THE WHOLE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA
Hello Friends:
Welcome to Countries Facts so Today in this Article I will show you the whole history of South Africa one historical legacy that nearly all of africa shares is that of colonization big european empires coming in throwing down arbitrary borders and exploiting the indigenous africans in their quest for continental domination and yeah when the map looked like this in the 1900s it's pretty hard to not picture those imperialist scenes in your mind but as with most things in africa big sweeping characterizations obscure much more complex realities there are myriad corners of the map where the relationship between native and newcomer was far more complex and few places where that dynamic had bigger long-term implications than south africa home to an astonishingly bustling web of narratives in the past few centuries the southern end of the continent is a prime example of how africans have taken and retaken the reigns of their story now before i spend any more time pontificating in this intro i have a lot of ground to cover so let's do some history recognizably human settlement in southern africa is about half a million years old with anatomically modern homo sapiens evolving around 200 000 years ago during the middle stone age eventually and we're talking about human evolution here so that is a long eventually there was some new technology in town as the first or second century bc saw the arrival of agriculture into southern africa and the early centuries ad brought iron working in the southwest semi-nomadic pastoralists domesticated livestock and cultivated small plants while the east saw larger and more permanent settlement after the arrival of the bantu peoples from central africa these groups brought with them the handy knowledge of how to make and use iron which made farming significantly easier and helped their urban settlements sustain hundreds of people by the medieval period it was several thousands as the mapungu kingdom in the limpopo valley became a huge commercial hub in the 11 and 1200s with strong links to trading centers on the indian ocean coast while punguboy and the limpopo valley later came under the umbrella of great zimbabwe but that is a tale for another time so by the middle of the second millennium southern africa was rocking a variety of different ethnic and linguistic groups but that diversity was of slim concern to the europeans who would make their way into africa over the next few centuries in 1487 portuguese sailors crossed southern africa to pass into the indian ocean and for the next century and a half they simply treated the south coast as a rest stop not so after 1652 when the dutch officially founded cape colony and set about a much bigger operation from their port in table bay they traded european and asian goods with the local koikoi people to get provisions for passing sailors the port was built primarily for use by the dutch east india company but was also open to foreign ships for a price keen 2 min max this business model colonists ventured beyond table bay in order to do some of the farming themselves easy money the problem was that the koikoi were slightly nomadic moving around seasonally just as the early pastoralists in the region had done but when dutch farmers or boers wandered onto a nice plot of land that wasn't occupied right this very second they assumed it was finders keepers when the koikoi politely informed them that the land was in fact theirs the dutch revised their initial statement to conquerors keepers and fought two wars between 1659 and 1677 to assert their claim this would start a bit of a trend as boers pushed further inland with the specific intent to stay the accidental importation of smallpox in 1713 hit the koikoi especially hard and significantly wide in the opening for the boars to step into by the later 1700s the koikoi weren't widely enslaved or exported like west africans had been for the atlantic triangle trade but they were definitely suppressed into a servile working class that said there were chattel slaves in the cape colony but they just weren't south african dutch sailors had actually imported slaves from the indian ocean mostly muslims which further stratified the racial class system keep that in mind because it'll show up later but soon even the dutch would no longer be atop the pyramid because some european geopolitical slapstickery it it's a napoleon thing resulted in britain annexing the cape colony for themselves in the early 1800s sending their own settlers to port elizabeth in 1820. they also sent tax collectors and abolished slavery and this is where the colonial dynamic starts to get weird because the boers had been living in southern africa for a century and a half in which time they'd incorporated french and germans and now beyond just dutch colonists they consider themselves afrikaners a local population that after the arrival of the british was now being oppressed by alien invaders that my friends is one heck of a swerve but they were serious so they adopted the not uncommon strategy of running away from britain leaving the cape colony in the mid-1830s to trek northeast and establish the uranium restaurant in the zoo african republic in the early 1850s as we noted earlier this land was very much inhabited so let's hop eastward to see what the bontu groups were up to as it happens lots since the late 1700s the entire structure and demography of their societies were changing with new approaches to militarization small states were consolidating under stronger kings to form large states and confederations to better compete for indian ocean trade by far the biggest player in this process was the zulu kingdom under the leadership of shaka much to the enjoyment of biographers everywhere shako was an intricate and unusual character exiled from the royal family at a young age and treated horribly by his peers he came back determined bordering on cruel sometimes he never married or had any recognized children and his most trusted advisor was his mother good son at a young age shaka proved himself as a warrior for the neighboring matathwa confederation and with their support he became leader of the zulu after his father's death in 1816 and when the meteth what king died two years later shaka became the dominant player in that confederation from there it was go time and the zulu expanded rapidly fighting hard but working to incorporate conquered kingdoms into the new zulu state still many were not fans and migrated away from the conflict which