Prehistory
Extensive fossil remains at the Sterkfontein, Kromdraai and Makapansgat caves suggest that various ape-men (australopithecines) existed in South Africa from about three million years ago. Important South African human fossils include the Taung child, "Mrs Ples" and the newly discovered Little Foot skeleton. These ape-men were succeeded by various species of Homo, including Homo habilis, Homo erectus and modern man, Homo sapiens.
Rock paintings thought to date to approximately 3,000 years ago have been discovered in the Ukhahlamba-Drakensberg area.
Iron-using agriculturists and herdsmen moved south of the Limpopo River, into modern-day South Africa, by the 4th or 5th Century A.D. at the latest. They slowly moved south and the earliest ironworks in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal Province are believed to date from around 1050 A.D. The furthest south they reached was the Fish River, in today's Eastern Cape Province. These Iron-Age populations displaced earlier hunter-gatherer peoples as they migrated.
When Dutch settlers arrived in 1652 South Africa was inhabited by the Khoi, San, Xhosa, Zulu and various other native tribes.
Early Dutch colonization
The written history of South Africa starts on April 6, 1652, when a victualing station was established at the Cape of Good Hope by Jan van Riebeeck on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. For most of the 17th and 18th centuries, the slowly expanding settlement was a Dutch possession. The Cape Colony was settled by European Calvinists, primarily from the Netherlands, but including people from Germany, France, Scotland, and elsewhere. (See Afrikaner Calvinism for more about these settlers.) The Dutch settlers largely wiped out the culture of the Khoi and San people, the original inhabitants of Southern Africa, in a series of wars called Cape Frontier Wars, and imported slaves from Indonesia, Madagascar and India. Descendants of these slaves, who often married with Dutch settlers, later became known as Cape Coloureds and "Cape Malays", constituting roughly 50% of the population in the Western Cape Province.
British incursions
Great Britain seized the Cape of Good Hope area in 1797 during the Anglo-Dutch War. The Dutch declared bankruptcy, and the British annexed the Cape Colony in 1805. A dispute arose over compensation after the British abolition of slavery in 1833, and many of the Afrikaner settlers, who were known as the Voortrekkers, travelled to the interior of the country to found their own republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. A Voortrekker incursion into the coastal area of Natal was fought off by the Zulus under Dingane, brother, heir, and murderer of Shaka. The Zulu empire would later be conquered by the British in the Anglo-Zulu War.
The Boer Wars
The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 encouraged economic growth and immigration and intensified the subjugation of the native inhabitants. The Boers successfully resisted British encroachments during the First Boer War in 1880-81, basing their tactics much better on local conditions. For example, the Boers wore khaki clothing, which was the same colour as the earth, whereas the British wore bright red uniforms, making them easy targets for Boer sharpshooters.
The British returned in greater numbers and without their bright red uniforms in the Second Boer War (1899-1902). British-Boer relations, already strained, were further stressed after the unsuccessful Jameson Raid, launched into the Transvaal from neighboring Rhodesia by irregular forces aligned with rich diamond businessman and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes. The Second Boer War was largely opposed by the Liberal Party in the British parliament as both uncalled for and expensive, but the huge gold and diamond reserves in the Boer republics drove the Tories to intensify the war. The Boers' attempt to ally themselves with German South West Africa provided the British with yet another excuse to take control of the Boer Republics. The Boers resisted fiercely with guerrilla tactics, using their superior knowledge of the land to strike quickly and disappear, but the British eventually overwhelmed the Boer forces using their far superior numbers and external supply chains.
The British rounded up civilian Afrikaners, along with their black workers, and placed them in separate concentration camps, where malnutrition and diseases were rampant. They burned the farmhouses and crops in an effort to deny food to the Boer guerrillas. As supplies became scarce, the guerrillas turned to raiding African towns for food, antagonizing the Africans and forcing the Boers to fight them as well as the British. Many Afrikaners, derisively called "joiners" or "hensoppers" (hands-uppers in Afrikaans) by the other Afrikaners (the "bittereinders", or bitter-enders), began to feel that the time had come to make peace with the British. After continuing the resistance for another year, the bittereinders finally accepted that the Boer nation would be completely destroyed if they persisted, and signed a peace treaty with the British at Pretoria on May 31, 1902.
