Mountains during the 1810s and 20s. The Kololo, on the other hand, moved east out of Transaranja, where they ran into Bay slavers and migrated west into Botswana. In 1826, they were attacked by an alliance of Nowaketse and European mercenaries, and ended up in Zambia in the 1850s, exporting slaves themselves to the Arabs and Portuguese. Emergence of the Eastern States Four main defensive African state clusters had emerged in eastern South Africa by the 1820s. The Peti, led by Saquati, in the Steelport Valley, the Nguan, led by Sobhuza, in the eastern Transvaal, the Mokoteli, led by Moshocho, in the Caledon River region, and the Zulu, led by Shaka, south of the Swarton-Folozi River. The Peti received refugees from the Limpopo and coastal plains, and the Mokoteli absorbed eastern Transarangian refugees, which enabled them to defeat the Griqua and Karana raiders by the mid-1830s. By 1825, Shaka had welded the Chunu, Metethwa, Kwabe, Mekize, Sile, and other groups into a large militarized state, with fortified settlements called amakanda. Zulu amabutho, age sets or regiments, defended against raiders, provided protection for refugees, and, apparently, began to trade in ivory and slaves themselves. From 1824, the Zulu began to clash with Cape colonists who came to Port Natal, renamed Durban in 1835, and organized mercenary armies. These groups were comparable to the Portuguese Presero armies along the Zambezi and to the warlord state set up by the Portuguese trader João Albacene in the eastern Transvaal in the 1840s, but they operated on a smaller scale. During the 1820s, European raiders joined Zulu amabutho in attacking areas north of the Swartmafolosi River and south of the Umzimkulu River, where in the mid-1820s, French ships exported slaves. Francis Farewell's raiders, in alliance with Zulu groups, seized women and children in the same area in 1828. Conflicts split the Zulu elite into rival factions and led to Shaka's assassination in 1828. Shaka's half-brother, Dingane, became the Zulu leader, but his succession was accompanied by civil wars and by increasing interference in the Delagoa Bay trading alliances. By the mid-1830s, a coalition of Cape merchants had begun planning for the formal colonization of Natal, with its superb agricultural soils and temperate climate. The British left the less-desirable malaria-ridden Delagoa Bay region to the Portuguese, who traded slaves out of Lorenço Marques, now Maputo, Mozambique, for another half-century. The expansion of European colonialism, c. 1835–70, the Great Trek. A few Boer settlers had moved north of the Orange River before 1834, but after that, the number increased significantly, a migration later known as the Great Trek. The common view that this was a bid to escape the policies of the British, i.e., the freeing of slaves, is difficult to sustain, as most of the former slave owners did not migrate, most trekkers came from the poorer East Cape, and the earlier labor shortage had been alleviated by 1835. Instead, the trek was more of an explosive culmination of a long sequence of colonial labor raids, land seizures, punitive commando raids, and commercial expansions. Europeans, who possessed technologically advanced weaponry, also had instructive examples of how small groups of raiders in Natal and Transaranja could cause disruption over large areas. Thus, the trekkers should not be seen as backward feudalists escaping the modern world, as some historians have maintained, but as energized people extending their frontier. Several thousand Boers migrated with their families, livestock, retainers, wagons, and firearms into a region already destabilized and partially depopulated by Grieco and coastal raiders. They did encounter some Africans, such as the Ndebele, who in the early 1830s had moved from the southeastern to the western Transvaal. The Boers and their Rolong, Taong, and Grieco allies, however, crushed the Ndebele during 1837, taking their land and many cattle, women, and children. The remaining Ndebele fled north, where they resettled in southern Zimbabwe. The trekkers had penetrated much of the Transvaal by the early 1840s. A grouping of commando states emerged based at Potchefstroom, Pretoria, and, from 1845, Origstad Leidenberg in the eastern Transvaal. Andries Hendrik Potgieter, Andries Pretorius, John Mock, and others competed for followers, attacked weaker African chiefdoms, hunted elephants and slaves, and forged trading links with the Portuguese. Other Boers turned east into Natal and allied themselves with the resident British settlers. Farms developed slowly and, as had been the case in the Cape prior to the 1830s, depended on forced labor. Until the 1860s, the Peti and Swazi in the east and even the Quena and Huritsi in the west were strong enough to avoid being conscripted as labor and thus limited the labor supply. The British in Natal The appearance of thousands of British settlers in Natal in the 1840s and 50s meant that for the first time, Africans