The African continent has proved a rich resource for exploration into our ancient past, from missing links to dinosaur fossils to lost civilisations.
The South African landscape contains a truly amazing span of historical sites that cover just about every important phase in the development of our species - from pre-human hominids, through early human settlements that predate the use of fire and tools, and Early to Late Stone Age up to Iron Age.
South Africa has had its fair share of battles and wars throughout its bloody history. It is the conventional wisdom that the Zulu War of 1879 consisted of one huge victory for the Zulu forces at Isandlwana followed by swift retribution by the British at Gingindlovu, with a few minor skirmishes in-between.
Those 'few minor skirmishes' in fact constituted a protracted war that played out over decades. The Anglo Boer War, everyone said it would be over by Christmas of 1899, but they were wrong. It was not over for another three years, and what many people today don't realise is just how widespread, vicious and devastating the fighting was.
Just about every square kilometre of the country was fiercely contested, from Namaqualand to Komatipoort. More than half a million soldiers fought, but most of the tens of thousands of deaths - men, women and children, black and white - were caused by disease.
There are certain events that, it’s clear with hindsight, significantly changed the direction of history.
South Africa Online ® explores South African history with literature from a broad spectrum of acclaimed South African writers.
Well known South African historical sites, museums and monuments include Rhodes Memorial, the Afrikaans Language Monument in Paarl and the V...
The latest findings support the theory that it was in Africa, and most likely South Africa, that humans evolved – where we first stood up ...
A Brief History of South Africa. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1884 in the interior encouraged economic growth and immigrati...
The history of South Africa is a colourful and diverse one, with stories of struggle for land, the movement of people, and the cultures of a...
In SA, art was once a simple finger-painting of a buck being speared down by a group of stick men on the wall of a cave in animal’s blood....
The Bushmen of old lived a life of gentle transhumance; free to move with the great herds of game that roamed the plains of Southern Africa....
Why were the Bushmen chased away so vehemently, and why did the campaign against the Bushmen take on overtones of what we now call ‘Ethni...
So, how do we know anything about Bushman culture at all? Well, luckily, some Bushmen tribes have survived and maintained their traditional ...
After the Bushmen, came the Khoikhoi (also called Khoekhoe, Khoenkhoen or Koina). They were close cousins of the Bushmen, but had started ke...
In 1487, a sailor named Bartolomeu Dias set off in a little ship from the seaward shores of Portugal. His goal was to find a sea route to th...
Carefully following in his predecessor’s footsteps, Vasco Da Gama rounded the Cape without major incident and, five months after leaving h...
The Xhosa were quite distinct from the Khoikhoi and Bushmen (San), who had hitherto been the only indigenes to interact with the Europeans....
At the close of the eighteenth century. when the south-western Cape was a thriving colonial outpost of Europe, the rest of Southern Africa w...
The arrival of the 1820 Settlers at the Cape added a new dimension to the colony's developing human tapestry. They were placed along the Cap...
The pioneer educators who brought with them from those far-off cities their deep religious convictions were like the missing piece in the ji...
The first roads in South Africa came with the Europeans. Before the Dutch East India Company landed on our shores, footpaths, cattle tracks ...