British rule
The Treaty of Vereeniging specified full British sovereignty over the South African republics, and the British government agreed to assume the £3,000,000 war debt owed by the Afrikaner governments. Dutch were accorded special legal status. (Afrikaans was not yet recognized as a distinct language.) One of the main provisions of the treaty ending the war was that blacks would not be allowed to vote, except in the Cape Colony. The British administration briefly attempted "Anglicisation" of the Boer populace through mandatory education in English, but the plan backfired and only built Boer resentment, and the plan was abandoned when the Liberals came to power in Britain in 1906. It was around this time that the first formal recognition of Afrikaans as a language distinct from Dutch began, although it did not replace Dutch as an official language until 1926.
Union of South Africa
After four years of negotiations, the Union of South Africa was created from the colonies of Cape Colony, Natal Colony, and the republics of Orange Free State, and Transvaal on May 31, 1910, exactly eight years after the end of the Second Boer War. The Union was a British Dominion, but only the white minority had political power.
In 1910, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts formed the South African Party and between them led the Union until Barry Hertzog's National Party replaced them. In 1934 the two parties merged to form the United Party, seeking reconciliation between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites, but split in 1939 over the Union's entry to the Second World War as an ally of the United Kingdom. The right-wing rump National Party sympathised with Nazi Germany during the war, and sought greater racial segregation, or apartheid after it.
Apartheid
The National Party came to power in 1948, under D.F. Malan. Many policies of segregation were implemented under apartheid, and the disenfranchisement of the mixed race Coloureds, as well as the few black Africans in the Cape who had the vote. Mixed race marriages were banned, and special agricultural and trade schools were established as the only institutions that would accept black students. Stores would serve any white customers present before blacks. Blacks had to carry internal passports called pass books to travel into white areas, or risk arrest.
Except for a recession during the early 1960s, the economy grew rapidly until the late 1970s. By that time, with a mixture of public and private enterprise, South Africa possessed a modern infrastructure, which was by far the most advanced in Africa: efficient financial institutions, a national network of roads as well as railways, modernized port facilities in Cape Town and Durban, and, besides the long-established diamond-, gold-, and coal-mining industries, a wide range of factories. The private sector was dominated by two great interlocking giants: the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, and De Beers Consolidated Mines. They formed the core of one of the world's most powerful networks of mining, industrial, and financial companies, employing 800,000 workers on six continents. State corporations controlled industries that were vital to national security, notably Armscor (Armaments Corporation of South Africa), which produced high-quality military equipment, and SASOL (South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation), which alleviated South Africa's lack of petroleum resources by converting coal to gasoline and diesel fuel.
This burgeoning economy was buoyant enough to sustain the cost of a drastic program of social engineering. The man who played the major part in transforming apartheid from an election slogan into practice was Hendrik F. Verwoerd. Born in The Netherlands, Verwoerd immigrated with his parents to South Africa when he was a child. He became a nominated senator in 1948, minister of native affairs in 1950, and prime minister from 1958 to 1966, when a deranged man assassinated him in Parliament. According to Verwoerd, the South African population comprised four distinct racial groups (white, African, Coloured, and Asian), each with an inherent culture; whites were the civilized group and, as such, entitled to control the state.
Parliament passed a plethora of laws to give effect to these ideas and to institutionalize the apartheid system. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. There were laws to prohibit interracial marriage or sex. Other laws and regulations segregated South Africans in every sphere of life: in buses, taxis, and hearses; in cinemas, restaurants, and hotels; in trains and railway waiting rooms. When a court declared that separate amenities should be equal, Parliament passed a special law to override it. Under the Group Areas Act (1950), the cities and towns of South Africa were divided into segregated residential and business areas, and the government removed thousands of Coloureds and Indians from areas classified for white occupation.
A vast bureaucracy, staffed largely by party loyalists, administered apartheid, aided by a mass of coercive laws. The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 defined communism and its aims sweepingly and empowered the government to detain anyone it deemed likely to further any communist aims. Later laws gave the police the right to arrest and detain people without trial and without access to families or lawyers and left the courts with scarcely any means to intervene.
