Southern Africa

Southern Africa holds some of the longest records of modern human behaviour. Blombos Cave on the southern Cape coast has engraved ochre about 75,000–100,000 years old, and the Cradle of Humankind north-west of Johannesburg has yielded fossils of Australopithecus and Homo naledi. The San, hunter-gatherers whose ancestors lived here for tens of thousands of years, left rock paintings and engravings from the Drakensberg to Namibia's Twyfelfontein and Botswana's Tsodilo Hills.

About 2,000 years ago Khoekhoe herders brought sheep and later cattle into the western half of the region. From roughly the 3rd century AD, Bantu-speaking farmers who worked iron moved south through the wetter east, bringing crops, cattle and the language families that most people in the region speak today: Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele), Sotho-Tswana, Shona and others.

Cattle and gold built states. Mapungubwe, on the Limpopo where South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe meet, traded gold and ivory to the Indian Ocean in the 11th–13th centuries. Its successor, Great Zimbabwe, built the largest stone enclosures south of the Sahara between about 1100 and 1450. Later came the Mutapa and Rozvi states in Zimbabwe, the Lozi kingdom on the upper Zambezi floodplain, and in the early 19th century the military kingdom of the Zulu under Shaka.

The upheaval of the 1810s–1830s, remembered as the Mfecane or Difaqane, scattered groups across the region: Mzilikazi's Ndebele moved north to found a state around Bulawayo, the Kololo reached the Zambezi, and Moshoeshoe gathered refugees on the mountain fortress of Thaba Bosiu to found what became Lesotho. Mswati II consolidated the Swazi kingdom in the same years.

The Dutch East India Company set up a supply station at the Cape in 1652. Slaves brought from South and Southeast Asia, Madagascar and East Africa, the Khoekhoe and the settlers produced the Cape's mixed communities and the Afrikaans language. Britain took the Cape in 1795 and again in 1806; Afrikaner farmers who rejected British rule trekked inland in the 1830s and founded the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

Diamonds at Kimberley (1867) and gold on the Witwatersrand (1886) turned the interior into the richest mining zone on earth. Johannesburg grew from a camp to a city in a decade. Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company pushed north to create Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia); Germany took South West Africa (Namibia) in 1884 and, in 1904–08, killed most of the Herero and Nama peoples there in what is now recognised as the 20th century's first genocide. Britain declared protectorates over Bechuanaland (Botswana), Basutoland (Lesotho) and Swaziland partly to keep them out of Boer or company hands.

The South African War of 1899–1902 brought the Boer republics under British rule, and the Union of South Africa (1910) excluded black South Africans from power. Land laws in 1913 left most of the country to the white minority. After 1948 the National Party built apartheid: racial classification, pass laws, forced removals, 'homelands' and separate everything. Namibia, ruled by South Africa after 1915, got the same system.

Resistance grew from petitions to mass campaigns and, after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, to armed struggle. Nelson Mandela was jailed in 1962–64 and held until 1990. The 1976 Soweto uprising, sanctions, township revolt and the collapse of the Cold War forced negotiations; South Africa voted in its first democratic election on 27 April 1994.

Independence came in two waves. Botswana and Lesotho (1966), Swaziland (1968), Malawi and Zambia (1964) became independent peacefully. Where white settlers or Portugal held on, it took war: Angola and Mozambique after long guerrilla campaigns and the 1974 revolution in Lisbon (both in 1975), Zimbabwe after the Rhodesian bush war (1980), Namibia after a liberation war and UN-supervised elections (1990).

The 'frontline states' around South Africa sheltered liberation movements and paid for it with raids and destabilisation. Angola and Mozambique fell into civil wars fed by the Cold War that lasted until 1992 (Mozambique) and 2002 (Angola), leaving landmines that are still being cleared. Botswana chose a different path: diamonds found in 1967 were managed through a state partnership with De Beers, and it became one of the fastest-growing economies in the world with an unbroken record of elections.

Zimbabwe's story turned after 2000: fast-track land reform, economic collapse and hyperinflation in 2008 led to the adoption of the US dollar in 2009. Robert Mugabe was removed in 2017. The country has since launched several local currencies, the latest being the gold-backed ZiG in April 2024, while most daily prices stay in dollars.

Politics shifted again in the 2020s. South Africa's ANC lost its majority in 2024 and formed a national unity government; Botswana's ruling party lost power for the first time in 2024; Mozambique's disputed 2024 election brought months of protests. SADC, the Southern African Development Community, links all ten countries and underpins cross-border trade, the Common Monetary Area and the transfrontier parks.

Most of the region is a high plateau between 1,000 and 1,800 m, edged by the Great Escarpment and narrow coastal plains. Rain falls mostly in summer and decreases from east to west: the Mozambique coast is humid, the Kalahari is semi-desert, and the Namib, cooled by the cold Benguela current, is one of the oldest deserts on earth. The Cape is the exception, with winter rain and its own plant kingdom, the fynbos, one of six floral kingdoms on the planet.

Rivers decide where the big game lives. The Zambezi drops over Victoria Falls and runs through the Kariba and Cahora Bassa dams. The Okavango never reaches the sea: it spreads into a 15,000 km² inland delta in the Kalahari, and its flood, fed by Angolan rains months earlier, peaks in the dry season, pulling wildlife in when the rest of the country is dry.

The region's parks range from South Africa's fenced, road-served Kruger to the open wilderness of northern Botswana, which holds the world's largest elephant population. Transfrontier conservation areas now link parks across borders; KAZA (Kavango–Zambezi), shared by Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, covers about 520,000 km², and its joint UNIVISA is the tourist-facing piece.

Conservation is contested and political. Rhino poaching surged after 2008; South Africa and Namibia dehorn rhinos and guard them heavily. Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia argue for selling ivory stocks and allowing regulated hunting, while elephant pressure on villages is a daily issue. Community conservancies, first in Namibia, give local people income from wildlife tourism and are now a model across the region.

About 90 million people live in the ten countries, over 60 million of them in South Africa. Most speak a Bantu language at home and switch easily into English, which is official or widely used everywhere except Angola and Mozambique, where Portuguese is the language of the state. South Africa has 12 official languages, including South African Sign Language since 2023.

Christianity is the main faith across the region, often mixed with ancestral practice; independent African churches such as the Zion Christian Church draw millions to their gatherings. Traditional leaders still matter: Eswatini is Africa's last absolute monarchy, Lesotho has a constitutional king, and chiefs allocate land in much of rural Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Food rests on maize porridge, called pap, sadza, nshima or xima depending on the country, eaten by hand with a relish of meat, greens or beans. The braai, grilling meat over wood, is a social institution in South Africa and Namibia. The Cape adds Cape Malay curries and bobotie; Mozambique brings peri-peri, prawns and Portuguese bread rolls; German bakeries survive in Namibia's towns.

Visitors meet the region through people in the tourism trade: guides, trackers and camp staff who often come from nearby villages. Greetings come first, handshakes can be long and three-part, and elders are addressed with respect. HIV rates are among the highest in the world, and life expectancy has recovered strongly since treatment became widespread in the 2000s.