Africa’s biggest economy sits on a 2,798-kilometre shore
South Africa, the continent’s southernmost state, wraps about 2,798 kilometres of Atlantic and Indian Ocean coast around nine provinces and more than 63 million people—Africa’s sixth-most populous country. It holds Africa’s largest nominal GDP and ties Ethiopia for the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites on the continent.
The country covers about 1,221,037 square kilometres and completely surrounds Lesotho. It splits its capitals three ways: Pretoria administers, Cape Town legislates and Bloemfontein hosts the judiciary, while Johannesburg is the largest city. Twelve languages carry the official name, and the colloquial Mzansi comes from a Xhosa word for south. A Gini coefficient of 0.67 ranks it among the most unequal societies on Earth.
A cluster of Gauteng caves nicknamed the Cradle of Humankind, Sterkfontein among them, have produced some of the world's richest hominin fossil finds, and the Taung Child, found in 1924, was the first hominin fossil discovered in Africa. Species from Australopithecus africanus to Homo naledi lived here, and modern humans have been present for at least 170,000 years. Bantu-speaking farmers who worked iron had settled south of the Limpopo by the fourth or fifth century. Around 1220 the elite of Mapungubwe moved onto a flat-topped hill; by 1250 their capital held 5,000 people and ruled some 30,000 square kilometres, enriched by Indian Ocean trade, before collapsing around 1300 as commerce shifted north toward Great Zimbabwe.
Bartolomeu Dias rounded the cape in 1488 and called it the Cape of Storms, but King John II renamed it the Cape of Good Hope. In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck set up a supply station for the Dutch East India Company at what became Cape Town; enslaved people brought from Indonesia, Madagascar and East Africa mixed with settlers and Khoisan to form the Cape Coloured community. Britain took over after 1795 and the 1806 Battle of Blaauwberg, and the upheaval called the Mfecane gave rise to the Zulu Kingdom.
Four colonies merged into the Union in 1910 after the Second Boer War, and a 1961 referendum made the country a republic. Apartheid, imposed in 1948, began to be dismantled in the mid-1980s, and most Black citizens first voted in 1994.
Source: South Africa
