11 - The peoples and states of southern Africa

Summary

Southern Africa is a region of high savanna, the veld (Afrikaans, “field”), mountains, and narrow coastal plain severed by short rivers lying south of the Zambezi River and comprising the modern states of Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland, and the Republic of South Africa, which surround the independent kingdom of Lesotho. Although Europeans had established stations along the coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly the strategic Dutch colonial station at Cape Town near the southernmost point of the continent, they knew little of the interior of southern Africa until the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, although it is relatively new to Europeans, it is in fact geologically the oldest region of the African continent. Rocks formed more than 1 billion years ago still lie in their horizontal plane, untouched by the upheavals that have elsewhere shaped the configuration of the global landmass. Here in southern Africa, protruding upward from the molten core of the earth, is the massive plug of rock called the Kaapvaal Craton, which resisted the geologic turbulence that floated the other continents away to their present locations. When the African continent became stabilized about 500 million years ago, the Kaapvaal Craton, 234,000 square miles of southern Africa, remained undisturbed, along with its prodigious mineral wealth.