and European settlers lived together, however uneasily, on the same land. The Boers began to carve out farms in Natal, as they had done along the eastern frontier, but further slave and cattle raids on the Baka south of the Mzimkulu provided the pretext for British annexation of Natal in 1843. Theophilus Shepstone received an appointment in 1845 as a diplomatic agent, later secretary for native affairs, and his position served as a prototype for later native commissioners. The Harding Commission, 1852, set aside reserves for Africans and missionaries and pliant chiefs were brought in to persuade Africans to work. After 1849, Africans became subject to a hut tax intended to raise revenue and drive them into labor. Roads were built, using forced labor, and Africans were obliged to pay rent on state land and European farms. To meet these burdens, some African cultivators grew surplus crops to sell to the growing towns of Pietermaritzburg and Durban. The British were reluctant, though, to annex the Transaurasian interior, where no strategic interests existed. Boer trade links with Delagoa Bay posed little threat because Portugal was virtually a client state of Britain. To the Boers fell the tasks of eroding African resistance and developing the land, although the policy never received clear enunciation or much financial backing. Britain half-heartedly attempted to protect some of its African client states, such as that of the Grécois and the Sotho state, led by Mosheshoe. However, after further fighting with the Rarhabig Xhosa on the eastern frontier in 1846, Governor-Colonel Harry Smith finally annexed over the next two years not only the region between the Great Fish and the Great Quay rivers, establishing British Khafraria, but also a large area between the Orange and Val Rivers, thus establishing the Orange River sovereignty. These moves provoked, further warfare in 1851-53 with the Xhosa, joined once more by many Khoi, with a few British politicians ineffectively trying to influence events. A striking feature of this period was the capacity of the Sotho people to fend off military conquest by the British and Boers. After defeating and absorbing the rival Tlokwa in 1853-54, Mosheshoe became the most powerful African leader south of the Val-Pongola rivers. His soldiers utilized firearms and, in the cold Heiveld, horses, which proved to be the keys to political and military survival there. Attempts at Boer consolidation. Faced with these unprofitable conflicts, the British temporarily withdrew from the southern African interior, and the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boers gained independence through the Sand River and Bloemfontein Conventions, 1852 and 1854 respectively. Both Boer groups wrote constitutions and established volksrad, parliaments, although their attempts at unification failed. For more than a decade, civil wars and the struggle with the environment hampered consolidation among the Boers. Nevertheless, the Orange Free State's economy grew rapidly, and by the 1860s, the Boers were exporting significant amounts of wool via Cape ports. The Cape economy capitalist infrastructure came earlier to the Cape than to the Boer regions because of its older colonial history and its seacoast links to the British Empire. Banks, insurance companies, and limited liability companies arose in the 1840s and 50s, and a class of prosperous colonial shopkeepers, financiers, traders, and farmers emerged as Cape Town grew to more than 30,000 people in the 1850s. Port Elizabeth, now Geberha, established in 1820, also became an important trading center and harbor. The British government granted the Cape settlers what was termed representative government in March 1853. The Legislative Assembly had elected members, with an executive appointed from London, and responsible government in 1872, the Assembly appointed the executive. Franchise qualifications were relatively low, and even some Africans could vote, although their small number had no political impact. These nominal rights were reduced later in the century and abolished outright in 1936. Between 1811 and 1858 colonial aggression deprived Africans of most of their land between the Sundays and Great Key rivers, and produced poverty and despair. From the mid-1850s, British magistrates held political power in British Khafreya, destroying the power of the Xhosa chiefs. Following a severe lung sickness epidemic among their cattle in 1854-56, the Xhosa killed many of their remaining cattle, and in 1857-58 grew few crops in response to a millenarian prophecy that this would cause their ancestors to rise from the dead and destroy the whites. Many thousands of Xhosa starved to death, and large numbers of survivors were driven into the Cape Colony to work. British Khafreya fused with the Cape Colony in 1865, and thousands of Africans newly defined as Fingo resettled east of the Great Key, thereby creating Fingoland. The Transkei, as this region came to be known, consisted of the hilly country between the Cape and Natal. It became a large African reserve and grew in size when. Those parts that were still independent were annexed in the 1880s and 90s. Pondoland lost its independence in 1894. European missionaries and their African catechists worked unremittingly from the 1820s to Christianize indigenous communities and to introduce them to European manufactured goods they had previously done well without. Whatever intentions the missionaries may have had, their efforts undermined African worldviews and contributed to the destruction of traditional African communities throughout South Africa. For a time, nevertheless, a small number of African peasant farmers used plows, paid rents and taxes, produced for the market, and sold surplus grain to the towns in competition with colonial farmers. The difficulty they encountered obtaining capital, however, as well as the legal and political discrimination they faced, drove most of them out of business in the decades following the South African War of 1899–1902. The Cape economy, narrowly based on wine and wool, was not particularly prosperous. Wool exports, though soaring to some 6,000 tons in 1855, lagged far behind those of Australia and remained susceptible to drought and market slumps. African labor built roads, but only a few miles of railway were constructed before 1870. Various alternatives that would broaden the economic base were explored. Accumulations of guano, droppings of gannets and cormorants used as fertilizer, were exploited on off-coast islands. Copper mining began in the southwestern party of the country. Hunters, operating as far north as the Zambezi, sent back large quantities of ivory. And traders, hunters, missionaries, and full-time prospectors surveyed and sampled the rocks. The most potentially rewarding commodities were diamonds discovered in the Val Valley, and gold found in the Tati Valley and in the northern and eastern Transvaal between 1866 and 1871. Disputes in the North and East To the north, colonial communities and African states alternately cooperated and competed with each other, with the advantage slowly moving to the colonists. The Swazi and Gaza supplied slaves both to the Transvaal Boers and to the Portuguese. During the 1850s, the Swazi overran much of the and exchanged captured children for firearms and horses with the Transvaal settlers. After the death of Sochangani, leader of the Gaza State, in 1856, a Gaza civil war broke out that also involved the Swazi, Boers and Portuguese. After the Swazi gained control of land almost to Maputo in 1864, the Gaza, under the victorious Mozilla, migrated northward into the Buzi River area of present-day eastern Zimbabwe. Farther south, the Zulu competed with the Swazi and the Boers to dominate the Pongola and Ingwavuma Valleys, and with the Boers to control the Buffalo-Muzinyathi River area. The colonial administrator, Theophilus Shepstone, interfered not only in Zulu politics but also in Ndebele's succession dispute, 1869–72, attempting to oust the eventual leader, Lobengula, in favor of a pretender. Marthinus Praetorius, the Transvaal leader, annexed huge areas, at least on paper. To the irritation of settler farmers and plantation owners, few Zulu went south to work in Natal. Instead, a supply of Mozambican indentured laborers, some of them forced, entered the region. This eventually evolved into a steady flow of migrant workers in the following decades, but because not enough labor appeared initially in the early 1860s, indentured laborers from India were brought in to work on the new sugar plantations. The Sotho continued their tenacious hold on their lands along the Caledon River, and for a time supplied the Boers of the Orange Free State with grain and cattle. The Sotho mobilized a force of 10,000 and defeated the Boers in 1858. The Boers, however, coveted the fertile Caledon Valley and defeated the Sotho eight years later, after the Boers regained their unity. The Sotho were forced to sign the Treaty of Thababosu, 1866, and only British annexation of Sotho territory in 1868 prevented their complete collapse. The Zulu after Shaka. The Zulu, although initially successful at repelling the Europeans, were, like then Debele, eventually overpowered by them in clashes such as the Battle of Blood, Anicum River, in 1838. Boer attacks on the Zulu between 1838 and 1839 precipitated a Zulu civil war between Dingane and Mpande. The latter allied himself with the Boer invaders and so split the kingdom. Between 1839 and 1840, the Boers seized large parts of the Zulu kingdom, including the area between the Tugela and the Swart Mfalozi. When the British in turn evicted the Boers and annexed Natal in 1843, the southern region to the Tugela was restored to the Zulu. Mpande reigned 1840-72, a formidable ruler, controlled territory between the Tugela in the south and, roughly, the Pongolo in the north, boundaries that were not seriously disturbed until 1879. In 