Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0319/03193.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 33KB | 540 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03193}
$Pretitle{293}
$Title{South Africa
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{James L. McLaughlin}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{dutch
khoi
british
south
boers
xhosa
cape
first
land
africa}
$Date{1980}
$Log{Ox Wagon*0319301.scf
Figure 2.*0319302.scf
}
Country:     South Africa
Book:        South Africa, A Country Study
Author:      James L. McLaughlin
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1980

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

[See Ox Wagon: Ox wagon, symbol of Boers' Great Trek]

     Modern social, political, and economic institutions in South Africa are
direct consequences of clearly discernible historical developments over a
period of more than three centuries. The social institutions are the outcome
of a series of conflicts that began with the first contacts between the
country's disparate peoples. These conflicts have always been framed in
racial terms, and the basic issues have been the questions of control of the
land, and later, of labor to work the land.

     White colonists of European origin and their descendants, with their
superior technology and more developed political organizations, strov from
the beginning to dominate the country's numerically superior Black Africans.
By the mid-eighteenth century, after 100 years in South Africa, most Whites
were so convinced of their culture's superiority that nothing could challenge
their view that Blacks were destined by God to be permanently relegated to
positions inferior to the Whites. Most of the history of South Africa in the
twentieth century has been marked by the efforts of the White community to
ensure continued supremacy of its interests over those of other groups-Blacks,
Coloureds (of mixed race), and Asians (chiefly Indians)-in a rapidly
developing industrial economy despite the rapid emergence of independent
Black African states and generally hostile world opinion. These efforts to
maintain White supremacy have led to the imposition of social and legal
restraints under which the non-White majority has chafed in the decades since
World War II.

     Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century White settlers were
chiefly farmers (or pastoralists) and merchants competing for land against
a variety of Black groups engaged in subsistence cultivation and herding. The
discovery of diamonds and gold in the last decades of the century marked the
beginning of a change that was to lead to industrialization and the
urbanization of most Whites, Coloureds, and Asians and substantial numbers of
Blacks. These changes and the resultant economic interdependence among the
races were to pose the crucial questions of social and political relations
between Whites and non-Whites that persisted into the fourth quarter of the
twentieth century. In general the basic pattern was one of White economic,
political, and social domination, but there was a good deal of controversy
among Whites over the most effective ways of dealing with Blacks, Coloureds,
and Asians in order to maintain that domination.

     The introduction of mining and the subsequent growth of industry and
urban life also exacerbated the historically strained relations between the
two major White groups, the Afrikaners (more commonly called Boers in the
nineteenth century, the descendants of the Dutch colonists), and the British
settlers. The conflict flared up in the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) in
which the British were victorious. They eventually granted self-government
to the conquered Boer republics, which culminated in the establishment of
the Union of South Africa in 1910. This was the first step in a long and
complex struggle for power over the entire territory between the two White
groups. That struggle was broadly framed in ethnic terms, but it was marked
by a number of crosscurrents reflecting in part the economic differences
between the bulk of Afrikaners and most English speakers.

     After World War II the National Party came to power. Based on that very
large portion of the Afrikaner population still economically inferior to
English-speaking Whites and subject to actual or potential competition in the
labor market from non-Whites, the party espoused the ideology of apartheid
(literally, separateness). Its implementation was to shore up Afrikaner
identity vis-a-vis other Whites and guarantee the economic, social, and
political status of Whites-particularly Afrikaners-with respect to Blacks,
Coloureds, and Asians.

     The institution of apartheid, seen by some Afrikaners as a long-range
solution to the racial situation, engendered a number of problems. The growth
of the economy in the years after World War II increased the significance of
the non-White labor force. The perspectives of Afrikaners (and other Whites)
were not accepted by Blacks, Coloureds, and Asians. Government actions to
suppress movements intended to change the social and political order, although
effective, did not end them and served to focus the disapprobation of the
international community on the South African system.

The Pre-European Period

     Man and the manlike creatures who may have been his ancestors have
inhabited the southern African plateau for millennia. The remains of the
predecessors of modern man have been found at several South African sites,
including the hominid australopithecine (man-ape), who inhabited southern
and eastern Africa in the early Pleistocene well over 1 million years ago.
Fragmentary remains suggest the emergence of an intermediate hominid, not
quite Homo sapiens, about 500,000 years ago. Much of the research on early
man, his products, and his environment has been done by South African
specialists.

     By the end of the Pleistocene-roughly 10,000 to 20,000 years ago-and
probably earlier, all forms were fully Homo sapiens, hunters and gatherers
using stone tools. Some lived in the interior and hunted game; others
gathered shellfish and other marine products along the coast. Their precise
relationship to modern man in South Africa was still not settled in the late
1970s, but there is some evidence that hunters and gatherers of the late
Pleistocene and early recent periods were the ancestors of the Khoi (called
Hottentots by the White settlers) and the San (known as Bushmen to the
Whites).

     Archaeological discoveries show that people resembling the present-day
Khoi and San inhabited southern Africa for thousands of years. In the first
century A.D. the Khoi may have had goats and sheep; by the eleventh century
they had acquired herds of cattle. At the time the Europeans first encountered
them, the Khoi and San possibly numbered between 100,000 and 200,000.

     The ancestors of the Bantu (see Glossary) speakers, moving southward
from the Congo region, entered the area around the Zambezi River at the
beginning of the Christian Era and, as early as A.D. 400, probably established
the beginning of the sociopolitical system that gave rise to ancient Zimbabwe
in the modern state of the same name. These people carried a knowledge of
agriculture and iron-making. At some point before they crossed the Limpopo
River (the northeastern boundary of modern South Africa), many of them had
also acquired cattle, and it is likely that their search for new pastures
led them to move south. They crossed the Limpopo sometime before 500, settling
first in the eastern Transvaal (see fig. 2).

     No specific link has been established between the earliest Bantu speakers
and modern peoples, but it is fairly clear that the ancestors of those Black
Africans called Nguni, i.e., Zulu, Xhosa, and Swazi, crossed the Limpopo
about 1300 and drove some of the earlier inhabitants south and west while
absorbing others. The Nguni occupied all of South Africa south of the Limpopo
to the Great Kei River and between the Drakensberg Mountains
and the Indian Ocean, apparently driving the Khoi before them. The forward
elements of the Nguni reached the Great Fish River by 1500. The journals of
Portuguese sailors cast away on t