southernmost region of the African continent, comprising the countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The island nation of Madagascar is excluded because of its distinct language and cultural heritage.

The interior of Southern Africa consists of a series of undulating plateaus that cover most of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana and extend into central Angola. Contiguous with this are uplands in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Coastal mountains and escarpments, flanking the high ground, are found in northern Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and along the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border. Coastal plains abut the Indian Ocean in Mozambique and the Atlantic in Angola and Namibia.

The Kalahari desert forms the central depression of the Southern African plateau. Its elevation rises to the Great Escarpment, which flanks the plateau in an almost unbroken line from the Zambezi River to Angola. Southern Zimbabwe and much of South Africa are within a region of scrublands and grasslands known as the veld. To the southeast of the veld is the Drakensberg range, which includes the region's highest peak—Lesotho's Mount Ntlenyana, at 11,424 feet (3,482 metres). In Namibia the coastal margin includes the extremely dry Namib desert, which, in the south, merges eastward into the great sandy expanse of the Kalahari.

The region is generally drained eastward toward the Indian Ocean, a pattern exemplified by the largest rivers, the Zambezi (Zambezi River) and Limpopo (Limpopo River). The Zambezi is the longest river in the region, and its catchment includes much of Angola, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The only major river flowing into the Atlantic Ocean is the Orange (Orange River), which drains parts of South Africa, Lesotho, and Namibia.

Southern African climates are seasonal, ranging from arid to semiarid and from temperate to tropical. The seasonality is an important control on plant growth and a regulator of river flows. Droughts are common in much of the region. Four main types of vegetation are found: savanna woodlands (known as miombo forest) in the north, a series of dry woodlands to the south of these, arid and semiarid grassland, scrubland, and bushland in the Namib and Kalahari deserts and their environs, and Mediterranean vegetation along the southern coast.

The semiarid plains and plateaus that cover much of the region contain animals commonly associated with the East African plains—e.g., antelopes, gazelles, zebras, elephants, and the big cats. However, different animals are found in the coastal woodlands of South Africa and in the desert regions to the north and northwest. Many habitats have been extensively modified by agriculture, thus restricting the ranges of certain species that were formerly more widespread. There are some two dozen large national parks and game reserves in the area as well as many smaller ones, most located in the open or partially wooded plains. At the beginning of the 21st century, several transfrontier parks were opening, including Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the first transnational park, and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, among the largest parks in the world.

The black peoples of Southern Africa—the overwhelming majority of the region's population—can be divided into speakers of two language families, Khoisan (Khoisan languages) and Bantu (Bantu languages). Khoisan speakers, who have inhabited the region for millennia, have now been displaced in many areas by Bantu speakers. People of European ancestry began migrating to the region in the mid-17th century; they now constitute a sizable minority in South Africa and a much smaller population in Zimbabwe.

The history of Southern Africa cannot be written as a single narrative. Shifting geographic and political boundaries and changing historiographical perspectives render this impossible. Research into local history in the late 20th and early 21st century has presented fragmented historical knowledge, and older generalizations have given way to a complex polyphony of voices as new subfields of history—gender and sexuality, health, and the environment, to name but a few—have developed. Archaeological and historical inquiry has been extremely uneven in the countries of the Southern African subcontinent, with Namibia the least and South Africa the most intensely studied. Divided societies produce divided histories, and there is hardly an episode in the region's history that is not now open to debate. This is as true of prehistory as of the more recent past.

The uncertainties of evidence for the long preliterate past—where a bone or potsherd can undermine previous interpretations and where recent research has subverted even terminology—are matched by conflicting representations of the colonial and postcolonial periods. In Southern Africa, history is not a set of neutrally observed and agreed-upon facts: present concerns colour interpretations of even the remote past. For all the contestants in contemporary Southern Africa there has been a conscious struggle to control the past in order to legitimate the present and lay claim to the future. Who is telling what history for which Africa is a question that needs constantly to be addressed.

This article covers the history of the region from the prehistoric period to the end of the colonial period in the 20th century. Coverage of the region's physical and human geography can be found in the article Africa. For discussion of the physical and human geography of individual countries in the region and of their postcolonial history, see Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi (Malaŵi), Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Area 2,314,764 square miles (5,995,215 square km). Pop. (2005 est.) 121,111,000.

The controversies in Southern African history begin with the discovery of a fossilized hominin (Hominidae) skull in a limestone cave at Taung near the Harts River north of Kimberley in 1924, followed in 1936 by discoveries in similar caves in the Transvaal (now Limpopo and Gauteng provinces) and Northern Cape province, in South Africa. Other significant hominin finds were made in the Sterkfontein Valley (in Gauteng province) beginning in the 1940s. For some time the significance of these finds and their relationship to the evolution (human evolution) of early humans were unappreciated, perhaps because the finds could not be dated, and stone tools—long regarded as the defining characteristic of early humans—had not been found with them. Since that time, similar but datable discoveries in eastern Africa as well as discoveries in the Makapansgat Valley in South Africa have made it possible to place the South African remains in sequence and identify them as australopithecines (Australopithecus), upright-walking creatures who are the earliest human ancestors. The australopithecines who roamed the highland savanna plains of Southern Africa date from about three million to one million years ago. There can be little doubt that for hundreds of thousands of years Southern Africa, like eastern Africa, was in the forefront of human development and technological innovation.

Controversies remain, however. The connections between australopithecines and earlier potentially hominin forms remain unclear, while a number of species of australopithecines have been identified. Their evolution into the species Homo habilis and then into the species Homo erectus—which displayed the larger brain, upright posture, teeth, and hands resembling those of modern humans and from whom Homo sapiens almost certainly evolved—is still fiercely debated. Homo erectus appears to have roamed the open savanna lands of eastern and Southern Africa, collecting fruits and berries—and perhaps roots—and either scavenging or hunting. Acheulean industry appeared during the Early Stone Age (Stone Age) (c. 2,500,000 to 150,000 years ago) and was characterized by the use of simple stone hand axes, choppers, and cleavers. First evident about 1,500,000 years ago, it seems to have spread from eastern Africa throughout the continent and also to Europe and Asia during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch (Pleistocene Epoch), reaching Southern Africa about 1,000,000 years ago; Acheulean industry remained dominant for more than 1,000,000 years.

During this time early humans also developed those social, cognitive, and linguistic traits that distinguish Homo sapiens (human being). Some of the earliest fossils associated with Homo sapiens, dated from about 120,000 to 80,000 years ago, have been found in South Africa at the Klasies River Mouth Cave (Klasies) in Eastern Cape, while at Border Cave on the South Africa–Swaziland border a date of about 90,000 years ago has been claimed for similar Middle Stone Age (150,000 to 30,000 years ago) skeletal remains.

With the emergence of Homo sapiens, experimentation and regional diversification displaced the undifferentiated Acheulean tool kit, and a far more efficient small blade (also called microlithic) technology evolved. Through the controlled use of fire, denser, more mobile populations could move for the first time into heavily wooded areas and caves. Wood, bark, and leather were used for tools and clothing, while vegetable foods were also probably more important than their archaeological survival suggests.

Some scholars believe that the addition of organized hunting to gathering (hunting and gathering culture) and scavenging transformed human society. The large number of distinctive Late Stone Age (Neolithic Period) (30,000 to 2,000 years ago) industries that emerged reflect increasing specialization as hunter-gatherers exploited different environments, often moving seasonally between them, and developed different subsistence strategies. As in many parts of the world, changes in technology seem to mark a shift to the consumption of smaller game, fish, invertebrates, and plants. Late Stone Age peoples used bows and arrows and a variety of snares and traps for hunting, as well as grindstones and digging sticks for gathering plant food; with hooks, barbed spears, and wicker baskets they also were able to catch fish and thus exploit rivers, lakeshores, and seacoasts more effectively.

Despite the ever-increasing number of radiocarbon dates available for the many Late Stone Age sites excavated in Southern Africa, the reasons for changed consumption patterns and variations in technology are poorly understood. Until the 1960s, population explosion and migration were the common explanations; subsequent explanations have stressed adaptation. Yet the reasons for adaptation are equally unclear and the model equally controversial. Environmental changes do not seem to have been directly responsible, while the evidence for social change is elusive. Nevertheless, the appearance of cave art, careful burials, and ostrich-eggshell beads for adornment suggests more sophisticated behaviour and new patterns of culture. These developments apparently are associated with the emergence between 20,000 and 15,000 BC of the earliest of the historically recognizable populations of Southern Africa: the Pygmy, San, and Khoekhoe peoples, who were probably genetically related to the ancient population that had evolved in the African subcontinent.

Although many scholars attempt to deduce the nature of Late Stone Age societies by examining contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, this method is fraught with difficulties. Evidence from Botswana and Namibia suggests that many contemporary hunter-gatherers recently have been dispossessed and that their present way of life, far from being the result of thousands of years of stagnation and isolation, has resulted from their integration into the modern world economy; this hardly provides an adequate model for reconstructions of earlier societies.

During historic times hunter-gatherers were organized in loosely knit bands, of which the family was the basic unit, although wider alliances with neighbouring bands were essential for survival. Each group had its own territory, in which special importance was attached to natural resources, and in many instances bands moved seasonally from small to large camping sites, following water, game, and vegetation. Labour was allocated by gender, with men responsible for hunting game, women for snaring small animals, collecting plant foods, and undertaking domestic chores. These patterns are also evident in the recent archaeological record, but it is unclear how far they can be safely projected back.

Contrary to the popular view that the hunter-gatherer way of life was impoverished and brutish, Late Stone Age people were highly skilled and had a good deal of leisure and a rich spiritual life, as their cave paintings and rock engravings show. While exact dating of cave paintings is problematic, paintings at the Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia appear to be some 26,000 to 28,000 years old. Whereas the art in the northern woodlands is stylized and schematic, that of the savanna and coastlands seems more naturalistic, showing scenes of hunting and fishing, of ritual and celebration; it vividly portrays the Late Stone Age cosmology and way of life. The motives of the artists remain obscure, but many paintings appear linked to the trance experiences of medicine men, in which the antelope (eland) was a key symbol. In later rock paintings there is also the first hint of the advent of new groups of herders and farmers.

In the long run these new groups of herders and farmers transformed the hunter-gatherer way of life. Initially, however, distinctions between early pastoralists, farmers, and hunter-gatherers were not overwhelming, and in many areas the various groups coexisted. The first evidence of pastoralism in the subcontinent occurs on a scattering of sites in the more arid west; there the bones of sheep and goats, accompanied by stone tools and pottery, date to some 2,000 years ago, about 200 years before iron-using farmers first arrived in the better-watered eastern half of the region. It is with the origins of these food-producing communities and their evolution into the contemporary societies of Southern Africa that much of the precolonial history of the subcontinent has been concerned.

When Europeans first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, they encountered herding people, whom they called Hottentots (a name now considered pejorative) but who called themselves Khoekhoe, meaning “men of men.” At that time they inhabited the fertile southwestern Cape region as well as its more arid hinterland to the northwest, where rainfall did not permit crop cultivation, but they may once have grazed their stock on the more luxuriant central grasslands of Southern Africa. Linguistic evidence suggests that the languages of the later Khoekhoe (the so-called Khoisan languages) originated in one of the hunter-gatherer languages of northern Botswana. In the colonial period, destitute Khoekhoe often reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence; herders and hunters were also frequently physically indistinguishable and used identical stone tools. Thus, the Dutch, and many subsequent social scientists, believed they belonged to a single population following different modes of subsistence: hunting, foraging, beachcombing, and herding. For this reason the groups are often referred to as Khoisan, a compound word referring to Khoekhoe and San, as the Nama called hunter-gatherers without livestock (Bushmen, in the terminology of the colonists).