1856, the primary conflict in the Zulu civil war, the Battle of Nondakusuka on the lower Tugela River, close to the sea, elevated Mpande's younger son, Tsetshwayo, over Mpande's older son, Mbuyazi. Although Tsetshwayo formally became ruler of Zululand, only upon his father's death in 1872, he had in fact effectively ruled the kingdom since the early 1860s. By the late 1870s, colonial officials had identified the Zulu kingdom as a major obstacle to confederation, and in January 1879, British and colonial troops invaded Zululand, see Anglo-Zulu War. During his rule, Mpande had expanded Zulu military capacity, and Tsetshwayo used this effectively against the British invaders at Isandalwana in 1879. The annihilation of a large British force at Isandalwana slowed the invasion, but imperial firepower ultimately prevailed, see Battles of Isandalwana and Rourke's Drift. For the Zulu, political dismemberment followed military defeat. British divide-and-rule policies precipitated another civil war in 1883, and Zululand was annexed in 1887. The Decline of the African States As the 1860s came to an end, the great African states began to weaken. Not only did many important African leaders die during this period—Soshangane in 1858, Sekwadi of the Pedi in 1861, Mizwadi in 1865, Mizilikazi in 1868, Moshoeshu in 1870, and Mpande in 1872—but, increasingly, Europeans were determined to exploit Africans as a source of labor and to acquire the last large fertile areas controlled by them. Colonial troops tipped the balance decisively against societies that had previously withstood attempts to bring them under the settlers' control. A century of military conflict on the Cape frontier ended with the Cape-Exosa War of 1877–78 Sea-Cape Frontier Wars. Between 1878 and 1881, the Cape Colony defeated rebellions in Gricoland West, the Transkei, and Bassoudaland. Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of the Cape and High Commissioner for Southern Africa from March 1877, rapidly decided that independent African kingdoms had to be tamed in order to facilitate political and economic integration of the region. Governor George Gray had already proposed a federated South Africa in 1858, and in the late 1860s the discovery of gold and diamonds reactivated this idea. The annexation of Bassoudaland in 1868 began a series of movements toward consolidation that included the British seizure of the diamond fields from the competing Grécois, Tilhaping, and Boers in 1871, the Keat Award, Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon's more determined Federation Plan of 1875, Shepstone's invasion of the Transvaal in 1877, and the British invasions of Zululand and Petaland in 1879. British troops also took part in an 1879 campaign that crushed petty military power in the northern Transvaal. With the collapse of Zulu resistance in the 1880s, the invasions of the Gaza and Ndebele kingdoms in 1893-96, and the crushing of Venda resistance in 1898, by 1900, no autonomous African societies remained in the region. Julian R. D. Cobbing, Diamonds, Gold, and Imperialist Intervention, 1870-1902. South Africa experienced a transformation between 1870, when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, when the South African war ended. Midway between these dates, in 1886, the world's largest gold fields were discovered on the Witwatersrand. As the predominantly agrarian societies of European South Africa began to urbanize and industrialize, the region evolved into a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy. Gold especially was urgently needed to back national currencies, and ensure the continued flow of expanding international trade. British colonies, Boer republics, and African kingdoms all came under British control. These dramatic changes were propelled by two linked forces. The development of a capitalist mining industry, and a sequence of imperialist interventions by Britain. Diamonds and Confederation. A chance find in 1867 had drawn several thousand fortune seekers to alluvial diamond diggings along the Orange, Val, and Harz rivers. Richer finds and dry. Diggings in 1870 led to a large-scale rush. By the end of 1871, nearly 50,000 people lived in a sprawling polyglot mining camp that was later named Kimberley. Initially, individual diggers, black and white, worked small claims by hand. As production rapidly centralized and mechanized, however, ownership and labor patterns were divided more starkly along racial lines. A new class of mining capitalists oversaw the transition from diamond digging to mining industry as joint stock companies bought out diggers. The industry became a monopoly by 1889 when De Beers Consolidated Mines, controlled by Cecil Rhodes, became the sole producer. Although some white diggers continued to work as overseers or skilled laborers, from the mid-1880s, the workforce consisted mainly of black migrant workers housed in closed compounds by the companies, a method that had previously been used in Brazil.