Africans were treated as tribal people, domiciled in the reserves under hereditary chiefs and bound to live there except when they were working for whites. In 1951 the government abolished the Natives Representative Council. Then it began to consolidate the scattered reserves into 8 (eventually 10) distinct territories, designating each of them as the homeland of a specific African ethnic community. It also manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Claiming to match the decolonization process that was taking place in tropical Africa, the government devolved powers onto those administrations and eventually encouraged them to become independent. Between 1976 and 1981 four accepted independence: Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei. However, like the other homelands, they were economic backwaters, dependent on subsidies from Pretoria, and not a single foreign government recognized them.
Conditions in the homelands rapidly deteriorated, partly because they had to accommodate vast numbers of additional Africans. Attempting to reverse the flood of Africans into the towns, the government strengthened the pass laws, making it illegal for an African to be in a town for more than 72 hours without a job in a white home or business. By 1983, in a particularly brutal series of forced removals, it had ejected more than 3.5 million Africans from the towns and from white rural areas (including lands they had occupied for generations) and dumped them in the reserves.
The government also established direct control over the education of Africans. In the Bantu Education Act of 1953, it took African schools away from the missions. Then, to meet the expanding economy's increasing demand for semiskilled black labour, it created more African schools, especially in the lower grades, but subjected the students to stringent discipline and prescribed syllabi and textbooks that endorsed official policies.
A 1959 law prohibited the established universities from accepting black students, except with special permission on an individual basis. Instead, the government created five new ethnic university collegesone for Coloureds, one for Indians, one forZulus, and one for Sotho, Tswana, and Venda students, plus a medical school for Africansand transformed the South African Native College at Fort Hare, which missionaries had founded primarily but not exclusively for Africans, into a state college solely for Xhosa students. It staffed these ethnic colleges with white supporters of the National Party and subjected the students to stringent controls.
Apartheid imposed appallingly heavy burdens on most South Africans. The economic gap between the wealthy few, nearly all of whom were white, and the poor masses, virtually all of whom were African, Coloured, or Indian, was larger than in any other country. The whites were well fed, well housed, and well cared for; Indians, Coloureds, and especially Africans suffered from widespread poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Consequently, despite the growth of the national economy, for most South Africans life was a struggle for day-to-day survival.
Nevertheless, during the 1950s the previously moribund ANC came to life under a vigorous president, Albert Lutuli, and three younger men: Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, who ran a joint law practice in Johannesburg, and Walter Sisulu. In cooperation with the South African Indian Congress, which also had been revitalized, they organized a passive resistance campaign in 1952, when thousands of volunteers defied discriminatory laws. Three years later, in conjunction with Indians, Coloureds, and sympathetic whites, they convened a mass meeting (Congress of the People) that adopted the Freedom Charter, asserting that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white, and no Government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people. The government broke up the meeting and subsequently arrested 156 people and charged them with high treason. None was found guilty, but the trial dragged on until 1961, when the last of the accused were released.
In 1959 a group of Africans led by Robert Sobukwe, a language teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand, believing that the alliances with white, Coloured, and Indian organizations had impeded the struggle for African liberation, broke away from the ANC and founded the Pan-Africanist Congress ( also known as the PAC).
The African National Congress (ANC), the largest political organization including blacks, had socialist leanings, a convenient excuse for the Afrikaner government to suppress it during the early Cold War hysteria. Both blacks and whites organized protests against apartheid, though protest or unrest was usually dealt with brutally by government security forces.
In 1960, the apartheid regime provoked international condemnation with the Sharpeville Massacre, in which 69 unarmed black protesters (including women and children) were shot dead, and more than 180 were injured.
They were demonstrating against the 'pass laws', with many burning their passes (identity papers). The ANC and other black political organizations were banned in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. On October 5 of that year, whites voted in a referendum, to sever South Africa's last links with the British monarchy and become a republic, a long cherished goal of Afrikaners.
On May 31, 1961, the Republic of South Africa came into being, with Queen Elizabeth II replaced as head of state by a State President. It also withdrew from the Commonwealth in the face of hostility from its African and Asian members.