The archaeological remains of nomadic pastoralists living in impermanent polities are frustratingly sparse, but in the upper Zambezi River valley, southwestern Zimbabwe, and Botswana, herding and pottery appear late in the 1st millennium BC. Cattle and milking appear somewhat later than small stock and were perhaps acquired from iron-using farmers in western Zimbabwe or northeastern South Africa. The loosely organized herders expanded rapidly, driven by their need for fresh grazing areas. Along with pastoralism and pottery came other signs of change: domestic dogs, changes in stone tool kits, altered settlement patterns, larger ostrich-eggshell beads, and the appearance of marine shells in the interior, which suggests the existence of long-distance trade.

Most of Southern Africa's early agricultural communities shared a common culture, which spread across the region remarkably quickly from the 2nd century AD. By the second half of the 1st millennium AD, farming communities were living in relatively large, semipermanent villages. They cultivated sorghum, millet, and legumes and herded sheep, goats, and some cattle; made pottery and fashioned iron tools to turn the soil and cut their crops; and engaged in long-distance trade. Salt, iron implements, pottery, and possibly copper ornaments passed from hand to hand and were traded widely. Some communities settled near exceptionally good salt, metal, or clay deposits or became known for their specialist craftsmen.

Archaeologists are divided over whether all these cultural and economic attributes arrived with a single group of new immigrants speaking a new language or resulted from a more piecemeal development of different skills and the adoption of new techniques by indigenous hunter-gatherers, as has already been suggested in the case of herding among the Khoekhoe. Moreover, archaeologists disagree about the routes and modes of dispersal as well as its timing. It seems likely, however, that a movement of immigrants into Southern Africa occurred in two streams and was part of a wider expansion of populations speaking Bantu languages that ultimately derived from the Niger-Congo languages of western Africa some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

“Eastern-stream” Bantu speakers, associated with the earliest farming communities in the well-watered eastern half of Southern Africa, date from the 2nd to the 5th century AD. Similar pottery has been found stretching from northeastern Tanzania and coastal Kenya through southern Zimbabwe into eastern South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. These early farmers settled on arable soils along coastal dunes, rivers, and valley basins. Where possible, they exploited marine resources, planted cereals, and worked iron; cattle and long-distance trade were insignificant.

“Western-stream” Bantu speakers were initially more familiar with fishing, oil palms, and the cultivation of vegetables than with cereals or cattle. Even before the 1st millennium AD, pottery similar to that of the eastern stream was being made in the upper Zambezi valley, and pottery of a slightly more recent date has been found in parts of northern Angola. It was probably from these communities that the Bantu speakers spread into the more arid western half of the subcontinent, northwestern Zambia, southwestern Zimbabwe, along the eastern margins of the Kalahari into Botswana, and later into eastern South Africa and Mozambique. Like their counterparts in the east, western-stream Bantu speakers cultivated cereals, worked metal, and made pottery, but the evidence of livestock is far more clear-cut; at first they primarily raised sheep and goats, slightly later cattle. While some argue that the shift to livestock raising merely reflects the human impact on the environment as new lands were opened up for grazing animals, others associate the appearance of domestic stock with the emergence of a different and distinctive tradition of ceramics and a characteristic settlement pattern—known as the Central Cattle Pattern—that embodied both the new centrality of cattle and the different nature of hierarchy in these communities.

Although at first the impact of food production was probably less momentous than is often assumed, agriculture combined with pastoralism and metallurgy could support far larger settled communities than previously had been possible and enabled a more complex social and political organization to develop. cattle raising led to increased social stratification between rich and poor and established new divisions of labour between men and women; the accumulation of cattle and the continuous site occupation inherent in cereal production enabled the storage of wealth and the deployment of more organized political power. Archaeologists argue about how easily groups made the transition from a way of life based on hunting and gathering to one centred on herding or agriculture, but an increasing number of excavations suggest that these boundaries were often permeable. The relationships established among hunters, herders, and agriculturalists over more than 2,000 years of socioeconomic change ranged from total resistance to total assimilation. For the indigenous people of Southern Africa the frontiers between different modes of subsistence presented new dangers and opportunities.

As the new culture spread, larger, more successful farming communities were established; in many areas the new way of life was adopted by the hunter-gatherers. Even in the apparently inhospitable and isolated Kalahari it is now clear that there was intense interaction and exchange between hunter-gatherers and food producers, leading to the development of hybrid amalgams of pastoralism, agriculture, and foraging. Contemporary Bantu-speaking peoples of Southern Africa are genetically very similar to the Late Stone Age people of Africa; their close relationship also is evidenced by the presence of Khoisan “click” sounds (in Xhosa (Xhosa language), Zulu (Zulu language), and Shona) and loanwords in southeastern Bantu and from the iron and stone tools, cattle and wild animal bones, pottery, and ostrich-eggshell beads on early farming sites such as Broederstroom in east-central South Africa and Hola-Hola in Mozambique.

From about the turn of the 1st millennium AD, in some areas of what are now central Zambia, southeastern Zimbabwe, Malawi, and eastern South Africa, changes in ceramic style were paralleled by a change in the location and nature of settlements. More sophisticated techniques of ironworking, more extensive gold and copper mining, and a great increase in stone building suggest the evolution of more complex state structures, the growth of social inequalities, and the emergence of new religious and spiritual ideas. These changes were, however, neither simultaneous nor evenly spread.

The nature of these transitions and the differences among the sites are still poorly understood, and, again, archaeologists disagree as to whether the changes can be explained by local developments or are best explained by the arrival of migrating populations. In part the controversy may reflect regional differences. In most of Zambia and Malawi a sharply distinguishable pottery style appears at this time, probably from southeastern Congo (Kinshasa), and forms the basis of the ceramics made by several different societies. Farther west, however, there are greater continuities with the earlier wares, while in southeastern Africa locally driven increases in population and cattle—which led to expansion into less favourable environments but which also brought new ideas and new methods of political control—may hold the key.

Whatever the explanation, many of the changes appear for the first time at Toutswe in eastern Botswana with the appearance about the 7th century AD of a new ceramic tradition, new technology, and new forms of social and economic organization. There, larger, well-defended hilltop capitals probably dominated a series of smaller sites with access to water over a wide region. Toutswe may provide evidence for a new population; on the other hand, the evidence of its large cattle herds provides insight into the way in which the natural buildup of herds in a favourable environment could stimulate social change and territorial expansion. Cattle underpinned both material and symbolic power in Southern Africa and served to cement social obligations through bridewealth and loan arrangements. Cattle were also an ideal medium for exchange, and the increase in herding necessitated increased specialization and the extension of trading networks. Patrilineal and polygynous cattle-keeping farmers thus had immense advantages over communities that lacked these new forms of wealth and social organization. Similarities between Toutswe and the material culture of later sites in the Limpopo valley and Zimbabwe suggest that Toutswe also may have inspired new forms of social and economic organization for peoples further afield.

Greater stratification and more complex social organization were also probably accelerated by the growth of trading with the outside world and by competition for access to it. In the early centuries AD the northeastern African coast was well known to the traders of the Greco-Roman world. These contacts diminished with the rise of Islam, and the east coast became part of the Indian Ocean trading network. By the 8th century Arab traders had begun to visit more southerly harbours, and between the 11th and 15th centuries they founded some three dozen new towns. Although they never united politically, these towns developed a common Afro-Arabic, or Swahili, culture and a splendour that amazed the first European arrivals.

The Limpopo and Save rivers were early arteries of the trade from the southernmost Arab trading posts, with African intermediaries initially bringing ivory and perhaps animal skins, and later copper and gold, to the coast. In the 8th century the presence of Persian potsherds at Chibuene on the coast of Mozambique and snapped cane glass beads at various locations—Kruger National Park, Schroda on the Limpopo, Botswana, the Zimbabwe plateau, and the Mngeni River near Durban—all attest to the influence of this long-distance trade in the region and its early integration into the Indian Ocean networks.

At 9th- and 10th-century sites such as Schroda and Bambandyanalo in the Limpopo valley, the ivory and cattle trade seems to have been of major importance, but later sites such as Mapungubwe (a hilltop above Bambandyanalo), Manekweni (in southwestern Mozambique), and Great Zimbabwe, which date from the late 11th to the mid 15th century, owed their prosperity to the export of gold. Farther north the 14th-century site of Ingombe Ilede (near the Zambezi-Kafue confluence) probably also owed its prosperity in copper and gold—and its social stratification—to the rise of the east coast trade. Although they do not typify the later Iron Age as a whole, the conspicuous consumption at these sites and the bias in oral sources toward centralized states means they have attracted perhaps a disproportionate share of scholarly attention.

In Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe a wealthy and privileged elite built with stone and were buried with gold and copper ornaments, exotic beads, and fine imported pottery and cloth. Their homes, diet, and ostentatious burials are in stark contrast to those of the common folk, whose dwellings cluster at the foot of the sites where they probably laboured. Large quantities of stone were brought to build walls on these hilltop sites, which suggests considerable labour. All were centres of political authority, controlling trade and cattle movement over a wide area stretching from eastern Botswana in the west to Mozambique in the east. Cattle, gold, and copper came in trade or tribute from settlements hundreds of miles away. Skilled craftsmen made elegant pottery, sculpture, and fine bone tools for local use and for trade, while the presence of spindle whorls suggests local weaving.

In the past, fierce controversy raged concerning the racial identity of Mapungubwe's occupants, and, as in the case of Great Zimbabwe, early excavators refused to accept that it could have been built by Africans. Mapungubwe's skeletal and cultural remains are, however, identical to those found at other Iron Age settlements in the subcontinent, and there is little reason to doubt the African origin and medieval date of both sites.

In the second half of the 15th century Great Zimbabwe came to an abrupt end. Its successor in the southwest was Torwa, with its centre at Khami; in the north it was replaced by the Mutapa state. The new culture at Khami developed both the stone building techniques and the pottery styles found at Great Zimbabwe and seeded a number of smaller sites over a wide region of the southern and western plateau. The Torwa kingdom seems to have lasted until the end of the 17th century, when it was replaced by the Rozwi Changamire Dynasty from the central plateau, which lasted well into the 19th century. The domination of the Mutapa state extended into Mozambique. Contrary to earlier historical opinion, there is little evidence to link the origins of Mutapa directly to Great Zimbabwe, and Mutapa did not reach the magnitude suggested in some accounts. It was, nevertheless, of considerable size by the beginning of the 16th century; the capital alone contained several thousand people. Like the rulers of Great Zimbabwe, the Torwa, Mutapa, and Rozwi dynasties maintained the coastal gold and ivory trade, although cereal agriculture and cattle remained the basis of the economy.

In the first half of the 2nd millennium AD the majority of Southern Africa's peoples were probably relatively unaffected by the formation of these larger trading states. Most lived in small-scale societies, based on kinship, in which political authority was exercised by a chief who claimed seniority by virtue of his royal genealogy but who may have risen to power through his access to mineral resources, hunting, or ritual skills. By 1500 most of the farming communities had stabilized in roughly their present-day habitats, reaching their ecological frontier on the dry southern Highveld of South Africa and gradually clearing the coastal forests.

While in many areas ceramic evidence suggests cultural continuity over many centuries, within these boundaries there was considerable movement as populations expanded and found available resources inadequate. Thus, between the 17th and 19th centuries there was migration of northern and eastern Shona speakers into the centre and south of the plateau, while in South Africa new land was colonized by cattle-raising peoples, as the stone-walled sites in the southern Highveld indicate. In some areas the expansion inevitably led to conflict as the newcomers came up against settled communities; in others the indigenous inhabitants were gradually absorbed, while elsewhere sparsely inhabited, colder, and more arid mountain lands were colonized.

