South Africa – national flag
South Africa – National Flag, The flag was officially adopted in 1994. It is unique in having six balanced primary colors, but none of them have their own symbolic value. The flag should promote the unity of the country, with all population groups represented in the six colors.
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South Africa – History
According to a2zgov, population pattern and land distribution in South Africa before colonization were the result of several centuries of interaction between the San people’s hunters and gatherers, the Khoi people’s herdsmen (see Khoisan) and the Bantuthe tribes who were agriculturalists. About 1600 were khoi and san, who were later called by the whites respectively. hottentots and bushmen, residing in the south-west of the country, while bantu’s had spread over the northeast half of present-day South Africa. At the same time, Dutch and English ships provided the natural anchorage site under Table Mountain at Cape of Good Hope for provision, and in 1652 the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) established a fast-growing trading station. In 1717 there were 2000 white residents of the Cape Colony, in 1780 there were 10,000.
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The first victims of European colonization were the Khoi people, who had already disappeared around 1800, but also the San people were displaced and almost wiped out by white militia groups. In return, slaves were imported from other parts of Africa; their numbers corresponded throughout the 1700-t. roughly to the growing white population. In the mix of whites, slaves and khoisan a so-called colored population emerged. The White expansion of the 1770’s led to a wide variety of wars with the Bantu people; alone with the Xhosa, eight frontier wars were fought between 1779 and 1853. The rise and expansion of the Zulurian kingdom in the first half of the 1800’s, Mfecane, led to the expulsion and migration of other indigenous peoples.
Prime Ministers and Presidents
| Period | Prime minister |
| 1910-19 | Louis Botha |
| 1919-24 | Jan Smuts |
| 1924-39 | JBM Hertzog |
| 1939-48 | Jan Smuts |
| 1948-54 | Daniel F. Malan |
| 1954-58 | Johannes G. Strijdom |
| 1958-66 | Hendrik Verwoerd |
| 1966-78 | John Vorster |
| 1978-84 | PW Botha |
| Period | President |
| 1961-67 | Charles R. Black |
| 1967-68 | Joshua François Naudé (constituted) |
| 1968-75 | Jacobus Johannes Fouché |
| 1975-78 | Nicolaas J. Diederichs |
| 1978 | Marais Viljoen (constituted) |
| 1978-79 | John Vorster |
| 1984-89 | PW Botha |
| 1989-94 | Frederik de Klerk |
| 1994-99 | Nelson Mandela |
| 1999-2008 | Thabo Mbeki |
| 2008-09 | Kgalema Motlanthe |
| 2009-18 | Jacob Zuma |
| 2018- | Cyril Ramaphosa |
Britain annexed the Cape Colony in 1795, gave it back to the Netherlands in 1803, but took it back in 1806. Afterwards, the colonization gained momentum with increased trade, mission and importation of several thousand British settlers. The abolition of slavery by the British in 1834 was a contributing factor to the Great Trek, with thousands of Africans emigrating from the Cape Colony to the South African inland. The emigration led to the establishment of the republics of the Orange Free State, the Transvaal and Natalia; the latter was incorporated in the British Cape Colony in 1843, of which the Natal colony was separated in 1856. From the 1860’s, labor was imported from India to the sugar plantations in Natal.
The extraction of diamonds began in the 1870’s with the help of low-paid black migrant workers, and in the 1880’s gold mining was also initiated. The rich mineral deposits, along with strategic considerations, led Britain to seek control over the entire South African area, which succeeded in the Boer War of 1899-1902. The Boer republics became British crown colonies; in 1910, they joined forces with the Natal and Cape Colony of the South African Union, which became an independent dominion within the British Empire.
The colonial history of South Africa is in many respects similar to that of the rest of Africa, but the large white population and the discovery of diamonds and gold contributed greatly to a particular development in South Africa; partly, the native Africans were displaced from large parts of the country (see bantustans) and partly created the basis for a more pervasive industrialization than in any other African country. Both political and economic development were characterized by more pronounced racial inequality. In establishing the South African Union, a racially discriminatory system was established, in which blacks gained only very limited parliamentary influence. The most important political party in the white parliamentary system was initially the South African Party, which sought to unite Africans and English speakers. The party’s leading figures were Louis Botha, South Africa’s first prime minister, and Jan Smuts; they were both supporters of South African participation in World War I, which in 1914 led JBM Hertzog, who was against war participation, to create the African-dominated National Party of South Africa(NP). The NP gained more influence and formed from the 1924 government with the Labor Party. The Westminster Statute of 1931 further strengthened South Africa’s independence from Britain.
