South Africa

Contents

Introduction3

Discussion3

Geographically Location4

Colonization4

The South African War5

Apartheid7

Post Apartheid8

Nelson Mandela8

Role of Race, Class and Ethnicity9

Conclusion9

South Africa

Introduction

The Republic of South Africa is a country on the southern tip of Africa and a regional economic power. South Africa is an ethnically mixed country where people of all colors live and that are because of this variety often referred to as the rainbow nation. Because the different ethnic groups but not always lived side by side without conflict, dominated ethnic problems and civil unrest between the white minority population and the majority of black history and politics of the country (Ross, 2008).

Discussion

History of South Africa

Africa can date its civilization from the earliest evolution of man. By around a million years ago Homo erectus became the first hominid to leave Africa and colonize the whole Old World, and Homo sapiens existed in southern and eastern Africa between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. The north of Africa came to be dominated by the literate cultures of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the last of which expanded across the whole of the northern part of the continent in the seventh century (Downing, 2004). These regions north of the Sahara therefore developed differently and independently from the Sudanic and other civilizations in the south. They also have well-preserved histories, providing valuable resources for historians (Limb, 2005)

. Literacy was slower to permeate sub-Saharan Africa, ensuring an integral role for oral histories in historical analysis until relatively recent times. The advent of Islam also saw the development of commerce across the Indian Ocean from the Arab settlements in the east African region. This trade reached its high point from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, before the arrival of the Portuguese when the colonial period can be said to begin(Maldon Institute, 1986)

. Many European countries including Britain, France, Holland, and Germany competed with the Portuguese and each other for trade in goods and slaves from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with many African countries remaining under outside rule until the 1960s(Allen, 2005).

Geographically Location

South Africa is situated in the south of Africa. It has nine Provinces with 2,798 kilometers (1,739 mi) of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The north site of the South Africa lies in the neighbor of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Colonization

Until the 1960s, scholarship on the history of Southern Africa's on-white inhabitants was rare. This was not only for political, but also for historiography reasons, due to the scarcity of written evidence (Maldon Institute, 1986). Since then, evidence has emerged to dispel the myth of the empty land' and reveal the nineteenth century as a period of mounting population pressures in this area. Among the Nagoni people, the expansion of political units into larger kingdoms culminated in the mfecane (Limb, 2005)

.

This series of wars, which changed southern, eastern and central Africa socially, politically and demographically, spurred the formation of the Matabele, Gaza and Basotho nations during the 1820s and 1830s. The increase in the number of European settlers in the area also had great ...