In most of these farming communities land was relatively plentiful, while labour was not, and control over people was therefore of the essence. Those societies in which cattle were important were patrilineal, polygynous, and virilocal; men herded, while women were the major agricultural producers. The labour and reproductive power of women was transferred from father to husband through the circulation of cattle in the form of bridewealth. Where cattle were meagre, societies were matrilineal and usually matrilocal; men still depended on women for agricultural labour and for bringing young men and children into the household. Wealthy homes were those with large numbers of women, and even before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade it had become customary for men to take slave wives who would work in exchange for protection.

By the time coastal peoples were first encountered by literate European observers in the 15th century, many were the recognizable forebears of Southern Africa's contemporary population. This does not mean, however, that these societies were static and unchanging. New kingdoms and chiefdoms were formed and older ones disintegrated, the result of both internal and external agency, while new ethnic and cultural identities began to be forged in the hazardous new world resulting from Africa's incorporation into the Atlantic economy.

The first Europeans to enter Southern Africa were the Portuguese, who from the 15th century edged their way around the African coast in the hope of outflanking Islam, finding a sea route to the riches of India, and discovering additional sources of food. They reached the Kongo kingdom (Kongo) in northwestern Angola in 1482–83; early in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias (Dias, Bartolomeu) rounded the southern tip of the continent; and just over a decade later Vasco da Gama (Gama, Vasco da) sailed along the east coast of Africa before striking out to India. Although the voyages were initially unpromising, they marked the beginning of the integration of the subcontinent into the new world economy and the dominance of Europeans over the indigenous inhabitants.

Portuguese influence in west-central Africa radiated over a far wider area and was much more dramatic and destructive than on the east coast. Initially the Portuguese crown and Jesuit missionaries forged peaceful links with the kingdom of the Kongo, converting its king to Christianity. Almost immediately, however, slave traders followed in the wake of priests and teachers, and west-central Africa became tied to the demands of the São Tomé sugar planters and the transatlantic slave trade.

Until 1560 the Kongo kings had an effective monopoly in west-central Africa over trade with metropolitan Portugal, which showed relatively little interest in its African possessions. By the 1520s, however, Afro-Portuguese traders and landowners from São Tomé were intervening in the affairs of the Ndongo kingdom to the south, supporting the ruler, or ngola, in his military campaigns and taking his war captives and surplus dependents as slaves. By the mid 16th century Ndongo, with Portuguese assistance, had become a major kingdom extending over a wide area between the Dande, Lukala, and Kwanza rivers.

By the last third of the 16th century, the Portuguese attitude toward Africa had changed; rumours of fabulous gold and silver to be found in the interior led in 1569 to the dispatch in the east of Francisco Barreto (Barreto, Francisco) to discover the sources of gold in the Mutapa kingdom and to the appointment in 1575 of Paulo Dias de Novais to search for what turned out to be mythical silver mines in the west. Dias established himself as captain-general, or governor, in Luanda, with jurisdiction over an undefined area between the Dande and Kwanza rivers. A few years after his arrival a century of almost constant warfare was initiated. The wars soon resolved themselves into slave-raiding campaigns, as Europeans demanded labour rather than tropical products in exchange for their merchandise, and African societies rapidly exhausted local supplies of war captives and criminals.

Chiefs exchanged slaves for European firearms and luxury goods and secured further dependents with cheaply produced textiles and Brazilian alcohol. Impelled by the increased demand for slaves for the sugar plantations of São Tomé and later Brazil, and relying on African mercenaries and allies, the military governors of Luanda launched armed incursions against the people of the interior. States rose and fell as African rulers were ineluctably drawn into the slave trade and were as often destroyed by it.

New warlords emerged at the head of bands of starving refugees, who from the late 16th until the 18th century swarmed down from the hills, fought one another, and devastated the settled kingdoms. By the end of the 16th century well-organized military bands of marauders, known as the Imbangala, began to appear along the coast south of Luanda. In their eagerness to swell slave numbers, Portuguese governors allied with these war bands, and together they dealt the final blow to the Ndongo kingdom about 1622. By that time the Imbangala had retreated to the middle Kwango, where they founded the kingdom of Kasanje. Over the next two centuries this kingdom replaced Ndongo as the chief slave-trading entrepôt between the coast and the east, where the highly centralized and militarist Lunda kingdoms became increasingly important in supplying slaves by the 18th century.

As the Portuguese were penetrating inland from Luanda at the beginning of the 17th century, they also moved southward. In 1617 they established a colony at Benguela, which, as in the case of the Kongo kingdom, was annexed as part of Angola in the 19th century. Expansion inland from Benguela, however, like the initial expansion farther north, was spearheaded by Afro-Portuguese slave traders, who used southern ports to outflank Portuguese control. As the slave frontier moved south, the process of constructing and then destroying slave-trading warrior kingdoms was repeated. Those who were not crushed by the process sought safety in woodlands and swamps or joined new heterogeneous communities of refugees, like the Chokwe (“Those Who Fled”) of the western savanna. These new communities often became slave raiders themselves.

Through the 18th and early 19th centuries the slave trade remained at the centre of Angola's economic existence, with Benguela replacing Luanda as the chief port. As a result, the Ovimbundu kingdoms on the Bié Plateau, which probably were formed by refugees from the Imbangala and Mbundu kingdoms in the late 16th and 17th centuries, displaced Kasanje as the main source of slaves. The expansion of plantations in the New World doubled the numbers of slaves exported in the last third of the 18th century, when trade routes stretched as far as the Kunene River in the south and met up with the routes from Mozambique.

Although a brief Dutch occupation of Luanda in the mid 17th century did not seriously challenge the Portuguese hold over Angola, Dutch, British, French, and Brazilian manufactures increasingly undercut those of the Portuguese, and after 1763 the French became the chief traders on the southwest coast. Portuguese attempts to maintain their position led to Ovimbundu resistance and drastic Portuguese intervention in the Benguela hinterland in an attempt to install compliant rulers in the 1770s. Despite military victory, the Portuguese were unable to control the Ovimbundu effectively until more than a century later.

Initially the southeastern coast was of far less concern to the Portuguese than west-central Africa. Within a few years of their arrival, however, they had seized its wealthy but divided cities and had established themselves at Moçambique and Sofala, which soon became key ports of call for ships on the way to India.

The Portuguese conquests led to the economic and cultural decline of the east coast cities. Yet the newcomers soon discovered that they were unable to control the vast area they had conquered. They faced resistance from coastal communities throughout the 16th century, and the profits they expected from the gold trade failed to materialize. In an attempt to control the trade and to discover the precious minerals for themselves, the Portuguese, following in the tracks of Muslim traders from the coast, expanded into the Zambezi valley about 1530.

In the Zambezi valley the Portuguese penetrated the Mutapa state, with its heartland in the northeast between the Zambezi and Mazoe rivers. Portuguese records shed some light on the complex world of African politics to the north and south of the Zambezi River, which provided an unbroken waterway 300 miles into the interior. By the 1530s the Portuguese dominated the trade exits from the coast and had established fortresses and trade fairs along the Zambezi and on the plateau, where Africans came to exchange ivory and gold for beads and cloth. After 1541 Portuguese residents at these outposts elected representatives who were delegated certain powers by the Mwene (ruler of) Mutapa. Individual Portuguese and Goans also were able to get land grants and judicial rights from local rulers, which enabled them to extract tribute from the local population. These early grants formed the basis of what became known as the prazo system of landholding. Between the 17th and 19th centuries prazeros became immensely powerful and interfered in local African politics, creating an Afro-Portuguese society in the lower Zambezi valley independent of either African or Portuguese jurisdiction. Assisted by slave-soldiers known as the Chikunda, Afro-Portuguese warlords engaged in the slave and ivory trade, unsettling a wide area of east-central Africa.

The effect of Portuguese traders along the Zambezi valley on the Mutapa state was minimal until the late 16th century. In the 1560s, however, their hold was probably strengthened with the appearance in Zambesia of people known as the Zimba, a term applied to any marauders. They seem to have been Maravi people, who had first migrated from Luba territory to the southern end of Lake Nyasa in the 14th century. There they broke up into a number of chiefdoms, usually under the paramountcy of the most powerful chief, who controlled the rain shrine at the heart of the local religion. The reasons for the emergence of the Zimba are far from clear, however. The Maravi attacked chiefs friendly to the Portuguese, as well as their settlements at Sena and Tete and on the coast. By 1601 the Mwene Mutapa (Mwene Matapa) was forced to call on the Portuguese for assistance, and this led to almost a century of increasingly disruptive Portuguese intervention in the affairs of Shona kingdoms to the south of the Zambezi.

Although attempts to drive the Portuguese from the Zambezi valley were unsuccessful until the late 17th century, when they were driven out by the armies of the Rozwi kingdom, this appearance of Portuguese power was deceptive: the Portuguese never had the resources to control the interior, and it was the Afro-Portuguese prazeros and the Rozwi Changamire dynasty who truly exploited the Mwene Mutapa's weakness.

In addition to gold, the Portuguese were interested in ivory and other mineral resources of the eastern African interior, particularly after 1700, when the gold appeared exhausted. A search for silver mines had led them first into Malawi in the 17th century, and from that point there is direct, though fragmentary, evidence of developments in the region. While the Portuguese records suggest that before 1590 there were no large states in the region, by the first decades of the 17th century a powerful state had emerged under Muzura, perhaps out of an earlier system of small Maravi states at the southern end of Lake Nyasa. Although initially Muzura was assisted by the Portuguese, his power was based on exacting tribute from the Portuguese and their allies south of the Zambezi. In the early 1630s dissident Karanga and Manyika attempted once more to expel the Portuguese from Zambesia; Muzura joined the alliance and unsuccessfully attacked the coastal town of Quelimane. This defeat seems to have ended his challenge to the Portuguese; thereafter he concentrated on controlling the territory in the western Shire Highlands to the north, trading ivory and, increasingly, slaves with the Portuguese to the south.

By mid century Muzura was eclipsed by the Kalonga, whose capital lay on the southwestern shore of Lake Nyasa, while by the turn of the 18th century the rise of the well-armed Yao in the trade between Lake Nyasa and the coast, and of the Bisa as middlemen to the west, contributed to the disintegration of the Maravi Confederacy into several more or less autonomous fragments. This process was further accelerated by the wars and slave raids of the 19th century and the introduction of missionaries. By the early 18th century the Portuguese also had penetrated into present-day Zambia, establishing trading fairs at Zumbo and Feira on the Zambezi. Although there were no highly organized broker kingdoms in the area, prazeros traded gold and slaves to the coast.

As in west-central Africa, from the beginning of the 17th century the Portuguese faced increasingly severe competition from Dutch and British ships in the Indian Ocean, while north of Cape Delgado the Arabs also took advantage of Portuguese weakness. In 1631 a series of revolts began on the east coast; by the beginning of the 18th century the Portuguese had been driven from the coast north of the Rovuma River. The Portuguese then turned their attention southward, where they had traded at Delagoa Bay with the local Tsonga inhabitants since the mid 16th century. They were unable to establish themselves at the bay permanently, however, and through the 18th century Dutch, English, and Austrian ships competed for the local ivory while North American whalers also traded there for food and cattle. Local chiefdoms vied for this market, and this competition contributed to the buildup of larger states in the hinterland of Delagoa Bay from the mid 18th century. Doubtless there was also trade in slaves, although the numbers seem to have remained relatively small before the 19th century.