led to huge demographic redistribution with some displaced groups like the losi and ngoni going almost a thousand miles north but shaka wouldn't live to see the longer term success of his kingdom as he was assassinated in 1828 by one of his half-brothers still the zulu kingdom stayed strong and ran up against the afrikaner wartreckers in the mid-1850s and this is where our two plot lines converge and the resulting frontier zone between afrikaner and british and zulu and other bantu groups is complex this frontier like many saw trade and cultural exchange as well as conflict with alliances forming and ending based on pure circumstance so even though the map in the 1800s was already a giant checkerboard it's important to note that even within all of those states was a dynamic cast of players the southern coasts didn't just turn oops all british after they started pushing in land many of the absorbed groups were able to carry on more or less as they had been such as the basotho up in the dragonsburg mountains who had formed an alliance in the wake of the zulu conquests and became an autonomous british protectorate in 1868. the zulu however weren't about to take that offer and rather preferred to kick the pants off of anyone who tried to muscle in on their land unfortunately britain took that as a challenge in 1879 they invaded zulu land but suffered a fierce defeat at isandlana losing two-thirds of their soldiers and instantly making zulu a worldwide byword for valor and strength against colonial aggression with even the british army holding them in a kind of dreaded reverence later that year britain returned with five times the soldiers leaving absolutely nothing to chance by the summer the zulu had been defeated their kingdom partitioned and the last major bantu state conquered from there the last obstacle to dominating the subcontinents were the boers in the north who had just made the literally earth-shattering discovery of diamonds and gold in the orange state and transvaal so naturally britain did the shitty shoot grabby grab first failing in 1881 and then succeeding in 1902 with the help of half a million soldiers from across the empire in 1910 the disparate british colonies were reorganized into the union of south africa and it wasted precisely zero time restructuring the mines for peak efficiency what began as a simple resource rush now developed into a highly organized and ultimately nation-defining industry with no piece of south africa untouched by the consequences of mining the almost inconceivable power of these mining enterprises was largely a product of control over the outbound supply of diamonds so that the prices would stay high and over the wages workspace and even living conditions of the miners who dug and refined it all this was especially hard on black south africans from outside the posh city centers who left their rural families to do dangerous labor-intensive gold mining work for extremely low pay because even that was still the best option and it was probably harder on the women who had to take care of the entire family and do the farming in the early 1900s south africa was definitely not being subtle about the unequal distribution of lands the rampant wage discrimination or the white monopoly on political power this wasn't slavery but it was a very robust system of discrimination which history has come to know as apartheid this overtly white supremacist ideology became official policy after the afrikaner nationalist party won the elections of 1948 but the economic social and political mechanisms that enabled apartheid were already hard at work in the decades prior what changed here was their intensity and the rigid legal framework intended to make this system permanent interethnic marriage was outlawed schools taught black people they were inferior to whites blacks needed special permission to go anywhere and every conceivable public and private amenity was segregated down to the damn stairs while depriving black people of power resources or the simple ability to enjoy public life the nationalist party knew they needed black labor to sustain the economy so when black civil rights and labor groups recognized this and began campaigning against apartheid the government responded viciously banning the african national congress arresting their political and paramilitary leaders firing into crowds of protesters at sharpsville and soweto and killing the prominent activist steve biko in 1977. biko was beloved by south africans for his leadership in the black consciousness movement which shattered the apartheid fallacy that black people were inherently lesser after his activism and his murder black south africans were rightly furious but also recognized that biko was right that it didn't need to be like this and some of the afrikaners noticed it too during the 1980s the government and economy were under pressure from persistent civilian unrest and paramilitary action the growing strength of black labor unions widespread sympathy abroad and targeted international economic sanctions enter nelson mandela well not really enter he had been imprisoned since 1962 but while still jailed he was cultivating potential reformers from within the national party looking to convince pliable afrikaners to let this broken system go and build something new in 1990 f.w de clerk became president and he and mandela negotiated on a series of reforms such as legalizing all political parties freeing political prisoners and holding south africa's first multiracial election which in 1994 a newly liberated mandela won by a landslide he finished the clerk's process of dismantling apartheid and set south africa on a course to becoming a proudly multiracial democracy almost three decades later there's still plenty of work to be done but with institutional racism no longer official policy it's now possible to do that work like most places on the african subcontinent south africa has been through an absolute ringer of a history in the past few centuries between migration commerce disease colonization convergence exploitation oppression resistance and liberation and all of the ethnic and cultural groups that call south africa home were playing an integral part and it's already my great regret that i wasn't able to discuss them all in this video but this grand diversity is a real treasure that rewards every little bit of inquiry with a new perspective on this story and it's the reason that south africa is so deserving of its epithet the rainbow nation thank you so much for watching we will see you tomorrow bye.