The Pan Africanist Congress turned to violent actions. The ANC primarily limited their activities to strategic targets such as blowing up power stations (for which future president Nelson Mandela was jailed) and other infrastructure, while the Pan-Africanists engaged in more random and general acts of terror.
The Soweto riots
In 1975, during a reorganization of the Bantu Education Department of the government, bureaucrats decided to start enforcing a long-forgotten law requiring that secondary education be conducted only in Afrikaans, rather than in English, or any native African languages. By 1976, several teachers were ignoring the directive and were fired, prompting other staff resignations. Tensions grew, and an Afrikaans language teacher was stabbed in May. Students refused to write papers in Afrikaans and were expelled. The students of one school after another went on strike, prompting the government to simply shut the schools down and expel the striking students.
A protest march was organized in the black Soweto district of Johannesburg on June 16, 1976. About 20,000 students arrived in groups, followed closely by the police. Despite appeals from organizers not to antagonize the police in any way, conflict began almost immediately, as police fired tear gas and then guns into the crowds. The heavily outnumbered police fled to regroup, and the enraged students set up barricades and began destroying property and employees of the government.
The Soweto riots were over within a few days as massive numbers of police were deployed to the area and many protesters were shot, but in the following weeks, violence spread across the country to other black townships.
During the riots, international news organizations broadcast footage of unarmed protesters being massacred by government security forces. One famous picture depicts a 13 year old, Hector Petersen, who was shot dead by police, being carried away from the riots. However, white South Africans were oblivious, as there was little or no coverage in the media. The South African Broadcasting Corporation was tightly controlled by the apartheid regime. Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness movement, who was later tortured to death by the security forces, was declared a 'banned' person, who could not be quoted in the press.
Soon thereafter, most of the countries in the world -- with the notable exceptions of the United Kingdom and the United States -- imposed economic sanctions on South Africa as a response to apartheid in general and the government's handling of the Soweto riots in particular. The UK and the US did not impose sanctions due to South Africa's worldwide prominence as a supplier of diamonds, platinum, and gold.
The United States in particular refrained from cutting ties to South Africa [1] (http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/saessayx.htm), as a new front line had opened in the Cold War in Africa. US administrations had long held South Africa as a steadfast ally against communism in a continent particularly vulnerable to Soviet influence.
A coup in Portugal in 1974 led to withdrawal from its colonies in Angola and Mozambique. Nationalist and communist factions in Angola immediately tried to fill the power vacuum, resulting in a civil war from 1975 to 1976. Soviet aid and approximately 80 thousand Cuban soldiers arrived in support of the Movimento Populair de Liberacio de Angola (MPLA) faction, causing consternation within the South African government.
Fearful of forcing the South African government to enact reforms dismantling apartheid that might result in the communist-influenced ANC staging a communist revolution in South Africa [2] (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19861201faessay7817/thomas-g-karis/south-african-liberation-the-communist-factor.html), Presidents Carter and Reagan adopted a policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa and together with South Africa began covert material support of UNITA's insurgency in Angola.
Throughout the 1980s, South African forces (covertly supported by the United States) began staging cross-border raids into Angola targeting bases used by the Marxist SWAPO who were seeking an independent Namibia.
In 1988, South Africa, Angola, and Cuba, signed an agreement that withdrew Cuban forces from Angola and granted independence to Namibia.
Towards the end
By 1978 the illusion that apartheid would bring peace to South Africa was shattered. Most of the homelands were economic and political disasters. Their only significant export was labour, and most of their leaders were corrupt and unpopular. The national economy was in recession. Skilled whites were emigrating, and inflation was running high. Moreover, the global environment was changing. The Portuguese had handed over the government of Angola and Mozambique to Africans in 197475, and the writing was on the wall for Ian Smith's white regime in Rhodesia (which would come under African control as Zimbabwe in 1980). Increasingly isolated as the last bastion of white racial domination, South Africa had become the focus of global denunciation.