Apart from the Portuguese enclaves in Angola and Mozambique, the only other area of European settlement (colonialism, Western) in Southern Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries was the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Province). In the late 16th century the Cape had become a regular port of call for the crews of European ships, who found local people (Khoekhoe) ready to barter cattle in exchange for iron, copper, beads, tobacco, and brandy. By the mid 17th century Khoekhoe intermediaries traded far into the interior. These trade relationships profoundly affected the nature of contact between the Khoekhoe and the Dutch.

In 1652 the Dutch East India Company dispatched Commander Jan van Riebeeck (Riebeeck, Jan van) and 125 men to set up a provisioning station at the Cape. This outpost soon grew into a colony of settlement. In 1657 the company released a number of its servants as free burghers (citizens) in order to cultivate land and herd cattle on its behalf. Slaves arrived the next year via a Dutch ship, which had captured them from a Portuguese vessel bound from Angola to Brazil. Thereafter slaves continued to arrive at the Cape from Madagascar and parts of western and eastern Africa. Although the company prohibited the enslavement of the local inhabitants, in order to protect the cattle trade, the loosely organized Khoekhoe were soon undermined by the incessant Dutch demands for their cattle and encroachment on their grazing lands and waterholes. As one group became impoverished and reluctant to trade, another would take its place. The climate of the Cape was well suited to Europeans, and their birth rate was high; whereas in Angola and Mozambique the Portuguese were ravaged by disease, at the Cape it was the indigenes who were decimated by epidemics of smallpox, influenza, and measles brought by Europeans.

By the end of the 18th century, Cape settlers—called Boers (Dutch boer, “farmer”)—were far more numerous than their Portuguese counterparts, largely because of natural increase. Men outnumbered women 3 to 2. Despite the varied European origins of the settlers, their shared vicissitudes and the company's insistence that all settlers speak Dutch and practice Calvinism led to a certain cultural uniformity and sense of group identity. The settlers began to call themselves “Afrikaners”—Africans. Nevertheless, class divisions in Cape Town and its environs were marked. A small group of affluent merchants and status-conscious company servants lived in Cape Town; in the neighbouring farming districts of the southwestern Cape a wealthy gentry used slave labour to produce wine and wheat for passing ships. Independent small farmers eked out a living on the land, and a number of landless whites worked for others, generally as supervisors.

In the arid interior, economic necessity and ecology dictated a pastoral way of life for the Dutch cattle farmers, or trekboers. The poor soil and inadequate rainfall of the region necessitated vast, scattered farms, and the white population was thus thinly spread over an immense area. Although earlier literature stresses their mobility and subsistence economy, most frontier families occupied the same farms during their lifetime and remained dependent on the market for essentials such as arms and ammunition as well as for luxuries such as tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar.

The greatest barrier to Dutch expansion was the range of mountains inland from Cape Town. Once these were crossed and Khoisan resistance overcome, trekboers expanded rapidly to the east and north, while the company made only sporadic attempts to follow them. The new districts of Stellenbosch (1679), Drakenstein (1687), Swellendam (1745), and Graaff-Reinet (1785) were large and unwieldy, and their centres were far from the expanding colonists. Governmental authority was weak, and on the frontier trekboers were left to crush Khoisan resistance and mount their own defense through the commando system. They became accustomed to handling emergencies on their own and to ruling over their slaves and Khoisan servants and clients as they saw fit, often with a ferocity born of fear. As the settlers expanded, their impact—through forced trade, plunder, and human and cattle disease—was increasingly destructive for the inland Khoisan, who retaliated by stealing settlers' cattle and burning homesteads.

The number of slaves increased along with the settler population, especially in the arable districts. Experiments in the use of indentured European labour were unsuccessful, and by the mid 18th century about half the burghers at the Cape owned at least one slave, though few owned more than 10. Slaves spoke the creolized Dutch that in the 19th century became Afrikaans. Many adopted Islam, which alarmed the ruling class. Divided in origin and dispersed geographically, slaves did not establish a cohesive culture or mount effective rebellions. Individual acts of defiance were frequent, however, and in the early 19th century there were two small uprisings. Nevertheless, in Cape Town itself slave culture provided the basis for a working-class culture after emancipation.

Slavery at the Cape is often portrayed as benign, but mortality rates were high and birth rates low; punishments for even minor misdemeanours were fierce, perhaps because adult male slaves greatly outnumbered their owners. Manumission, baptism, and intermarriage rates were also low, although newcomers and poorer burghers married slave women and, more rarely, Khoekhoe women. Cohabitation with indigenous women was more common, especially in frontier districts where there were few white women. The children of these interracial unions, however, took on the unprivileged status of their mothers, so the practice did not affect the racially defined class structure of the society forming at the Cape. By the late 18th century in the Cape most blacks were servants and most Europeans were masters.

The existence of slavery affected the status and opportunities of the dispossessed Khoisan who entered the labour market in increasing numbers from the late 17th century. Although theoretically they were free, compulsion governed the relationship between master and servant, and the legal status of the Khoisan increasingly approximated that of slaves, especially when, during the wars of the late 18th century, the trekboers were allowed to employ captive women and children. As the Cape became increasingly involved in the world economy, the demand for food for European ships escalated, as did calls for increased controls over Khoisan labour: in 1775 a system of “apprenticing” Khoisan children until the age of 25 was established, and by the end of the century the Khoisan were subject to a pass system similar to that which curtailed slave mobility. As they lost their cattle and grazing areas, the Khoisan became virtual serfs on settler farms, although some groups managed to escape beyond colonial borders.

Khoisan resistance to Dutch colonialism erupted into guerrilla war (guerrilla warfare) on three occasions in the 17th century; the first, in 1659, nearly destroyed the settlement. Cattle raids punctuated almost every decade of the 18th century. The raids and counterraids became increasingly violent as the Dutch expanded into the northeast where sheep could be grazed; by the last quarter of the 18th century the colony's northern frontier was under arms, and numerous settlers had been driven from their lands. Between 1799 and 1803 dispossessed Khoisan farmworkers in Graaff-Reinet, many with horses and guns, rose in revolt, challenging the entire colonial order. The Dutch feared that the Khoisan would attack the arable farms of the southwest, especially as they were joined by Xhosa allies. The intervention of government troops, divisions among Khoisan and Xhosa forces, and sheer bloodletting led to the defeat of the uprising, although it haunted the colonial imagination well into the 19th century. This was the last time the Khoisan fought under their traditional leaders to regain their lost lands.

Settler expansion to the Cape's eastern frontier was blocked by the 1770s when trekboers came up against numerous Xhosa farmers in the area of the Great Fish River. During the 18th century the Xhosa had been embroiled in two major civil wars over the chiefly succession, of which the more important was the dispute, between the paramount Gcaleka and his ambitious brother Rarabe, that split the Xhosa kingdom. After both struggles, the unsuccessful contestants fled west across the Great Kei River, where they bore the brunt of the Xhosa wars against the Dutch and later the British. Various attempts to separate the colonists and the Xhosa were unavailing: in 1778 the Dutch decreed the Great Fish River to be the boundary between the Xhosa and the Dutch, but Xhosa lived in the contested area to the west known as the Zuurveld, while trekboers were embedded in Xhosa territory to the east.

The establishment of the district of Graaff-Reinet in 1785 hardly improved matters. The area of magisterial jurisdiction was vast and its inhabitants unruly. Before the century was over, minor cattle raids had escalated into two frontier wars, the prelude to a struggle that lasted almost 100 years; the trekboers only expanded again after moving north and outflanking the Xhosa. While the Dutch had superior firearms, the Xhosa had superior numbers, and both sides were internally divided. Thus, the first two frontier wars resulted in a stalemate, which ended only when the British acquired the colony permanently in the early 19th century.

By the end of the 18th century, then, when the British took over, the small Dutch East India Company outpost at the Cape had grown into a sprawling settlement in which some 22,000 whites dominated a labouring class of about 25,000 slaves and approximately as many Khoisan, as well as free blacks and “Prize Negroes”—slaves seized by the Royal Navy and reenslaved in the Cape—in Cape Town and a growing number of Xhosa in the eastern districts.

By the time the Cape changed hands during the Napoleonic Wars, humanitarians were vigorously campaigning against slavery, and in 1807 they succeeded in persuading Britain to abolish the trade; British antislavery ships soon patrolled the western coast of Africa. ivory became the most important export from west-central Africa, satisfying the growing demand in Europe. The western port of Benguela was the main outlet, and the Ovimbundu and Chokwe, renowned hunters, were the major suppliers. They penetrated deep into south-central Africa, decimating the elephant populations with their firearms. By 1850 they were in Luvale and Lozi country and were penetrating the southern Congo forests.

The more sparse, agricultural Ovambo (Ambo) peoples to the south also were drawn into the ivory trade. Initially trading in salt, copper, and iron from the Etosha Pan region to the north, and supplying hides and ivory to Portuguese traders, the Ovambo largely had been able to avoid the slave trade that ravaged their more populous neighbours. By the mid 19th century the advent of firearms led to a vast increase in the volume of the ivory trade, though the trade collapsed as the elephants were nearly exterminated by the 1880s. By then, traders from Angola, the Cape Colony, and Walvis Bay sought cattle as well as ivory. With the firearms acquired through the trade, Ovambo chiefs built up their power, raiding the pastoral Herero and Nama people in the vast, arid region to their south.

British antislavery patrols drove the slave trade east, where ivory had been more significant. In the first decades of the 19th century, slave traders for the French sugar plantations in Réunion and Mauritius, who had previously drawn the majority of their slaves from Madagascar, turned their attentions to the coast of Mozambique, while the demand from Cuba and Brazil also escalated. Thus, by the late 1820s Mozambique's slave exports were outstripping those of Angola, with demand from the French islands rivaling that of Brazil by the 1830s. The flow of slaves was augmented by turmoil in the interior of Southern Africa and by slaves captured by the Chikunda soldiers of the Zambezi warlords; by the 1840s rival Zambezi armies were competing to control the trade routes to south-central Africa.

The most important area of slave raiding appears to have been in Malawi and northeastern Zambia, where predatory overlords devastated a wide area from bases in the Congo. To the east of Lake Nyasa, the Yao—keen ivory traders from the 17th century—turned to slave raiding, obtaining firearms from the Arabs, subjugating the Chewa agriculturalists, and building up powerful polities under new commercial and military leaders. Displaced from northern Mozambique by the Ngoni in the 19th century, the Yao in turn pressured the Manganja peoples of the Shire Highlands. The Bemba also were able to increase their power through the slave and ivory trade, raiding the loosely organized Maravi peoples to the west of the lake from their stockaded villages on the infertile Zambian plateau. Although they never became large-scale slave traders, preferring instead to incorporate their captives, the Ngoni invaders added to the turmoil. While the first European observers probably exaggerated the extent of the depopulation, the political geography of the region was transformed as people moved into stockaded villages and towns and began to raid one another for captive women to work the fields while the men engaged in warfare. Vast numbers of people, especially women, were torn from their social settings, and earlier divisions based on kin came to matter less than new relationships between patron and client, protector and protected.

British pressure on the sultan of Zanzibar to ban the slave trade was easily circumvented, and, though the abolition treaty forced on the Zanzibaris in 1873 was more effective, the reduced coastal demand for slaves led to even more ruthless methods in the interior of east-central Africa; slaves were no longer needed for export and thus were exploited locally. East coast Arabs began to play a much more active role in the interior. Initially operating through local chiefs, they came to exercise wide military and political jurisdiction over the northern routes from strategically placed commercial centres; many of these became slave-based plantations.

