The early inhabitants
Humankind had its earliest origins in Africa. South Africa is rich in fossil evidence of the evolutionary history of the human family, going back several million years. Modern humans have lived in the region for over 100 000 years. The small, mobile bands of Stone Age hunter-gatherers, who created a wealth of rock art, were the ancestors of the Khoekhoe and San of historical times (the 'Hottentots' and 'Bushmen' of early European terminology).

The former (Khoekhoe) were those who, some 2 000 years ago, adopted a pastoralist lifestyle herding sheep and, later, cattle. Whereas the hunter-gatherers (San) adapted to local environments and were scattered across the subcontinent, the herders sought out the pasturelands between modern Namibia and the Eastern Cape, which, generally, are near the coast.

At around the same time, Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists began arriving in Southern Africa, bringing with them an Iron Age culture and domesticated crops. These cultures, which were part of a broader African civilization, predate European encroachment by several centuries. Settlement patterns varied from the dispersed homesteads of the fertile coastal regions in the east to the concentrated towns of the desert fringes to the west.

The early colonial period
European seafarers, who pioneered the sea route to India in the late 15th century, were regular visitors to the South African coast during the 1500s.

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) set up a station in Table Bay (Cape Town) to provision passing ships. Trade with the Khoekhoe for slaughter stock soon degenerated into raiding and warfare. Beginning in 1657, European settlers were allotted farms by the colonial authorities in the arable regions around Cape Town, where wine and wheat became the major products. In response to the colonists' demand for labour, the VOC imported slaves from East Africa, Madagascar and its possessions in the East Indies.

By the early 1700s, the colonists had begun to spread into the hinterland beyond the nearest mountain ranges. These relatively independent and mobile farmers (trekboers), who lived as pastoralists and hunters, were largely free from supervision by the Dutch authorities.

In the late 1700s, Khoisan bands offered far more determined resistance to colonial encroachment across the length of the colonial frontier.

From the 1770s, colonists also came into contact and conflict with Bantu-speaking chiefdoms some 700 km east of Cape Town. A century of intermittent warfare ensued during which the colonists gained ascendancy first over the Khoisan and then over the black chiefdoms to the east.

It was only in the late 1800s that the subjugation of these settled African societies became feasible. Their relatively sophisticated social structure and economic systems for long fended off decisive disruption by incoming colonists, who lacked the necessary military superiority.

A spate of State-building was launched beyond the frontiers of European settlement. Perhaps because of population pressures, combined with the actions of slave traders in Portuguese territory on the east coast, the old order was upset and the Zulu kingdom emerged as a highly centralised State. In the 1820s, the innovative leader, Shaka, established sway over a considerable area of south-east Africa, and brought many chiefdoms under his dominion.

As splinter groups conquered and absorbed communities in their path, the disruption was felt as far north as central Africa. Substantial states, such as Moshoeshoe's Lesotho and other Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, were established, partly for reasons of defence. The mfecane or difaqane, as this period of disruption and State formation became known, remains the subject of much speculative debate.

The British colonial era
In 1795, the British occupied the Cape as a strategic base, controlling the sea route to the East. After a brief reversion to the Dutch in the course of the Napoleonic wars, it was retaken in 1806 and kept by Britain in the post-war settlement of territorial claims. The Cape Colony was integrated into the dynamic international trading empire of industrialising Britain.

A crucial new element was evangelicalism, brought to the Cape by Protestant missionaries. The evangelicals believed in the liberating effect of 'free' labour and in the 'civilizing mission' of British imperialism. They were convinced that indigenous people could be fully assimilated into European Christian culture, once the shackles of oppression had been removed. One result was Ordinance 50 of 1828, which guaranteed equal civil rights for 'people of colour' within the colony and freed them from legal discrimination.

At the same time, a powerful anti-slavery movement in Britain promoted a series of ameliorative measures, imposed on the colonies in the 1820s, and the proclamation of emancipation, which came into force in 1834. The slaves were subjected to a four-year period of 'apprenticeship' with their former owners on the grounds that they must be prepared for freedom, which came on 1 December 1838.

Increasingly, they were lumped together as the 'coloured' people, a group which included the descendants of mixed unions, and a substantial Muslim minority who became known as the 'Cape Malays' (misleadingly, as they mostly came from the Indonesian archipelago).

