Land and People

Beautiful and Diverse

South Africa is a beautiful country blessed with a wonderfully diverse population and geography. It is home to some 48 million people from at least 20 ethnic groups. The country is about one-eigth the size of the US. At latitude 35 degree south, Cape Town is about the same distance from the equator as Sydney in Australia or Los Angeles in the Northern Hemisphere.

Geography: Two Main Regions

Broadly speaking, South Africa consists of two main regions, a huge inland plateau that is fringed by a narrow coastal plain on three sides. Separating the two is an escarpment of mountains and hills, dominated by the mighty Drakensberg range. Other spectacular mountain ranges grace the southern and western Cape.

Climate: Generally Temperate

Overall, South Africa is a dry country with annual average rainfall of 464mm, against the world average of 857mm. 65% of the country receives less than 500mm annually, the usual minimum for dry-land farming. Some of the high mountains receive rainfall of 2,000mm but along the west coast the average drops to 50mm. Like much of sub-Saharan Africa, the country periodically suffers from severe drought.

People: Early Origins

Some 2,000 years ago the Khoisan turned to pastoralism, acquiring livestock from Bantu-speaking people migrating southwards. The Khoikhoi (Hottentots) moved down the west coast and were the first indigenous people to encounter Dutch settlers under Jan van Riebeeck, who established a base for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape in 1652 to provision ships.

In the 1860s, indentured labourers from India arrived to work on the sugar plantations on the east coast. The white population grew substantially in the 1800s with the arrival of large groups of British settlers and, later, fortune seekers on the mines. Although not as numerous as Afrikaners, the Englishspeaking community has been in the forefront of industry and commerce. Today Africans comprise nearly 80% of the population, Whites 9%, Coloureds or mixed-race 9% and Asians 2.5%.

Demography

Over a third of South Africans live in the four high- population conurbations of Johannesburg/ Tshwane (Pretoria)/Vereeniging in Gauteng; eThekwini (Durban)/Pinetown/ Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal; Cape Town and surrounds; and the Nelson Mandela (Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage) region of the Eastern Cape.

Whites are predominantly urban-based and widely spread, while most Coloured people are found in the Western and Northern Cape provinces, and Asians in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.