It is not possible to compile an exact balance sheet of the devastation caused to Southern Africa by the slave trade, and historians differ in their estimation of the numbers involved and of the extent of the damage inflicted. In the 17th century some 10,000 to 12,000 slaves were exported annually from Luanda. Although this figure includes captives from both north and south of the bay, it does not include those smuggled out to escape official taxation. In the 18th century about a third of the slaves exported to the Americas probably came from Angola. The figure probably represents a relatively small proportion of the total population of a huge area in any one year, but it was a significant proportion of economically active adults. The figure also does not take account of the depopulation and social dislocation resulting from incessant warfare and banditry, resulting famine and disease, and the intensification of slavery within African society, where it was usually the young women who were taken as captive “wives” because of their utility as kinless and therefore unprotected agricultural labour.

The better-watered regions may have recouped their population losses within a couple of generations, supported by the introduction of new food crops such as manioc and corn (maize), which the Portuguese imported from South America. Nevertheless, the effects of the slave trade were, in social terms, incalculable. Accounts of Ndongo as rich and populous in the 16th century gave way to lamentations about its desolation in the 17th. The processes of border raids, wars of conquest, and civil strife, which affected the Ndongo and then the kingdoms of the Kwango River valley in the 17th century, were repeated to the south and east in the course of the 18th century as the slave frontier expanded. The ending of more overt violence as the slave frontier moved on left the weak—women, children, and the poor—vulnerable to innumerable personal acts of kidnapping and betrayal, a process exacerbated by the indebtedness of local traders to coastal merchants and the dependence of the traders on the transatlantic economy.

Neither Portugal's attempt to ban its nationals from slave trading in 1836 nor even the abolition of slavery in Brazil in the 1880s ended slavery in west-central Africa. Local merchants, chiefs, and elders turned to slaves to produce the tropical products demanded by Europeans and to serve as porters for the growing quantities of wax and ivory from the 1840s and '50s and rubber from the 1870s. By 1910 wild rubber accounted for more than three-quarters of Angola's exports by volume. Although the rubber trade was successful in the short term, excessive collection of wild rubber destroyed an irreplaceable natural resource, while new concentrations of population upset the ecological balance of a drought-prone environment.

Given the turbulence caused by slave raiding in east- and west-central Africa, it is tempting to blame this for the unprecedented warfare in Southern Africa in the second and third decades of the 19th century; the Mfecane, or Difaqane (“Crushing”), as this warfare is known, is currently much debated. As yet, however, there seems little evidence for extensive slave trading south of Quelimane until the 1820s, and the slave trade from Inhambane and Delagoa Bay remained paltry until 1823–44; the trade from these ports thus seems more a consequence than a cause of the wars.

Demand for cattle and ivory at Delagoa Bay seems rather more important in the emergence, by the late 18th century, of a number of larger states in the hinterland of Delagoa Bay. Trade gave chiefs new ways of attracting followers, while elephant hunting and cattle raiding honed military organization. In the early 19th century, however, the number of European ships calling at Delagoa Bay appears to have contracted, and this may have increased competition for the cattle and ivory trade. Together with a series of devastating droughts (in 1800–03, 1812, and 1816–18), this competition may better account for the debilitating wars in which the larger northern Nguni chiefdoms in Zululand were embroiled by the second decade of the century; indeed, oral sources attribute the first battles to conflicts over land. These battles occurred even before the rise of the Zulu king Shaka, whom an early historiography holds almost solely responsible for turmoil as far afield as the Cape Colony, Tanzania, and western Zambia.

Shaka, who until about 1817 was subject to the Mthethwa king, was thus the heir to, rather than the originator of, the intensified warfare in Zululand. Nevertheless, his military brilliance led to the emergence of the Zulu as the most important power in southeastern Africa. Within a few years Shaka had consolidated the numerous chiefdoms between the Tugela and Pongola rivers into a centralized military state. However, divisions within the royal family culminated in his assassination in 1828.

Initially, Shaka's most formidable rivals were the Ndwandwe (Ngoni), under the leadership of Zwide, who had driven the Ngwane people led by Matiwane onto the Highveld and the Ngwane led by Sobhuza (Sobhuza I) north across the Pongola river, beyond the Zulu orbit. There Sobhuza established the new conquest state of Swaziland (named for his successor, Mswati). In 1820 and again in 1823 Shaka defeated Zwide's armies, which broke into several groups. Zwide himself retired, but his generals fled northward. Clashing with one another and with the peoples in their path, the Ndwandwe (or Ngoni, as they became known) eventually established military states in northern Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, while the Ndwandwe general Soshangane established the extensive Gaza kingdom in south-central Mozambique. At its height, the Gaza kingdom stretched between the Zambezi and the Komati rivers; Soshangane engaged in slave trading with the Portuguese and reduced neighbouring Shona to tributary status. Adding greatly to the social dislocation of east-central Africa, Ngoni movements were dictated by the need to avoid more powerful African polities and to find new food resources after local cattle and crops had been exhausted through their raids. Within their military states, the Ngoni aristocracy monopolized cattle, incorporated the women and children of conquered peoples, and exacted tribute from those whom they were unable to permanently subdue.

As in eastern Africa, where violence intersected with the intensifying activities of slave raiders, so in Southern Africa the violence of this period is multifactorial and needs to be more closely analyzed. Warfare among the northern Ngoni preceded the expansion of the Zulu kingdom, and its rise does not sufficiently explain the violence in the hinterland of the Cape Colony. There the destructiveness of the settler presence was increasingly felt from the mid 18th century, as displaced groups of Khoisan and escaped slaves, carrying with them the commando system and the guns—and sometimes also the religion and the genes—of the white man, fled beyond the confines of the colony. In central and northwestern South Africa and southern Namibia these heterogenous groups of people, known variously as Basters (Baster), Griqua, Korana, Bergenaars, and Oorlams, competed for land and water with the Tswana and Nama communities and traded for or raided their ivory and cattle in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By the 1800s the extension of the firearms frontier was disrupting the Orange River valley and intensifying conflict between the Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms beyond.

The upheaval affected the southern chiefdoms and rebellious tributaries attacked by Shaka as far away as Pondoland. Many of the refugees fled either into the eastern Cape or west onto the Highveld, although their precise number is a matter of dispute. In both areas the arrival of the refugees added to upheavals of very different origin. The Mfengu, as the refugee population was known in the Cape, included in their ranks starving Xhosa victims of the 1834–35 frontier war, while the Mantatee or Fetcani (as the displaced population was known in the interior) were probably largely the product of labour raids by Griqua and Korana allies of frontier farmers.

Others shattered by the dual impact of the wars emanating from Zululand and the activities of labour raiders from the south scrambled to safety in the mountain fortresses of what is now Lesotho. There Moshoeshoe (Mshweshwe), the Koena leader, built a new kingdom at Thaba Bosiu, defeating and then incorporating his main rivals. Moshoeshoe quickly appreciated the utility of firearms and horses in the new warfare and of missionaries as diplomatic intermediaries. Shrewd diplomatic marriages extended his sway, and by the mid 19th century he had attracted some 80,000 followers, based on his ability to provide them with cattle and protection.

Other dislodged Highveld peoples joined the Griqua polities along the Orange River or continued raiding along the Vaal and into the western Transvaal region, where the disorders prepared the way for the coming of Mzilikazi. Originally one of Shaka's commanders, Mzilikazi fled from Zululand in 1823 with some 300 of his followers, known as the Ndebele (or Matabele). Over the next 15 years Mzilikazi created a 20,000-strong raiding kingdom in east-central South Africa by absorbing local Sotho-speaking peoples into his regiments. Nevertheless, he was constantly harried by Griqua raiders from the south, Zulu armies from the east, and the Pedi kingdom, which was establishing itself as the most formidable power in the northeastern Transvaal region. In 1837, harassed by his many enemies and defeated by expanding white farmers from the Cape Colony, Mzilikazi retreated across the Limpopo into southwestern Zimbabwe.

There Mzilikazi established himself relatively easily, for the Shona polities were ill-prepared for the new form of warfare and were already weakened by the earlier incursions of the Ngoni and by drought. As in northeastern South Africa, the local populace was absorbed into Ndebele age-set regiments; a castelike society evolved, with the original Ngoni on top, Sotho in the middle, and Shona at the bottom. The relationships that the Ndebele established with groups beyond their immediate settlement ranged from friendly alliances to the regular exaction of tribute and random raiding. Beyond the range of Mzilikazi's armies, however, many Shona chiefdoms remained independent; by the 1870s they were trading firearms to resist Ndebele incursions.

Yet another group dislodged by the warfare of this time, the composite Sotho group known as the Kololo, made its mark in west-central Africa. Defeated in warfare among the western Tswana, about 1840 Sebetwane led his followers across the Zambezi into northwestern Zambia. There they conquered the Lozi kingdom, which had been built up in the 18th century, and then dominated western Zambia. The Kololo triumph was short-lived, however; by 1864 the ravages of malaria, the accession of a weak and diseased king, and the revival of Lozi royal fortunes put an end to their hegemony. Nevertheless, a variant of Sotho is still the language of the region.

Britain occupied the Cape Colony at the turn of the 19th century. During the Napoleonic Wars the Cape passed first to the British (1795–1803), then to the Batavian Republic (1803–06), and to the British again in 1806. The main impulse behind Britain's annexation was to protect its sea route to India. However, the British demands that the colony pay for its administration, produce raw materials for the metropole, and provide a market for Britain's manufactures and a home for its unemployed ineluctably drew Britain into defending the colonists, expanding their territory, and transforming the Cape's mercantile economy. The displacement of Dutch East India Company rule by an imperial state in the early stages of its industrial revolution greatly expanded local opportunities for trade and increased demands for labour, just as the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire.

In its constitutional development the Cape Colony followed the pattern set by Britain's other settler colonies in the 19th century. It was initially a crown colony governed by an autocratic governor, whose more extreme powers were modified by the presence in Cape Town of an articulate middle class and by the arrival in 1820 of some 5,000 British settlers. These groups demanded a free press, an independent legal system, the rooting out of corruption, and more representative institutions. After intense political struggle, Cape men were granted representative government in 1853, with a nonracial franchise that included a low property threshold, which, it was hoped, would defuse the discontent of both Afrikaners and the rebellious creolized Khoisan/Coloured population.

In 1872 the Cape gained full responsible government. The colour-blind franchise was retained but came under increasing attack. As a strategy for incorporating the more prosperous black peasants and artisans, it had been supported by white merchants, professionals, and officials. With the annexation of African territories and the creation of a mass black working class, however, it proved vulnerable, and in 1887 and 1892 the franchise qualifications were changed in order to restrict the number of black voters.

Initially, imperial protection expanded Cape wheat and wine production, while the British did little to alter existing social and property relations. By the mid 1820s, however, imperial attempts to create a “free market” in labour—including the abolition of preferential tariffs and reform in the system of land tenure—had an explosive effect on the class relations of a colony dependent on slaves and serfs. New regulations ensured standards of treatment and established equality before the law for “masters” and “servants.” Ordinance 50 of 1828, which ensured Khoisan mobility on the labour market, caused an uproar; in 1834 slaves were finally emancipated. Despite their formal equality before the law, however, newly emancipated slaves received only modest protection, from the handful of mission stations, against exploitative and often brutal conditions. By 1841, largely through “masters and servants” legislation, settlers had reimposed much of their old authority.

Although the underclass received only limited benefits, the British land and labour policies—together with a restructuring of local government—threatened many Afrikaners. Between 1834 and 1838, in a movement known as the Great Trek, parties of Voortrekkers (“Pioneers”), with their families and dependents, departed the Cape Colony. Their exodus was to become the central saga of 20th-century Afrikaner nationalism. Beyond the confines of the colony, they established separate republics in Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal, outflanking the Xhosa along the southeast coast, where the British were confronted by a series of interlocking crises.

