L'histoire de l'Afrique du sud

SOUTH AFRICA BEFORE AND AFTER COLONIZATION

South Africa is located in the south of Africa and is the largest economic power in Africa. It is a country with a variety of cultures. On the South African territory one finds, as in Europe or the United States, large cities of developed capitalist countries with their ultra-modern buildings, their supermarkets, their luxury stores and with a white population. But there are also the shanty towns, the misery and underdevelopment, the dictatorship, the bloody repression and the fear in which the black, mixed race or Asian population lives. We will then see how South Africa was before the colony and what it became after.

Before the triangular trade arrived in Africa, this continent had a rich and varied history and cultures. There was a political context, with great empires, kingdoms, city-states, with their own languages and cultures. Africans lived like Europeans, in Africa, before slavery, the life of Africans was quite similar to that of the Europeans who enslaved them later. Some lived in large cities, some in small towns, some lived in the countryside. Some were rich, others poor. They knew periods of peace but also periods of war. Slavery slowed down the history of Africa and destroyed all their different habits and cultures. South Africa is, since the end of the 15th century, sailed by Portuguese navigators, and really started to interest Europeans in the 17th century. The first Europeans in South Africa were Dutch employees of the Company. Then came the "free burghers" who were subject to the administration of the Company and were not allowed to expand the land they were allocated. These peasant-settlers did not take kindly to the colonial pact. Throughout the two and a half centuries of colonial history, violent conflicts opposed the small community of white peasants to the colonial administration in the Cape. The latter, initially Dutch, became British from 1795. There were demands, riots, revolts, and above all, successive waves of migration to escape the grip of the colonial administration beyond the colony's borders. The colonists found free land and built up large estates. But the land was not so free. The settlers in the Cape, as well as the successive waves of "migrant peasants", came up against different peoples: first the Bushmen and the Hottentots, the first occupants of the country, then, as they expanded, the Bantu-speaking peoples.

They were all exterminated. The English colonial state, now well established in the Cape, and the descendants of the Dutch emigrants, who were now called "Boers," sometimes allied and sometimes fighting each other, waged several wars during the 19th century to occupy the lands of the various Bantu tribes. In 1867 and 1871, diamonds were discovered. In 1886, gold was discovered in the Boer Republics. A whole new population came to the Witwatersrand between 1885 and 1895. The Boer War began in October 1899. It was a colonial war fought with the same ferocity as that waged by the British armies. The war lasted two and a half years, during which the population put up a fierce resistance. The Boer peasants fought a guerrilla war against the British army. The troops systematically burned farms and crops, massacred herds and rounded up women, old men and children and put them in makeshift camps guarded by the military. The exhausted

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