In 1820, several thousand British settlers, who were swept up by a scheme to relieve Britain of its unemployed, were placed in the eastern Cape frontier zone as a buffer against the Xhosa chiefdoms.

The vision of a dense settlement of small farmers was, however, ill-conceived and many of the settlers became artisans and traders. The more successful became an entrepreneurial class of merchants, large-scale sheep farmers and speculators with an insatiable demand for land.

The Xhosa engaged in raiding as a means of asserting their prior claims to the land. Racial paranoia became integral to white frontier politics. The result was that frontier warfare became endemic through much of the 19th century, during which Xhosa war leaders such as Chief Maqoma became heroic figures to their people.

By the mid-1800s, British settlers of similar persuasion were to be found in Natal. They too called for imperial expansion in support of their land claims and trading enterprises.

Meanwhile large numbers of the original colonists, the Boers, were greatly extending white settlement beyond the Cape's borders to the north in the movement that became known as the Great Trek. Alienated by British liberalism, and with their economic enterprise usurped by British settlers, several thousand Boers from the interior districts, accompanied by a number of Khoisan servants, began a series of migrations northwards in the mid-1830s. They moved to the highveld and Natal, skirting the great concentrations of black farmers on the way by taking advantage of the areas disrupted during the mfecane.

When the British, who were concerned about controlling the traffic through Port Natal (Durban), annexed the territory of Natal in 1843, those emigrant Boers who had hoped to settle there returned inland.

The Voortrekkers (as they were later called) coalesced in two landlocked republics, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. There, the principles of racially exclusive citizenship were absolute, despite the trekkers' reliance on black labour.

Only after the mineral discoveries of the late 1800s did the balance of power swing decisively towards the colonists. The Boer republics then took on the trappings of real statehood and imposed their authority within the territorial borders that they had notionally claimed for themselves.

The Colony of Natal, situated to the south of the mighty Zulu State, developed along very different lines from the original colony of settlement, the Cape.

The size of the black population left no room for the assimilationist vision of race domination embraced in the Cape. Chiefdoms consisting mainly of refugee groups were persuaded to accept colonial protection in return for reserved land and the freedom to govern themselves in accordance with their own customs. These chiefdoms were established in the heart of the colonial territory.

Natal developed a system of political and legal dualism, whereby chiefly rule was entrenched and customary law was codified. Although exemptions from customary law could be granted to the educated products of the missions, in practice they were rare. Urban residence was strictly controlled and political rights outside the reserves were effectively limited to whites. Natal's system is widely regarded as having provided a model for the segregationism of the 20th century.

Natal's economy was boosted by the development of sugar plantations in the subtropical coastal lowlands. Indian-indentured labourers were imported from 1860 to work the plantations, and many Indian traders and market gardeners followed.

These Indians, who were segregated and discriminated against from the start, became a further important element in South Africa's population. It was in South Africa that Mahatma Gandhi refined the techniques of passive resistance which he practiced later in India.

What became known as the 'liberal tradition' at the Cape depended on the fact that the great mass of Bantu-speaking farmers remained outside the colonial borders until late in the 19th century.

The mineral revolution
By the late 19th century, the limitations of the Cape's liberal tradition were becoming apparent. The hardening of racial attitudes that accompanied the rise of a more militant imperialist spirit coincided locally with the watershed discovery of mineral riches in the interior of southern Africa. In a developing economy, cheap labour was at a premium, and the claims of educated Africans for equality met with increasingly fierce resistance.

Alluvial diamonds were discovered on the Vaal River in the late 1860s. The subsequent discovery of dry deposits at what became the city of Kimberley drew tens of thousands of people, black and white, to the first great industrial hub in Africa, and the largest diamond deposit in the world. In 1871, the diamond fields, which fell in sparsely populated territory to the west of the main corridors of northward migration, were annexed by the British, who ousted several rival claimants.

The mineral discoveries had a major impact on the subcontinent as a whole. A railway network linking the interior to the coastal ports revolutionised transportation and energised agriculture. Coastal cities such as Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban experienced an economic boom as port facilities were upgraded.

The fact that the mineral discoveries coincided with a new era of imperialism and the scramble for Africa brought imperial power and influence to bear in southern Africa as never before. Independent African chiefdoms were systematically subjugated and incorporated by their white-ruled neighbours. The most dramatic example was the Zulu War of 1879, which saw the Zulu State brought under imperial control, during which King Cetshwayo's impis inflicted a celebrated defeat on British forces at Isandlwana.

