South Africa

Overview

The modern South African state was created on 31 May 1910, when the South Africa Act 1909 fused the Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange River colonies into the Union of South Africa, a self-governing British dominion built on white-minority rule. Full legislative sovereignty followed with the Statute of Westminster in December 1931—hence the dataset's 1932 start date—confirmed domestically by the Status of the Union Act 1934. From the start, the Union entrenched racial dispossession: the Natives Land Act of 1913 confined black South Africans to reserves amounting to about 7 per cent of the land, later marginally expanded. The table's 2.1M km² peak area far exceeds the country's present 1,221,037 km² because the Union also administered the former German colony of South West Africa (Namibia) as a League of Nations mandate from 1919—territory it effectively annexed and held, against UN opposition, until Namibian independence in 1990.

History

South Africa fought alongside Britain in both world wars—the decision to enter World War II split the ruling United Party in 1939—and its gold and diamond-driven economy industrialized rapidly. The decisive rupture came in 1948, when D. F. Malan's National Party won power and institutionalized apartheid ("separateness"): the Population Registration and Group Areas Acts (1950), pass laws, the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), Bantu Education (1953), and eventually the bantustan system, which stripped black citizens of nationality by creating ten ethnic "homelands," four of them declared nominally independent (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei). Between 1960 and 1983 some 3.5 million people were forcibly removed. After police massacred peaceful protesters at Sharpeville in 1960, the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress were banned and turned to armed struggle; a whites-only referendum made the country a republic on 31 May 1961, and Commonwealth pressure forced its withdrawal that year.

Decades of internal resistance—the 1976 Soweto uprising above all—and mounting international sanctions, arms embargoes, and divestment gradually made the system untenable, while the border war in Angola and Namibia drained the state. On 2 February 1990 President F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC and freed Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison; the CODESA negotiations, backed by a 1992 white referendum, produced interim and final constitutions, and on 27 April 1994 the ANC won the first universal-franchise election, making Mandela president. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented some 21,000 deaths from political violence under apartheid and the transition.

Later history and present status

Post-1994 South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth, became the region's anchor state and a BRICS member, and holds Africa's largest economy by nominal GDP. Yet it remains one of the world's most unequal societies, scarred by unemployment, corruption and state capture under Jacob Zuma, the 2021 unrest, and an energy crisis; in 2024 the ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time, forcing a Government of National Unity under Cyril Ramaphosa.