In 1933, NP broke with Labor and instead formed government with the South African Party; the following year, the two parties merged into the United Party. For the next 15 years, especially during and immediately after World War II, South Africa underwent a rapid industrialization and urbanization process, under which segregation legislation was expanded and maintained by white privileges both in the workplace and in the residential areas.
The decision to participate in World War II on the Allied side, as well as a relatively liberal racial policy according to circumstances, led in 1939 to the re-establishment of a white nationalist party, the Reunited National Party. The party won government power in 1948 and conducted a more rigid racial discrimination under the term apartheid.
While almost the rest of Africa was decolonized in the following decades, the apartheid system was increasingly left alone as an example of institutionalized white supremacy. Under the leadership of the National Party, South Africa, until 1990, operated with a privileged parliamentarism for the whites, but as an oppressive police state against the blacks.
The armed struggle of the natives against the colonization in the 1800’s. became from the early 1900’s. replaced by more modern political freedom movements, facing white supremacy. The struggle was sometimes led by the black trade unions, at other times dissatisfaction was gathered in broad political movements such as the All African Convention, the ANC and the UDF. The struggle was non-violent until after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when the ANC and PAC, along with other organizations, were banned and then began armed struggle against the regime.
The massacre also led to international criticism of South Africa, which was forced out of the Commonwealth of Nations and in 1961 changed its name and status to the South African Republic. From the mid-1970’s, the apartheid system was gradually weakened by economic stagnation, international isolation and fierce resistance from the black population, especially after the Soweto uprising in 1976., when apartheid was officially abolished and open negotiations began with the ANC on a division of power. The leading forces in this development were Frederik de Klerk, President of 1989, and Nelson Mandela, ANC leader who was imprisoned 1962-90. At the country’s first democratic elections, the ANC won parliamentary control in 1994 and Mandela became president. That same year, South Africa re-entered the Commonwealth. As a government party, the ANC has sought to combine economic growth with a more social and racially equitable distribution policy. With the establishment of the Truth Commission in 1995, a mapping of human rights abuses under the apartheid regime was initiated with a view to the reconciliation of the population groups. The ANC also won the 1999 election and Thabo Mbeki replaced Nelson Mandela as president.
In the years after 2000, South Africa’s foreign policy sought to strengthen its regional position by acting as a conflict solver for several African conflicts, including in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, however, without much success.
In parliamentary elections in 2003, the ANC about 2/3 of the votes and more than 2/3 of the seats in parliament. This means that the ANC itself can draft amendments to the Constitution and send them to a vote. For the first time, the ANC gained a majority in all nine regions, though in alliance with other parties in Kwazulu-Natal.
In 2008, President Mbeki was forced off the post by the ANC; instead, Kgalema Motlanthe took office temporarily until the 2009 elections. Here Jacob Zuma, who since 2007 has been the leader of the ANC and vice president of Mbeki, won here.
South Africa has a large immigrant population as well as many refugees from many of Africa’s unrest areas; many had fled the disastrous economic crisis in Zimbabwe. It has repeatedly triggered unrest, such as when about 100,000 were driven from their homes in 2008.
South Africa – Literature
South Africa – literature, Among the prescriptive forms of expression belong the bushman poetry, which was prevalent until the early 1700’s. consists of songs to invoke spirits in connection with the expulsion of disease and evil, and tales of battles against penetrating black and white colonizers. Further use poetry was widespread in the black bantusprogstalende cultures which displaced Bushmen. It is further developed in the sangoma song used by today’s medicine men.
Important pre-colonial expressions are also the praise songs that came with more state-like forms of political organization among Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho- speaking people from the early 1800’s; the so-called izibongos to the Zulu king Shaka and his successor, Dingane, are particularly famous. The genre has been part of a despotic political culture, but in its ambiguous imagery it has also offered the opportunity for critical response. In the 1990’s, both Nelson Mandela, Chief Buthelezi and President Thabo Mbeki have had active praise singers, and the rhetoric of the genre has been powerfully embedded in political poetry and rap-like song by, for example, Mzwakhe Mbuli (b. 1959), who has been called the “poet of the people”.
Writing literature was developed in connection with the invasion of the European colonizers from the 1600’s, at the earliest in the Dutch-language accounts of the travels into the unknown, which have been effectively re-edited by André Brink, JM Coetzee and Antjie Krog (b. 1952). The records of British missionaries and officials also represent a rich legacy. During the 1800-t. the African languages in the area were written and systematized by missionaries through Bible translations and dictionaries.
