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 reins 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 ironworking!
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 Mapungubwe 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.
Mapungubwe 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 Khoekhoe 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 to min-max this business model,
colonists ventured beyond Table Bay in order to do some of the farming themselves.
EZ Money. The problem was that the Khoekhoe
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 Khoekhoe 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 Khoekhoe especially hard,
and significantly widened the opening for the Boers to step into.
By the latter 1700s, the Khoekhoe 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, ‘cause it’ll show up later. But soon, even the Dutch would no longer be
atop the pyramid, because some European geopolitical slapstickery...
(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 considered 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 Oranje Vrystaat and the
Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek by the early 1850s. As we noted earlier, this land was very much
inhabited, so let’s hop eastward to see what the Bantu 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,
Shaka 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 Mtethwa confederation,
and with their support, he became leader of the Zulu after his father’s death in 1816.
And when the Mtethwa 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 Lozi and Ngoni going almost 1,000 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 Voortrekkers in the mid-1850s.
And this is where our two plotlines converge, and the resulting frontier
zone between Afrikaner and British and Zulu and other Bantu groups is, whoo! 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 inland. Many of the absorbed groups were able to carry on
more or less as they had been, such as the Basotho up in the Drakensberg 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 Zululand but suffered a fierce defeat at Isandlwana, losing 2/3
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 subcontinent were the Boers in the north,
who had just made the literally earth-shattering discovery of diamonds and gold in the
Orange Free State and Transvaal. So, naturally, Britain did the
shooty-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 goldmining 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 land, 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.
Inter-ethnic 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 Sharpeville 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 Klerk 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 multi-racial election — which, in 1994, a newly-liberated Mandela
won by a landslide. He finished de Klerk's process of dismantling
apartheid and set South Africa on a course to becoming a proudly multiracial democracy.
Almost 3 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 continent, South Africa has been through an absolute wringer 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! As I hope I’ve shown, this history is fascinating in
its own right, but as an American, the story was especially intriguing because of how many direct
points of comparison and of contrast there are between the American and South African narratives.
But that’s part of the joy of Black History Month! Learning
anything in one area can illuminate other aspects of the global black experience.
And to help this video serve as a springboard for you to discover more about Black History,
I’ve linked some cool resources down in the description below. I really hope you check 'em out.