The first of these crises had erupted in 1799 shortly after the British first occupied the Cape. This was the third war (Cape Frontier Wars) between settlers and Xhosa in the Zuurveld and coincided with a mass uprising of Khoisan in Graaff-Reinet. Although peace was restored in 1803, the Xhosa remained in the Zuurveld until British troops drove them east of the Great Fish River in 1811–12; subsequent near-constant skirmishing again exploded into war in 1818–l9, 1834–35, and l846. For most of the century the Cape was dependent on British troops for its defense and for the further conquest of African territory.

By mid century the western Xhosa were formidable foes who used firearms and adopted guerrilla tactics. Thus, the eighth war (1850–53) was the most drawn-out and costly of all. As in 1799, a simultaneous uprising of Khoisan/Coloured people at the Kat River settlement in the eastern Cape north of Fort Beaufort (established as a buffer for the colony in 1828) weakened the colonists' position. In the end, it was not British arms or settler prowess that defeated the Xhosa but internal tensions resulting from the activities of white traders, missionaries, and settlers. These pressures were increased by the confiscation of Xhosa land and cattle, the apportionment after each war of captives as labour to settlers, the arrival of refugees from wars beyond their frontiers, and the expansion of commercial sheep farming, which was the most important sector of the Cape economy by the 1840s. The Cape's northern frontier was now the Orange River, while in the east the land between the Great Fish and Great Kei rivers was appropriated for white settlement.

In 1857 the internally divided Xhosa, exhausted by years of attrition, in the midst of severe drought and cattle disease, and undermined by the aggressive policies of the British governor Sir George Grey, turned to millenarian prophecies. They slaughtered their cattle and destroyed their crops in the belief that doing so would raise their ancestors from their graves and drive the whites into the sea. When the awaited salvation failed to materialize, some 30,000–40,000 Xhosa streamed across the frontier to seek work in the colony. An equal number died of starvation. Although Xhosa farther east fought the colonists again in 1877 and 1879, the slaughter of the cattle marked the end of Xhosa political and economic integrity. Thereafter the annexation of the remaining African territories proceeded peacefully, if piecemeal. The last of the independent kingdoms to pass into Cape hands was Pondoland, in 1895.

From the end of the 18th century, European missionaries were crucial in the transformation of African society at the Cape. With Christianity came Victorian notions of civilization and progress. Progress meant that Africans produced agricultural products for export and entered into the labour market. The first converts in the Cape were the Khoisan, in the east and north, and the Griqua, who by the 1820s had formed a series of independent if schismatic states in the Vaal-Orange confluence. By the late 1820s these states were seen by the missionaries as destined to have a vast “civilizing” influence in the interior. The neighbouring Sotho-Tswana communities were also early sites of missionary activity. Two of the most famous 19th-century Scottish missionaries to Southern Africa, Robert Moffat and David Livingstone (Livingstone, David), worked among the Tswana. The most notable of the Tswana converts were the Ngwato, under the king Khama III (reigned 1875–1923), who established a virtual theocracy among his people and was perhaps the most acclaimed Christian convert of his day, while in the eastern Cape the Mfengu were in the forefront of mission activity and peasant enterprise. In the second half of the 19th century, increasing numbers of Xhosa also turned to Christianity. In Zululand and on the Highveld the missionaries both preceded and paved the way for white settlers and were sometimes their fiercest critics.

Initially Christianity tended to advance most rapidly among the disaffected and dispossessed, and especially among women, with those who depended on the slave trade less enthusiastic. It was usually only after a major disaster undermined their belief systems that considerable numbers of men turned to the new religion. By inculcating individualism and encouraging the stratification that was to lead so many of their converts onto the colonial labour markets, the missionaries attacked much that was central to African society and developed an ideology to accompany colonial subordination.

The first European missionaries to south-central Africa, inspired by Livingstone, set up their Universities Mission in 1861. Although this mission ended in tragedy and failure, after Livingstone's death in 1873 other missionaries followed. In 1875 the Free Church of Scotland established the Livingstonia Mission in his memory, while the established Church of Scotland (Scotland, Church of) began work among the Yao at Blantyre the following year. From Lake Nyasa the Scottish missions spread inland to northeastern Zambia and were followed by a large number of representatives of other Christian denominations in the last decades of the century. By the last quarter of the 19th century, European missionaries and African evangelists of almost every denomination were working among the peoples of Southern Africa, eroding chiefly authority and inculcating the new values and practices of the colonial world but also bringing new modes of resistance and educating many Christian Africans who later became outspoken critics of colonialism (colonialism, Western).

If the expansion of white settlement under the British led to a vast expropriation of African land and labour, it also led to a rapid expansion of unequal trading relations. Black-white exchange existed in the frontier zone from the early 18th century. British traders soon crossed colonial frontiers and were at Shaka's court by the early 1820s. They exchanged African cattle and crops for beads and brandy and on occasion may have purchased slaves, although even settlers well beyond colonial boundaries now disguised this as “apprenticeship” and “indenture.” The establishment of republics throughout the 19th century meant that black Africans continued to lose land and ultimately their independence to white-dominated governments.

The establishment of trekker republics in Natal and on the Highveld greatly expanded the frontiers of white settlement. The Voortrekkers, however, did not display any sense of national unity, and the parties soon fell out and set off in different directions. The trekkers enjoyed some spectacular successes as a result of their firearms, horses, and use of ox-wagons to form laagers (protected encampments), as well as their strategic alliances with African chiefdoms; they found it far more difficult to establish permanent hegemony over the region.

Victory over the Zulu at the Battle of Blood River on December 16, 1838, and divisions in the Zulu kingdom enabled the establishment of the short-lived Republic of Natalia, bounded to the north by the still-powerful Zulu kingdom and to the south by the Mpondo. In 1843, however, the British, anxious to control the sea route to India, fearful of trekker negotiations with foreign powers, and concerned that trekker raids would spread to the eastern frontier, annexed Natal, leaving the Zulu kingdom north of the Tugela River independent until its disintegration in the civil wars that followed its defeat by the British army in 1879.

For most of the 19th century, British Natal was surrounded by powerful African states and was heavily outnumbered by Africans within the colony. Constitutional development in Natal was slower and more erratic than in the Cape; colonists received responsible government only in 1893. Unlike the Cape, Natal never had a viable nonracial franchise: at the century's end few Africans had the vote, despite the existence of considerable numbers of mission-educated black Christians. Racial practices in Natal—including the reservation of lands for African communal occupation, recognition of tribal authorities, codification of customary law, and control over urbanization through labour registration and influx control—were born out of the colony's weakness and provided precedents for 20th-century segregationist policies.

Absentee landowners bought up land claimed and vacated by the Voortrekkers and extracted rent from African producers, hoping increased white immigration would raise land prices. Like the weak colonial administration, the absentees were anxious to avoid the conflict that would have resulted from the expropriation of land occupied by Africans demanded by smaller settler-farmers. When in 1860 sugar was exploited successfully for the first time, indentured labour had to be brought from India to do the arduous work, because Africans—many of whom still had their own land and cattle—refused to work for the low wages offered on the plantations. By the last decades of the 19th century, however, a land shortage and high taxes had forced large numbers of Africans to seek work in colonial labour markets.

With the British annexation of Natal, most of the Voortrekkers rejoined their compatriots on the Highveld, where separate communities had been established in Transorangia (the region across the Orange River) and the western and northeastern Transvaal. Apart from a brief period in the mid 19th century, the British left them alone, controlling external trade and security threats through the coastal colonies. On the Highveld the Voortrekkers entered a vibrant and complex African world. To ensconce themselves in the interior, they fought major wars and established a series of accommodations with those Africans whom they were unable to conquer.

Compared with the British colonies, the racially exclusive republics between the Vaal, Hartz, and Limpopo rivers were weak members of the world economy, dependent on cattle ranching and hunting. Bitterly divided politically and ecclesiastically, these republics were unified in 1860 as the South African Republic, annexed as the British (British Empire) colony of the Transvaal between 1877 and 1881, and reconquered as the Transvaal during the South African War (1899–1902). The trekkers staked a claim to black lands, provided a framework for speculation and the beginnings of commerce, and established formal legal title to territory, though these claims were as yet barely effective. The incapacity of the settlers to wrest the indigenous inhabitants from their land resulted in the development of several types of labour coercion and control: slavery, clientship, indenture, debt bondage, and various forms of rent and labour tenancy.

The struggle to transform formal claims into actual landownership and control continued well into the 20th century. Money was short, and government officials were paid in land, usually along with its African occupants. The settlers' accumulation of wealth was often the result of random looting and forcible, though sporadic, extraction of tribute, tempered by the limited physical capacity of the commando system. Surrounded by a horseshoe of powerful African chiefdoms, it was only in the last third of the 19th century, during a period of renewed imperial interest in the interior, that the balance of power shifted decisively in favour of white farmers.

Farther south, in Transorangia, a far greater proportion of the small settler community was tied to Cape and British markets through wool production. Of a population in 1875 of some 125,000, only the 26,000 whites had citizenship, but many European observers considered the Orange Free State, with its parliament and written constitution, a model republic. Despite the Dutch ancestry of the majority of the settlers, English was the language of commerce and education into the 20th century.

The existence of Moshoeshoe's Basuto kingdom on the settlers' eastern flank meant constant friction. With the restoration of peace on the Highveld in the 1840s, many Africans attempted to return to their lands, only to find them occupied. Despite Moshoeshoe's attempts to keep the peace, cattle raiding by his dispossessed subjects, together with increasing demands for land and labour from settler sheep farmers, led to war in 1858 and again in l865–69. On the first occasion, the Orange Free State was forced to sue for peace. On the second, Basutoland, internally divided and starved of arms by the British decision to sell weapons to Afrikaners but not Africans, was beaten. Some chiefs, especially in the north, offered their allegiance to the Afrikaners and, with their followers, became labour-tenants on their farms; others moved into the Transkei. In 1868, in response to repeated appeals from the Sotho, the governor of the Cape annexed Basutoland, leaving the Orange Free State in possession of the fertile Caledon River valley. In 1869 the frontiers of Basutoland were delimited, and shortly thereafter it was handed over to the Cape. In 1881, however, when the Cape government tried to disarm the Sotho, a war that the colony could not control broke out, and in 1884 Basutoland reverted to British rule.

The Orange Free State also constantly encroached on the better-watered land of its western neighbours, the Griqua and southern Tswana states, which were also under frequent attack from the South African Republic. These attacks led to a growing alliance among the Tswana kingdoms and to protest from the missionaries and Cape traders, who feared the Afrikaners would block the main route to the interior. Nevertheless, the area came under colonial rule only after the discovery in 1867 of diamonds in Griqualand West.

From the 1860s it was known that there was gold in the interior of Southern Africa. In 1867 diamonds were discovered at Kimberley in Griqualand West to the north of the Cape Colony, followed shortly thereafter by discoveries of outcrop (surface) gold in the Transvaal and deep seams of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The conjuncture of speculation in mining futures and land, the imposition of colonial or company rule, and an industrial revolution based on mineral extraction meant that the last third of the 19th century was one of the most traumatic in the history of the region. The language of racial domination, though hardly new, was now buttressed by social Darwinism and was particularly well suited to an era of intensified land and labour exploitation.

