This is the basic, basic version; hugely simplistic not guarenteed as accurate, sterotyped but close enough and typical-ish... Although I'm sure that most of the South Africans I know can pull holes in this larger than the missing ozone layer but ho hum, I stand corrected if anyone has an opinion!
11 official languages, 9 different tribes but those are the indigenous tribes. It doesn't include the white tribes, namely "English" South African and "Dutch" South African a.k.a Afrikaans. The Afrikaans ultimately descent from the Dutch settlers in the 1700's, the English pretty much came from England (funny that). The original Dutch had a bit of a hard time... they came with the Dutch East India company which set up compounds in South Africa in a land they thought uninhabited (duh) - all male. Some decided they didn't like it and set off on a mission across the country and became known in history as the Voertrekkers, hardy folk that fought the Xhosas, the Zulus and everyone else inbetween (having discovered that rather obviously it wasn't uninhabited which rather ruined what they thought of as a covenant with God in that they believed it was their God-given land) and of course by the late 1800s they fought the British in the Boer Wars... the Voertrekkers are the ancestors of the Afrikaans today who were also the grand architects of Apartheid - in English it means "apart-ness''.
During Apartheid, the ruling National Party would restrict freedom of movement on blacks and coloureds (those with one white and one black parent), institute night curfews, banish people to the countryside, provide sub-standard education that was geared towards a life of servitude or manual labour, make it illegal to have a mixed race relationship, restrict voting rights and god knows how many other things that they managed to enshrine in law. This only ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as President.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment