365 Days of Climate Awareness 232 – Introduction to South Africa

The Republic of South Africa sits at the southern tip of Africa, with coasts on both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.  It covers 1,221,037 km²/471,445 mi² (twice the size of France!) and has a population of more than 60 million, not quite 5% of Africa’s total, having about 4% of the continent’s area. Like Kiribati, South Africa’s capital is split into three: the executive is in Pretoria, the judicial in Bloemfontein, and the legislative in Cape Town. The country is about 80% native black African, with the remaining 20% a mix of Asians and postcolonial white Europeans.

The World Bank has classified South Africa as “newly industrialized”. Its economy is the fourth-largest in Africa, the 33^rd largest in the world. The widespread poverty, partly a result of the colonial days and later Apartheid, despite the arrival of industry is the basic reason South Africa is considered to be a developing nation. Some of the oldest hominid fossils on earth have been found there, with several from the Australopithecus genus dating to 3 million years of age. Humans, Bantu-speaking natives, have lived there since the stone age. Portuguese explorers passed by from the 1400’s on, but the Dutch began to colonize in the mid-1600’s, to be taken over by the British in the early 1800’s.

In 1931 South Africa declared its independence. In 1948 the official system of Apartheid, writing the racial segregation of the colonial era into law, began. In the 1960’s and 70’s black activists used terrorist attacks and guerrilla tactics to force the issue of racial equality which they could not win by vote. In the 1980’s two South African leaders emerged in the fight to end Apartheid: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who called for worldwide divestment from the country, and Nelson Mandela, jailed for over 18 years for his activism, but who after his release became South Africa’s first black president and one of the world’s great champions of human rights.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Physically South Africa consists of the central plateau, consisting of the ancient Kalachari igneous and metamorphic craton, descending through the dramatic Great Escarpment (known as the Drakenberg in the southeast, and the Great Karoo in the southwest) down to the coastal plain. Mountains parallel the Great Escarpment and the temperate southern coast. To the north South Africa becomes increasingly dry and arid, with the Kalahari Desert in the northwest.

Nelson Mandela.

The entire country is temperate in climate, surrounded on two sides by ocean. The steady rise of South Africa’s elevation to the north, heading deeper into Africa, creates several climatic zones. The western half of the country is pronouncedly drier than the east.

Köppen-Geiger climate zones, 1980-2016

Table Mountain, overlooking Cape Town.

Tomorrow: South Africa and climate change.

Be brave, and be well.