An English-language fiction first appeared in the late 1800’s. with novels such as missionary daughter Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883, da. The History of an African Farm, 1980). To this end, until 1910, a religious and official Dutch-language writing culture emerged, which, only after the formation of the South African Union, was replaced by an African- language literature that also included poetry and fiction. It was created as a political project in the years following the Boer War (1899-1902) with the aim of developing cultural self-awareness and national feeling among the beaten Africans and with a stance against British civilization and modernity.
African fiction in writing first appeared in the 1920’s with Sol Plaatje’s English-language novel Mhudi (1930) and Thomas Mofolos (1876-1948) poem in Sotho and English about Shaka (1925). In the 1930’s, in Natal, self-conscious fiction developed in both English and Zulu around the brothers Herbert and Rolfes Dhlomo (1903-56 and 1901-71) and the poet Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (1906-47), as did the prophet Isaiah Shembes (approximately 1868-1935) Zulu hymns also reverberated as published writings. But the development of African fiction was increasingly hampered by racial discrimination and from 1948 by apartheid, which, with the Bantu Education Act of 1953, restricted black Africans’ opportunities for education.
Literature in Afrikaans from the 1920’s and 1930’s revolves around people’s health and being. Nicolaas Petrus van Wyk Louw (1906-70) praised the Great Trek of the Africans to the north from the Cape Province in the 1830’s and the “deep-seated right” they had acquired through this land and land. The novelist CM van den Heever (1902-57) developed themes that recall the fascism of man, the mastery of the earth through work, the relationship between man and woman, and the place and the earth’s determination of human identity – all in a South African landscape., where black people exist only as shadows and caricatures.
The life and destiny of white peasants is also central to English-language literature by authors such as Pauline Smith and Herman Charles Bosman (1905-51). Only in the years surrounding the introduction of the apartheid system did the criticism of racial segregation and political brutality begin to be central, for example in Peter Abrahams’ My Boy of 1946 and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948, then , my beloved country, 1949). Themes like these were from then on a hallmark of South African literature, developed with psychological finesse in Nadine Gordimer’s early novels and in Alex La Guma’s short stories from Cape Town’s slum.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s a black English-language township literature arose in connection with journalism at Can Themba and Nat Nakasa (1937-65) and as an autobiography at Es’kia Mphahlele (1919-2008). It was slowed down by the apartheid regime’s redevelopment and the transformation of townships into sleeping villages. The Soweto uprising in 1976 led to new forms of protest and rebellion literature with black consciousness as prominent ideology of poets such as Oswald Mtshali (b. 1940), Sipho Sepamla and Mongane Wally Serote (b. 1944), and Mazisi Kunene published his cultural nationalist 1979 email about Emperor Shaka the Great.
After Soweto, Afrikaans literature was also increasingly characterized by protest as in Breyten Breytenbach’s poems and modernist memoirs, in Karel Schoemans (1939-2017) and André Brink’s historical novels, with Elsa Joubert (b. 1922) and in Etienne van Heerdens magical – realistic fables. An effective modernist prose based on Kafka was developed by the English-language JM Coetzee.
The most extroverted figure at this stage, with apartheid appearing as existential terms, was Nadine Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991, just as the apartheid system was beginning to move. Even after the 1994 power shift and democratization, the shadows of the past have continued to dominate. New types of heroic prose about the ANC ‘s freedom fighters have emerged, and the account of the past is strongly depicted in Antjie Krog’s poetic report from the Truth Commission’s hearings, Country of My Skull from 1998. A novel by Zakes Mdas (b. 1948) demonstrates Ways of Dying from 1995 that brutality as well as creativity lives on in black poor neighborhoods across political change, but perhaps with new opportunities to express themselves.
At the turn of the millennium, it finally seemed as if South African literature was beginning to get the lift that it was expected that the collapse of apartheid would give it. JM Coetzee won the Booker Prize for the second time with the rape novel Disgrace (1999, da. Vanære, 2000) and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003. Rape theme is also central to Arthur Maimanes (1932-2005) Hate No More (2000), whose black criminal portrayed as a victim of apartheid, and Farida Karodias (b. 1942) Other Secrets (2000), where the victim is colored, and the rapist African, but the gender politics override the racial contradiction. An exciting new author is Ivan Vladislavic (b. 1957), who debuted in 1989 with the short story collectionMissing Persons and in 2001 published the novel The Restless Supermarket about the harsh Hillbrow neighborhood of Johannesburg, which is also addressed in Phaswane Mpes (1970-2004) Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001). Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000) revives the story of a xhosa rebellion in the 1800’s, and in David’s Story (2000), one of the best in post-apartheid literature, Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948) lets a colored ANC- guerrillas trace its historical origins among the griqua people. Not unexpectedly, memoir literature has also experienced a flourishing, for example in Raymond Suttner’s (b. 1945) Inside Apartheid’s Prison (2001).