In 1897, Zululand was incorporated into Natal (present day KwaZulu-Natal). The South African Republic (north of the Vaal River) was annexed by Britain in 1877. Boer resistance led to British withdrawal in 1881, but not before the Pedi (northern Sotho) State which fell within the Republic's borders had been subjugated. The indications were that, having once been asserted, British hegemony was likely to be reasserted.

The southern Sotho and Swazi states were also brought under British rule but maintained their status as imperial dependencies, so that both the current Lesotho and Swaziland escaped the rule of local white regimes.

The discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-fields in 1886 was a turning point in the history of South Africa. It presaged the emergence of the modern South African industrial State. Once the extent of the reefs had been established, and deep-level mining had proved to be a viable investment, it was only a matter of time before Britain and its local representatives again found a pretext for war against the Boer republics.

The demand for franchise rights for English-speaking immigrants on the gold-fields (the uitlanders) provided a lever for applying pressure on the Government of President Paul Kruger. Egged on by the deep-level mining magnates, to whom the Boer Government seemed obstructive and inefficient, and by the expectation of an uitlander uprising, Rhodes launched a raid into the Transvaal in December 1895.

The raid's failure saw the end of Rhodes's political career, but Sir Alfred Milner, Britain's High Commissioner in South Africa from 1897, was determined to overthrow Kruger's government and establish British rule throughout the subcontinent. The Boer Government was eventually forced into a declaration of war in October 1899.

The Anglo-Boer/South African War (October 1899 ­ May 1902) and its aftermath
The Boer forces took the initiative, besieging the frontier towns of Mafeking (Mafikeng) and Kimberley in the northern Cape and Ladysmith in northern Natal (today KwaZulu-Natal). Some colonial Boers rebelled, in sympathy with the republics. But after a large expeditionary force under Lords Roberts and Kitchener arrived, the British advance was rapid. Kruger fled the Transvaal shortly before Pretoria fell in June 1900.

The formal conquest of the two Boer republics was followed by a prolonged guerrilla campaign. Small, mobile groups of Boers denied the imperial forces their victory by disrupting rail links and supply lines. Commandos swept deep into colonial territory, rousing rebellion wherever they went. The British were at a disadvantage owing to their lack of familiarity with the terrain and the Boers' superior skills as horsemen and sharpshooters.

The British responded with a scorched-earth policy of farm burnings and looting and the setting up of concentration camps for non-combatants, in which some 26 000 Boer women and children died from disease. The incarceration of black (including coloured) people in the path of the War in racially segregated camps has been forgotten in conventional accounts of the War. They too suffered from appalling conditions and some 14 000 (perhaps many more) are estimated to have died.

In the Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the War, the British agreed to leave the issue of rights for Africans to be decided by a future self-governing (white) authority.

All in all, the Anglo-Boer/ South African War was a radicalising experience for Africans.
Britain's reconstruction regime set about creating a white-ruled dominion by uniting the former Boer republics (both by then British colonies) with Natal and the Cape.

The impact of the Anglo-Boer/ South African War as a seminal influence in the development of Afrikaner nationalist politics became apparent in subsequent years. After initial plans for anglicisation of the defeated Afrikaners through the education system, and numerical swamping through British immigration, were abandoned as impractical, the British looked to the Afrikaners as collaborators in securing imperial political and economic interests. The National Convention drew up a constitution and the four colonies became an independent dominion called the Union of South Africa on 31 May 1910.

It was clear from the start that segregation was the conventional wisdom of the new rulers. Black people were defined as outsiders, without rights or claims on the common society that their labour had helped to create.

Segregation
Government policy in the Union of South Africa did not develop in isolation, but against the backdrop of black political initiatives. Segregation and apartheid assumed their shape, in part, as a response to Africans' increasing participation in the country's economic life and their assertion of political rights.

Despite the Government's efforts to shore up traditionalism and to retribalise them, black people became more fully integrated into the urban and industrial society of 20th-century South Africa than happened elsewhere on the continent. An educated èlite of clerics, teachers, business people, journalists and professionals grew to be a major force in black politics.