The mineral discoveries led to dramatic economic development. Roads, railways, and harbours were built. New coal mines were exploited. Manufacturing, though in its infancy, responded to the new markets, while the creation of an internal market for food was crucial in the commercialization of agriculture and the spread of African cash crop production. Land prices soared, and the demand for labour became insatiable. A working class—consisting of both whites and blacks—was created out of the preindustrial societies. Colonial conquest subjugated the remaining independent African societies and destroyed the bargaining power of black workers.

Although most scholarly attention has focused on the gold mines, it was the diamond industry that pioneered many of the characteristics of Southern Africa's labour control policies. People from all over the world came to Griqualand West to seek their fortune; between 1871 and 1875 more than 50,000 Africans from all over the subcontinent came each year, many of them lured by the prospect of purchasing firearms. Within a few years there was hardly an African chiefdom, from the Transkei to the Limpopo, that was not armed with guns. Combined with the progressive encroachment on African lands and the intensifying demand for their labour, the rearming of Africans was a major source of the instability of these years.

Initially, claims on the diamond fields were limited, technology was primitive, and small-scale black diggers could compete with whites. In the mid 1870s, however, chaotic production conditions, a flooded world diamond market, and labour shortages made the transition to larger units of production necessary. Joint-stock companies were created, bringing international capital and a transformation of mining technology. By 1888 the thousands of claims of the previous decade had been monopolized by the De Beers Mining Company (De Beers S.A.). For black and white workers the establishment of the De Beers monopoly was of immense significance. African migrant workers were now more rigorously controlled by pass laws, which limited their mobility, and by confinement to compounds for the duration of their work contracts. Many white miners lost their jobs or became overseers, and wages for all workers were sharply reduced.

With the discovery of the Witwatersrand, attention switched from Kimberley to the South African Republic, which was quickly transformed from a ramshackle and bankrupt agrarian outpost to the most important state in the subcontinent. The coastal colonies competed to control the lucrative Witwatersrand trade, and immigration mounted: in 1870 the total white population of Southern Africa was probably less than 250,000; by 1891 it had increased to more than 600,000; and by 1904 it was more than 1,000,000. When local capital proved inadequate, funds flowed in from Britain, Germany, and France. From the late 1880s gold outstripped diamonds as the region's most important export, and by 1898 the Witwatersrand produced about one-fifth of world gold output.

In 1889 the Chamber of Mines, an organization of mine owners, was formed to drive down the costs of production. This became even more important once deep-level mines were opened in the mid 1890s, because development costs were high, the ore low-grade, and the price of gold controlled. Skilled, unionized white workers from the mining frontiers of the world were able to protect their high wages, while the chamber formed two major recruiting organizations, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Wenela) and the Native Recruiting Corporation, to extend, monopolize, and control the black labour supply throughout the subcontinent.

Throughout the region it was usually young men who were the first migrants (migrant labour), often sent by homestead heads, who tried to control their movement and their wages, or by chiefs who received a recruitment fee or a portion of the labourer's wages in tribute. For many young men a period of labour migration could bring independent access to bridewealth. Although the process had its roots in the migration of Africans to colonial labour markets earlier in the century, migrant labour expanded after the mineral discoveries and had profound ramifications for the control of senior men over juniors and colonial administrators over taxpayers. Chiefs thus became increasingly anxious over their lack of control over young men and women and struck alliances with colonial administrators and recruiting agents to secure the return of migrants.

The first move in the scramble for Southern Africa came with renewed assertions of British (British Empire) supremacy in the interior. After much dispute, Britain annexed Griqualand West as a crown colony in 1871, transferring it to the Cape Colony in 1881. The multiple crises following the diamond discoveries led during the 1870s to failed imperial schemes to confederate the Southern African territories, but imperial wars between 1878 and 1884 effectively ended the independence of the major African kingdoms. Of these conquests the best-known was the war in 1879 against the Zulu (Zulu War), which included a spectacular defeat of the British army at Isandhlwana; nevertheless, wars against the southern Tswana and Griqua, the Pedi of the eastern Transvaal, the western Xhosa, and the southern Sotho were the essential precondition for the creation of a unified South Africa.

The mineral discoveries whetted German imperial ambitions, and in 1884 Germany annexed the vast, sparsely populated territory of South West Africa (now Namibia). The annexation challenged British hegemony in the region, raised fears of a German-Transvaal alliance, and accelerated the scramble for Southern Africa. The possibilities of mineral wealth in the interior also revived Portugal's dream of uniting its African colonies. Portugal received short shrift from the other powers, however. At the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85, Portugal secured the Cabinda exclave and a portion of the left bank of the Congo River on the Atlantic coast—considerably less than it claimed—and in 1886 the Kunene-Okavango region went to Germany. Portugal gained even less in Mozambique, which remained a narrow coastal corridor.

With the discovery of gold, the remaining independent African polities south of the Limpopo were conquered and annexed, and both within and beyond colonial frontiers concessionaires were spurred by prospects of further discoveries and the availability of speculative capital. The Limpopo constituted no barrier, and between 1889 and 1895 all the African territories south of the Congo territory were annexed. In south-central Africa the British competed with the South African Republic, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium, while in east-central Africa, to the west and south of Lake Nyasa, the thrust from the south encountered the less powerful but still significant antislavery missionary and trading frontier from the east.

For many of the peoples of the subcontinent, the first phase of colonialism may have been overshadowed by the series of disasters that struck rural society in the mid 1890s, including locusts, drought, smallpox and other diseases, and a disastrous rinderpest epidemic that decimated African cattle holdings in 1896–97. Whereas before the colonial period such natural disasters would have killed large numbers in the short term but probably would have had little long-term consequence, the disasters of the 1890s drew considerable numbers of Africans into dependence on colonial labour markets for the first time and thus permanently changed the structure of African society.

From the 1860s it was known that there were “ancient gold workings” beyond the Limpopo, and by the mid 1880s Lobengula, the Ndebele king, was surrounded by concession hunters. In 1887–88 the high commissioner at the Cape, fearful of Transvaal expansion northward, declared the region a British sphere of interest. It was at this point that Cecil John Rhodes (Rhodes, Cecil) entered the arena.

The story of how Rhodes came to South Africa to repair his frail health and stayed to become a millionaire on the diamond fields before he was 30 is legendary. In 1880 Rhodes entered the Cape parliament, and in the 1880s he played a key role in securing the British annexation of the Tswana kingdoms that straddled the road to the interior. One of the leading mine owners in Kimberley, by 1888 he had bought out his rivals and created the De Beers consortium. In 1890, when he became the Cape's prime minister, he was the most powerful man in Southern Africa.

Rhodes hoped to find in south-central Africa a “second Rand” to outflank the South African Republic. In 1888 his agents secured exclusive mining rights from Lobengula for Rhodes's British South Africa Company (BSAC), which was granted a royal charter by the British government to exploit and extend administrative control over a vast area of south-central and Southern Africa. Across the Zambezi, where the British were anxious to preempt European rivals, Rhodes engaged the newly appointed British consul for Malawi and Mozambique, Harry (later Sir Harry) Johnston (Johnston, Sir Harry Hamilton), to establish his company's claims.

A flurry of treaty making in 1888–89 left the BSAC with land and mineral concessions throughout present-day Malawi and Zambia. Despite the dubious legality of the treaties, the chiefs agreed to accept British jurisdiction over non-Africans in their domains and over external relations. In the European chancellories, where the frontiers of Africa were being decided, the treaties played an important role in negotiations. In 1890–91 British, Portuguese, and German conventions established the frontiers of many of the modern states of Southern Africa.

For Britain the BSAC's great advantage was its promise to make British occupation effective against contending European powers and to bring capitalist development at minimum cost. In 1890 Rhodes sent a “Pioneer Column,” consisting of 200 white settlers and 150 blacks, backed by 500 police, into Mashonaland; the real goal was the Ndebele kingdom, which was conquered in a deliberately provoked war in 1893. Although Matabeleland's conquest brought an anticipated boom in BSAC shares, by the end of 1894 it was clear that there was no “second Rand” in south-central Africa and that the future lay with the new deep-level mines coming into operation farther south.

As their hopes of discovering gold waned, settlers and the BSAC began expropriating African land, labour, and cattle. Settlers who participated in the war were granted lavish farms and mineral claims, both of which soon passed to speculative syndicates. A land commission perfunctorily set aside two reserves for the Ndebele on poor soils. In 1896 the Ndebele rose in revolt and were joined by a number of eastern Shona polities. Only the arrival of imperial troops and the collaboration of other Shona groups saved the company state. The uprising led the British to intervene directly in BSAC affairs by appointing a resident commissioner in Bulawayo responsible to the imperial high commissioner in Cape Town.

These events left few resources for occupation north of the Zambezi until the late 1890s. Opposition from missionaries and the African Lakes Company ensured that the region around Lake Nyasa and the Shire River valley was separated from the BSAC sphere; it was declared the British Central African Protectorate in 1891, with Johnston as commissioner. Even before Johnston's arrival the British had been embroiled in open warfare with Arab slave traders, and during the early years of the protectorate Johnston engaged in a spate of wars against the Swahili and Yao slave and ivory traders, who feared the loss of their livelihood. Given the fragmentation and social divisions of the region, he found little difficulty in implementing a policy of divide and rule. Johnston's antislavery wars had the advantage of releasing labour for European employers. Wary of creating a landless proletariat, Johnston, like Rhodes, nevertheless believed that the protectorate's future development should be based on the marriage of white enterprise and black labour, assisted by Asian middlemen.

West of the protectorate, Africans were drawn more gradually under colonial rule, despite pleas from the Lozi king Lewanika that the British provide technical and financial assistance in exchange for mineral concessions, as promised in an 1890 treaty. Lewanika's scramble for protection in the 1890s was dictated by the same circumstances that initially had led him to invite whites into his kingdom in the mid 1880s. The 20 years following the restoration of the Lozi monarchy after the Kololo interregnum had been filled with civil war and succession disputes. By inviting the missionaries, and subsequently the BSAC, to Bulozi, Lewanika, like the Ngwato king Khama III to his south, hoped to bolster his internal position and gain the skills to enable him to deal with the intruders.

In 1897 the BSAC sent an administrator to Bulozi. Contrary to Lewanika's expectations, this spelled the end of Lozi independence. Despite Lewanika's “protected” status, over the next decade the powers of the king and the aristocracy were whittled away. British insistence on the abolition of serfdom and slavery in 1906 undermined the cultivation of the floodplain on which Lozi agriculture depended, and Lewanika's hopes to control the modernization of his state were not fulfilled. Bulozi became a protectorate within a protectorate, tied to the Southern African political economy.

In northeastern Zambia, too, the process of imposing colonial rule came later, but in the end it was swifter and less violent than it had been to the south or east. The natural disasters of the 1890s diminished the ability of the more powerful groups to resist, while weaker peoples at first welcomed the end of Bemba, Ngoni, and Swahili exactions. A lack of resources spared the region major confrontations with colonialism (by contrast, among the Ngoni led by Mpeseni, where gold was believed to exist, the onslaught was as dramatic as in Zimbabwe and the expropriation as brutal). Nevertheless, attempts to impose closer settlement, interfere with local agricultural techniques, and extract forced labour combined with natural disasters to produce extremely high morbidity and mortality rates in the early years of company rule.

