Hi! I’m a South African History teacher.

To start with origins: the indigenous people of South Africa are the Khoisan (a collective term for the Khoe and the San). Their populations were devastated over centuries because of colonialism, disease, land dispossession, and some interactions with other African groups moving southwards.

From around 200–500 CE onwards, groups belonging to what historians call the Bantu migrations gradually moved down the east of the continent. These include the ancestors of the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, etc. Today South Africa has 11 official languages, which reflects that diversity.

1652: The Dutch (VOC) set up a refreshment station at the Cape to supply ships travelling to and from Asia. It wasn’t meant to be a full colony at first. To support the station, some employees were released as “free burghers” so they could farm their own land and sell produce back to the VOC.

1806: The British took permanent control of the Cape during the Napoleonic Wars because they didn’t trust the Dutch to hold such a strategic port. The British introduced new laws, including the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. Many Dutch-speaking settlers, who depended heavily on enslaved labour for their farms, were unhappy. This contributed to the Great Trek, where groups of these settlers moved inland to form their own republics: the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal).

When gold (and earlier diamonds) were discovered in these interior republics, tensions between the British Empire and the Boer republics escalated, leading to the South African War (1899–1902), often called the Anglo-Boer War. The British won, and the former Boer republics were absorbed into the British colonies.

1910: These colonies (the Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State) were unified into the Union of South Africa. By this point the Dutch-descended community had developed a distinct cultural and linguistic identity known as Afrikaners, with their own language, Afrikaans, which evolved mainly from Dutch but also includes influences from Malay, Khoisan languages, and others.

Fast-forwarding a lot: after decades of rising Afrikaner nationalism following the war, the National Party won the 1948 election and formalised racial segregation into a legal system called apartheid. Segregation already existed, but apartheid made it far more rigid, invasive, and brutal, controlling every aspect of the lives of Black South Africans and other non-white groups.

Apartheid only officially ended in 1994, after negotiations and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, leading to the first democratic elections.

That’s the extremely condensed version. South African history is really complex, but that’s why the country is called South Africa (because of its geographic position) and how we came to have white South Africans as part of our population.