Mission Christianity and its associated educational institutions exerted a profound influence on African political life, and separatist churches were early vehicles for African political assertion. Steps towards the formation of a national political organisation of Africans began around the turn of the century. The African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, became the most important organisation drawing together traditional authorities and the educated èlite in common causes. In its early years, the ANC was concerned mainly with constitutional protest. Worker militancy emerged in the wake of the First World War, and continued through the 1920s.

The Communist Party, which from 1921 became a force for both non-racialism and worker organisation, was to prove far longer-lasting. In other sections of the black population too, the turn of the century saw organised opposition emerging. Gandhi's leadership of protest against discriminatory laws gave impetus to the formation of provincial Indian congresses, while coloured resistance found organised expression, amongst others, in the African (later People's) Organisation.

In keeping with its recommendations, the first Union Government enacted the seminal Natives Land Act in 1913. This defined the remnants of their ancestral lands after conquest for African occupation, and declared illegal all land purchases or rent tenancy outside these reserves. The Government also regularised the job colour bar, reserving skilled work for whites and denying African workers the right to organise.

In these and other ways, the foundations of apartheid were laid by successive governments representing the compromises hammered out by the National Convention of 1908­1909 to effect the union of English and Afrikaans-speaking whites.

Divisions within the white community remained significant, however. Afrikaner nationalism grew as a factor in the years after Union. It was given impetus in 1914 both by the formation of the National Party (NP), in a breakaway from the ruling South African Party, and by a rebellion of Afrikaners who could not reconcile themselves with the decision to join the First World War against Germany in 1914. In part the NP spoke for Afrikaners impoverished by the Anglo-Boer/ South African War and dislodged from the land by the development of capitalist farming.

Apartheid
In 1948, the NP with its ideology of apartheid that brought an even more rigorous and authoritarian approach than the segregationist policies of previous governments, won the general election. It did so against the background of a revival of mass militancy during the 1940s, after a period of quiescence in the 1930s.

The change was marked by the formation of the ANC Youth League in 1943, fostering the leadership of figures such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, who were to inspire the struggle for decades to come. In the 1940s, squatter movements in peri-urban areas brought mass politics back to the urban centres.

The State became an engine of patronage for Afrikaner employment. The secret society, the Afrikaner Broederbond, coordinated the Party's programme, ensuring that Afrikaner nationalist interests and policies attained ascendancy throughout civil society. In 1961, the NP Government under Prime Minister HF Verwoerd declared South Africa a republic, after winning a whites-only referendum on the issue. It also withdrew from the British Commonwealth, and a figurehead president replaced the Queen (represented locally by the Governor-General) as Head of State.

In most respects, apartheid was a continuation, in more systematic and brutal form, of the segregationist policies of previous governments. For the first time the coloured people, who had always been subject to informal discrimination, were brought within the ambit of discriminatory laws. In the mid-1950s, the Government took the drastic step of overriding an entrenched clause in the 1910 Constitution so as to be able to remove coloured voters from the common voters' roll. It also enforced residential segregation, expropriating homes where necessary and policing massive forced removals into coloured 'group areas'.

Until the 1940s, South Africa's race policies had not been entirely out of step with those to be found in the colonial world. But by the 1950s, which saw decolonisation and a global backlash against racism gather pace, the country was dramatically opposed to world opinion on questions of human rights.

The ending of apartheid
The introduction of apartheid policies coincided with the adoption by the ANC in 1949 of the Programme of Action, expressing the renewed militancy of the 1940s. The Programme embodied a rejection of white domination and a call for action in the form of protests, strikes and demonstrations. There followed a decade of turbulent mass action in resistance to the imposition of still more harsh forms of segregation and oppression.

The Defiance Campaign of the early 1950s carried mass mobilisation to new heights under the banner of non-violent resistance to the pass laws. In 1955, a Freedom Charter was drawn up at the Congress of the People in Soweto. The Charter enunciated the principles of the struggle, binding the movement to a culture of human rights and non-racialism.

The Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), founded by Robert Sobukwe and based on the philosophy of Africanism and anti-communism, broke away from the Congress Alliance in 1959. Matters came to a head at Sharpeville in March 1960 when 69 PAC anti-pass demonstrators were killed. A state of emergency was imposed, and detention without trial was introduced.

The black political organisations were banned, and their leaders went into exile or were arrested. In this climate, the ANC and PAC abandoned their long-standing commitment to non-violent resistance and turned to armed struggle, waged from the independent countries to the north.