By that time, the National Party was passing under the control of a new class of urban Afrikanersbusinessmen and intellectuals, who, like their English-speaking white counterparts, believed that reforms should be introduced to appease foreign and domesticcritics. The first attempt to give effect to their ideas occurred after Pieter W. Botha, who had been a National Party politician throughout his adult life, succeeded John Vorster as prime minister in 1978. Botha's administration applied a mixture of carrots and sticks. It repealed the bans on interracial sex and marriage; desegregated many hotels, restaurants, trains, and buses; removed the reservation of skilled jobs for whites; and repealed the pass laws. Provided that black trade unions registered, they were entitled to access to a new industrial court and permitted to strike. Also, a new constitution created separate parliamentary bodies for Indians and for Coloureds and vested great powers in an executive president, namely P.W. Botha.
However, the Botha reforms stopped short of making any real change in the distribution of power. The white parliamentary chamber could override the Coloured and Indian chambers on matters of national significance, and all Africans remained disenfranchised. The Group Areas Act and the Land Acts maintained residential segregation. Schools and health and welfare services for Africans, Indians, and Coloureds remained segregated and inferior, and most nonwhites, especially Africans, werestill desperately poor. Moreover, Botha used the State Security Councilwhich was dominated by military officersrather than the cabinet as his major policy-making body, and he embarked on a massive military buildup.
During the 1980s the conservative British and American administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, respectively, faced increasingly vociferous pressures for sanctions against South Africa. In 1986 a high-level Commonwealth mission went to South Africa in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the government to suspend its military actions in the townships, release political prisoners, and stop destabilizing neighbouring countries. Later that year, American public resentment of South Africa's racial policies was strong enough for the U.S. Congress to pass a Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over a presidential veto, banning new investments and loans, ending air links, and prohibiting the importation of many commodities. Other governments took similar actions.
Meanwhile, in 1983, 1,000 black and white representatives of 575 community groups, trade unions, sporting bodies, and women's and youth organizations launched the United Democratic Front. There followed a vast escalation of strikes, boycotts, and attacks on black police and urban councillors. Under strong pressure from white hawks, the Botha government resisted those pressures. In 1985 it declared a state of emergency in many parts of the country; a year later it promulgated a nationwide state of emergency and embarked on a savage campaign to eliminate all opposition. For three years police and soldiers patrolled the African townships in armed vehicles, destroying black squatter camps and detaining, abusing, and killing thousands of Africans, while the army also continued its forays into neighbouring countries. Rigid censorship laws tried to conceal those actions by banning television, radio, and newspaper coverage.
The resort to brute force did not create stability. Long-standing critics such as Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, defied the government; influential Afrikaner clerics and intellectuals withdrew their support. Resistance by black workers continued, including a massive strike by the National Union of Mineworkers; saboteurs caused an increasing number of deaths and injuries. The economy was severely strained by the costs of sanctions, of administering apartheid, and of military adventurism, especially in Namibia and Angola. The gross domestic product was decreasing, inflation rose above 14 percent per annum, and there was a dearth of investment capital. Moreover, in 1988 the army suffered a military setback in Angola, after which the government signed an accord paving the way for the removal of Cuban troops from Angola and the UN-supervised independence of Namibia in 1990. In these circumstances, many whites came to realize that there was no stopping the incorporation of Africans into the South African political system.
Transition to majority rule
The 1990s brought an end to apartheid with the release of Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990 by F.W. de Klerk. Then on November 18, 1993 21 political parties approved a new constitution for the nation. Majority rule was established with democratic elections held April 26th-April 29th 1994, under Nelson Mandela and later under Thabo Mbeki. South Africa added 9 native African languages to Afrikaans and English as official languages, bringing the total to 11.
The post-apartheid era
Shortly after the elections, the ANC government adopted a policy of reconstruction and development (RDP) aimed at rebuilding the economy. This policy was replaced by GEAR, a more conservative policy aimed at rebuilding the economy through growth and foreign investment. The change of focus has been controversial and the cause of much tension between the ANC and its alliance partners, the South African Communist Party and the trade union alliance, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
Despite these economic recovery efforts, South Africa's economy is still faced with many problems. Although in April 2004, inflation was at 0.2%, with the Rand having stabilised vs. the US dollar, foreign reserves remain low, though they have improved from coverage for 3 weeks worth of imports in 1994 to 18 weeks in 2003. The unemployment rate remains at nearly 30% of the able-bodied population [3] (http://www.resbank.co.za/Economics/zaflink1.html). Roughly 60% of the population lives below the poverty line, earning an income of 250 Rand (approximately $30 US as of February 2003) or less per month [4] (http://www.dti.gov.za/econdb/poverty.pdf). Economic disparity remains a problem; the poorest 50% of the overall population receive just 11% of South Africa's total annual income; whereas the richest 7% of the population receive over 40% of the country's income. [5] (http://www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/reports/poverty.html?rebookmark=1)
With the decline of the iron-fisted Afrikaner government, crime in South Africa has skyrocketed, although this can at least partly be attributed to increasing reporting of crime. Nevertheless the leading cause of death for males aged 15 to 21 is homicide.
