History Summarized: 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 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.