Top leaders still inside the country, including members of the newly formed military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), were arrested in 1963. At the 'Rivonia trial', Mandela, Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and others convicted of sabotage (in place of treason, the original charge) were sentenced to life imprisonment. The 1960s was a decade of overwhelming repression and of relative political disarray among blacks inside the country. Armed action from beyond the borders was effectively contained by the State.

The resurgence of resistance politics in the 1970s was dramatic. The Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steve Biko (who was killed in detention in 1977), reawakened a sense of pride and self-esteem in black people.

The year 1976 marked the beginning of a sustained anti-apartheid revolt. In June, the pupils of Soweto rose up against apartheid education. Youth activism became the single most effective arm of the politics of resistance in the 1980s. The Government embarked on a series of reforms, an early example being the recognition of black trade unions to stabilise labour. In 1983, the Constitution was reformed to allow the coloured and Indian minorities limited participation in separate and subordinate Houses of Parliament. PW Botha further modified the Westminster constitutional model by instituting an executive presidency and doing away with the job of Prime Minister.In 1986, the pass laws were scrapped.

These initiatives went hand-in-hand with the militarisation of society and the ascendancy of the State Security Council, which usurped the role of the executive in crucial respects. Under the states of emergency, a comprehensive counter-insurgency strategy was implemented to combat what, by the mid-1980s, was an endemic insurrectionary spirit in the land. At the same time, the international community strengthened its support for the anti- apartheid cause. A range of sanctions and boycotts was instituted, both unilaterally and through the United Nations.

FW de Klerk, who had replaced Botha as State President in 1989, surprised Parliament and the country at large by unbanning the liberation movements and releasing political prisoners, notably Nelson Mandela, in February 1990. A number of factors led to this step. International financial and trade sanctions were clearly biting, even if South Africa was no-where near collapse, either militarily or economically. Mass resistance continued and it was obvious that Botha's strategy of reform initiatives combined with repression had failed to stabilise the internal situation.

White South Africa had also changed in deeper ways. Afrikaner nationalism had lost much of its raison d'ètre. Many Afrikaners had become urban, middle class and relatively prosperous. Their ethnic grievances, and attachment to ethnic causes and symbols, had largely waned. A large part of the NP's core constituency was ready to explore larger national identities, even across racial divides, and yearned for international respectability.

Birth of a democratic South Africa
After a long, bumpy negotiation process, marked by much opportunistic violence from the right wing and its surrogates and in some instances sanctioned by elements of the State, South Africa held its first democratic election in April 1994 under an Interim Constitution. The ANC emerged with a 62% majority. Its main opposition came from the NP, which gained 20% of the vote nationally, and a majority in the Western Cape where it was strongly supported by coloured voters. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) received 10% of the vote, mainly in its KwaZulu-Natal base.

South Africa was divided into nine new provinces in place of the four provinces and 10 'homelands' that existed previously. In terms of the Interim Constitution, the NP and IFP participated in a Government of National Unity until 1996, when the NP withdrew. The ANC-led Government embarked on a programme to promote the reconstruction and development of the country and its institutions.

This called for the simultaneous pursuit of democratisation and socio-economic change, as well as reconciliation and the building of a consensus founded on the commitment to improving the lives of all South Africans, in particular the poor. Converting democratic ideals into practice required, among other things, initiating a radical overhaul of the machinery of government at every level, towards service delivery, openness and a culture of human rights.

A significant milestone of democratisation during the five-year period of the Mandela presidency was the exemplary constitution-making process which delivered a document that is the envy of the democratic world. So too were the local government elections that gave the country its first democratically-elected municipal authorities.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, helped inculcate a commitment to accountability and transparency into South Africa's public life, at the same time helping to heal wounds inflicted by inhumanities of the apartheid era.

The second democratic election, held on 2 June 1999, saw the ANC increase its majority to a point just short of two-thirds of the total vote. South Africa was launched into the post-Mandela era under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. The 1999 election also saw the sharp decline of the NP, which had ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994, and its replacement by the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Tony Leon, as the official opposition in the South African Parliament. The two parties merged in 2000 to form the Democratic Alliance. However, in October 2001, the NP suspended its membership of the Alliance pending a final decision, changing the face of politics in the Western Cape.