There have been accusations of bribery of high governmental officials, the bribery scandal involving the Chief Whip of the ANC in Parliament, Tony Yengeni, and Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace, being a recent example. Yengeni was convicted for failing to disclose an arms deal-related 47 percent discount (worth R167 387) on a Mercedes Benz 4x4 which he bought in 1998, and sentenced to four years in prison.
A number of small right wing terrorist organizations operate in South Africa. They are opposed to black majority rule, and seek a return to apartheid and the political dominance of Afrikaners. There were bombings in Soweto in 2002, for which several alleged members of one such group, the Boeremag, were arrested.
South Africa's current economic state seems to have stabilised within the last few years (1999-2003) , and it remains the single largest concentration of industrial power on the African continent. It also remains the only state in Africa with nuclear power of any form.
The AIDS crisis
Like much of Africa, South Africa is in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. A 1999 survey indicated that 22.4% of women who attended public antenatal clinics were HIV-positive. Government response to the epidemic has been inconsistent, with president Thabo Mbeki and other prominent members of the ANC government denying the standard scientific explanation for AIDS and actively fighting legal efforts to provide free antiretroviral medication to HIV-infected individuals. Mbeki has stated that he believes that poverty, not HIV, is the cause of AIDS; that many people who supposedly die of the disease are actually being poisoned by their antiretroviral medication; and that such medication is created by scientists in the employ of pharmaceutical companies that wish to experiment on Africans. [6] (http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/news/guardanc.htm). Many researchers claim that the lack of access to antiretovirals, combined with widespread ignorance about the nature of the disease, has greatly increased the AIDS death rate in recent years.
South Africa held a National AIDS Conference in Durban in August of 2003. Shortly before the conference, the ANC government announced that it was considering withdrawing legal approval for use of the anti-AIDS drug Nevirapine, widely accepted by the scientists as an effective means of greatly reducing mother-to-child HIV transmission rates. Anti-AIDS activists, such as the Treatment Action Campaign, were outraged at this announcement, and following the massive public outcry, the government announced that it will reverse its previous opposition to antiretroviral medications and create a plan to provide them to infected individuals by September of 2003.
See also
Former national symbols
Flag
 Former flag of South Africa, used from 1927 to 1994 The national flag of South Africa between 1927 and 1994 featured the old Dutch Prinsenvlag, with the flags of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, together with the Union Jack representing the former British colonies of the Cape Province and Natal. It remained unchanged when South Africa became a republic in 1961, although some Afrikaner Nationalists advocated the introduction of a new flag without the Union Jack in the centre. (Prior to 1958, the Union Jack had equal status with the South African flag, and between 1912 and 1928, South Africa used a version of the Red Ensign, defaced with the shield from its coat of arms.)
National Anthem
The previous national anthem of South Africa, Die Stem van Suid-Afrika was first used in 1928, later being translated into English as The Call of South Africa in 1952. It officially replaced God Save the Queen in 1957. It was retained after the adoption of the first non-racial constitution in 1994, having equal status with Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, until the two were combined to form the present anthem in 1997.
Coat of arms
 Former Coat of arms of South Africa, used from 1910 to 2000 The coat of arms, dating from 1910, was used until 2000. The four quarters of the shield represented the four provinces of the Union of South Africa, and remained unchanged following the proclamation of the Republic of South Africa in 1961. The motto in Latin, Ex Unitate Vires or 'Unity is Strength', was a translation of the Dutch motto of the old South African Republic Eendracht Maakt Macht.
Literature
- William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa, Oxford UP 2001
Films
- Malcolm Clarke, The life and death of Steve Biko, 1978
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