For much of the 19th century, Portuguese colonists in Angola and Mozambique were fewer in number and weaker in authority than those in the interior of South Africa. At the beginning of the century, fewer than 1,000 settlers in each colony huddled on a number of estates around inland forts, along the Bengo and Dande rivers in Angola, and along the lower Zambezi in Mozambique. Most of them had intermarried with local peoples and were independent of Portugal. The metropolitan Portuguese were unable to control either the coastal trade or the activities of the merchants and warlords in the hinterland, who often acted in their name. In the absence of regular taxation or an effective system of customs and tariffs, the economies of the territories were poor and their administrations weak and corrupt. Despite a mythology that held that the Portuguese, unlike the northern Europeans, did not differentiate according to race, from early times it is clear that whites had superior status and prestige—if not always greater power—in Angola and Mozambique. Although both territories gained somewhat from the Napoleonic Wars, it was not until the end of the 19th century that Portugal regained any of its colonizing energy.

From the mid 19th century, Portuguese capital began to enter the colony. The Portuguese made land grants in the Luanda hinterland, and planters experimented with raising coffee, cotton, cacao, and sugarcane, using the slaves who could no longer be exported. In the absence of an adequate administration or communications network, the plantations in Angola were never highly successful, although coffee cultivation spread among African peasant farmers in the region. The appropriation of African land for plantations was resisted, and Portuguese attempts to expand their colonial nucleus led to a series of wars with African peoples, followed by famine and epidemics. The instability of the last decades of the 19th century paved the way for the colonial period that followed.

Portuguese attempts to develop Mozambique met with even less success, given the lack of investment and prevailing disorder, as escaped slaves, soldiers, and porters formed bandit bands in broken country and attacked Portuguese settlements and African villages. In many areas domestic slavery underpinned the migration of young men to the labour markets of the south by the 1850s. Liberal governments in Portugal from mid century were anxious to outlaw the feudal aspects of the prazo system but were unsuccessful, despite four military campaigns and a declaration in 1880 that the prazos were crown property.

Until the 1890s the Portuguese had little authority beyond their coastal enclaves. The only bright spot in their fortunes in southeastern Africa was the growing prosperity of Delagoa Bay, as trade with the Transvaal increased. In 1875 Portuguese rights to Delagoa Bay were recognized internationally. With the discovery of gold in the South African Republic, the bay acquired a new importance as its closest outlet, and in 1888 Lourenço Marques became the capital of Mozambique.

Although Portugal failed in its major territorial ambitions in the late 19th century, it nonetheless acquired about 800,000 square miles (2,000,000 square km) of African territory, of which it controlled about one-tenth. In both Portuguese territories “pacification” became a sine qua non of economic development, and there were military campaigns or police actions in almost every year between 1875 and 1924, a measure of Portugal's weakness as a colonial power. The greatest resistance came from those people with the longest experience of Portuguese rule and with the necessary firearms. In Angola the major campaigns were against the Kongo, Mbundu, and Ovambo peoples; in Mozambique against peoples of the Zambezi valley, the Islamized Makua and Yao, and the Gaza kingdom, which was finally defeated in 1895.

The majority of Portuguese troops in both territories were black, a situation that turned every campaign into a potential civil war. Fragmentation of political authority, resistance of traditional elites threatened by colonial rule, and the precipitate introduction of taxes and forced labour policies also made resistance in the Portuguese colonies the most prolonged in early 20th-century Africa.

Colonial markets were of particular importance to Portugal, and tariff barriers were erected to protect its manufactures. Starved of capital and racked by financial crises, Portugal planned to develop the colonies by attracting immigration and foreign capital and by fostering plantation agriculture. In Mozambique, however, local employers could not compete with the Witwatersrand. Since the 1850s, Mozambican migrants had traveled to the farms and sugar plantations of South Africa, while by the 1870s sterling had begun to replace cattle and hoes as bridewealth. By 1897 more than half the mine workers on the Rand came from Mozambique, while thousands worked on South African farms.

The Germans were the last imperial power to arrive in Africa. Their annexation and control of South West Africa was eased by the intense cleavages that had opened up between the local Nama and the Herero chiefdoms, a result of their increasing involvement in the world economy during the 19th century.

Throughout the 19th century, displaced communities of Khoekhoe and Oorlams from the Cape had made their way into South West Africa, competing for the sparse water and grazing land. At first they settled peacefully on land granted them by the local populace, some of them establishing mission communities. The advent in the 1830s of the Oorlam chief Jonker Afrikaner and his well-armed followers significantly altered the regional balance of power. Responding to an appeal from the Nama, who were being driven from their grazing lands by Herero expansion, Afrikaner settled at Windhoek. By gaining control over the all-important trade routes from Walvis Bay and the Cape Colony, he ensured, until his death in 1861, Nama dominance over the Herero. Wars between the Nama and Herero were exacerbated from the mid 19th century by the increasing cattle and ivory trade and the availability of firearms; apart from a breathing space between l870 and 1880, the Nama-Herero wars continued from 1863 to 1892.

Initially Germany hoped to exploit the territory through a concession company, but it could not raise sufficient capital. The government was increasingly forced to intervene in local affairs, especially when settlers appropriated Herero cattle and grazing lands. The most formidable opponent of the Germans was Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama chief who tried unsuccessfully to unite the Herero and Nama against the Germans. After a lengthy guerrilla war, he was defeated in 1894.

The rinderpest epidemic, the alienation of the better-watered highlands, unfair trading practices, and increasing indebtedness led to an uprising by the Nama and Herero peoples in l904–07. They were crushed in a genocidal (genocide) campaign: the Herero population fell from about 70,000 to about 16,000, with many dying in the desert while attempting to escape. The Nama were reduced by two-fifths. The handful of settlers had to turn for labour to the Cape Colony and Ovamboland, which was formally brought under colonial rule only when the South Africans took over South West Africa during World War I.

If the Nama-Herero wars were among the most savage in colonial Africa, an equally bitter, costly colonial war was fought by Britain against the Afrikaner South African Republic. The reasons for the South African (or Anglo-Boer) War (South African War) (1899–1902) remain controversial: some historians portray it in personal terms, the result of clashes between the president of the South African Republic, Paul Kruger (Kruger, Paul), and the representatives of British imperialism, Rhodes (Rhodes, Cecil) and the high commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner (Milner, Alfred Milner, Viscount); some argue that the British feared that the regional dominance of the South African Republic would open the way for German intervention in the subcontinent and endanger the sea route to India; others believe that the struggle was for supremacy over the richest gold mines in the world and the need to establish a state in the Transvaal that would fulfill the demands of the deep-level mine owners.

Even before the war, the South African Republic's inability to create and coerce a labour force was irksome to the deep-level mine owners, with their huge demand for labour and tight working costs. The liquor, railway, and dynamite policies of the South African Republic also angered the mine owners. Taking advantage of the fomented clamour of British immigrants over their lack of voting rights and secretly backed by the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain (Chamberlain, Joseph), Rhodes plotted the armed overthrow of the republic by his lieutenant Leander Starr Jameson (Jameson, Sir Leander Starr, Baronet).

The Jameson Raid in December 1895 was a complete fiasco. There was no internal uprising, and the raiders were soon arrested. Rhodes was forced to resign from the premiership of the Cape Colony, and the alliance he had carefully constructed between English and Afrikaners in the Cape was destroyed. Previously loyal to the empire, Cape Afrikaners now backed Kruger against the British, as did their fellows in the Orange Free State. Nascent pan-South African Afrikaner nationalism received a push. Milner's determination to assert British supremacy exacerbated matters, and in 1899 a rearmed South African Republic issued an ultimatum to the British that amounted to a declaration of war. Over the next three and a half years, nearly 500,000 British troops were deployed against an Afrikaner force of 60,000 to 65,000, at great cost to the British taxpayers. Some 6,000 British soldiers died in action and another 16,000 of infectious diseases. The Afrikaners lost some 14,000 in action and 26,000 in concentration camps. The camps powerfully inflamed 20th-century Afrikaner nationalism. Although the total number of African dead is unrecorded, according to low official estimates, more than 100,000 were forced into camps and at least 13,000 died there. In the end, Britain's greater resources wore the Afrikaners down; their leaders were forced to sue for peace, and a treaty was signed on May 3l, 1902.

Even before the war ended, Milner had begun to “reconstruct” the vanquished Afrikaner republics; the most serious grievances of the mine magnates were removed, and an efficient bureaucracy was established. The smooth functioning of the mining industry was crucial both politically and economically. An acute shortage of unskilled African labour was resolved by the importation of 60,000 Chinese, despite the bitter opposition of white workers, and ambitious schemes were hatched to reduce the cost of both black and white labour.

Africans were effectively disarmed and systematically taxed for the first time, and the pass laws were made more efficient. These changes also benefited white farmers, who were assisted in a variety of ways by the state. By 1906–07 the British were sufficiently confident of the new order they had established to grant self-governing institutions to male whites in the conquered territories, and in 1910, under the South Africa Act passed by the British Parliament in 1909, the four South African colonies of Transvaal, Natal, Orange Free State, and the Cape (Cape Province) were unified as provinces of the Union of South Africa. Although much British propaganda before and during the South African War had been concerned with the political rights of British subjects regardless of colour, outside the Cape province blacks remained excluded from citizenship.

By the beginning of the 20th century the subcontinent was under European (British Empire) rule, and its disparate societies were increasingly meshed into a single political economy. The annexation of African territories meant the establishment of new states, and colonial rule was given perceptible effect by policemen and soldiers, administrators, tax collectors, traders, prospectors, and labour recruiters. Railroads connected the coast with the interior, opening up new markets and releasing new sources of labour. New boundaries were drawn that lasted beyond the colonial period, and the Zambezi (Zambezi River) became the frontier between the settler south and the “tropical dependencies” of East and Central Africa, although Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) occupied a middle ground.

The exploitation of minerals, the capitalization of settler agriculture, and the establishment of manufacturing industries drew Africans into the world economy as workers and peasants, transforming class structures and political alignments and shifting the division of labour between men and women. Previously male occupations, such as hunting and warfare, declined. Indigenous production of nonagricultural commodities from cotton to iron suffered from the competition of cheap, mass-produced imports. The costs of colonialism were unequally distributed. In the areas of white colonization, the BSAC and the colonial powers supported the settlers. Elsewhere African ruling elites were able to strike compromises with their new overlords. On the reserves and protectorates of Southern Africa, chiefs and hereditary headmen still controlled their followings, although their authority was eroded as they became appointees of the colonial authorities. Again the process varied from area to area. Whereas colonial authorities initially attempted to destroy the overarching powers of the African kings and paramounts, who had led the military resistance to colonialism and symbolized the cohesion of their people, the role of intermediate chiefs in providing a cheap administrative infrastructure was soon recognized.

Many Afrikaners also experienced a period of rapid change. In 1886 the South African Republic was still a preindustrial state controlled by a livestock-owning elite; by 1910 it was dominated by mining capital and formed the hub of the industrializing subcontinent. The injection of international capital, inflated land prices, the South African War, and imperial social engineering transformed Afrikaner society as painfully and perhaps more completely than African society. For Afrikaners, too, there were winners and losers.

Some blacks and whites, particularly those who had been educated or had prior experience, were able to take advantage of economic opportunities developing in new towns and markets. Yet, for the growing numbers of mission-educated Africans and Coloured and for Indian communities in Southern Africa, the period was probably one of regression rather than advance. European racist ideology replaced an older tradition in the Cape of social dominance through economic control. Strident settler demands for urban segregation classified even wealthy Indian merchants as “uncivilized natives.” Indian immigration into all the South African colonies was restricted, and in Natal a number of anti-Indian discriminatory measures followed the grant of responsible government in 1893. In the Cape, institutions became increasingly segregated (segregation, racial). While the establishment of new colonial states contributed to the creation of new forms of national consciousness, black hopes of inclusion in the wider society were dashed by the South Africa Act of 1909 and by the establishment of settler-only representative institutions elsewhere. White racism, though still embryonic outside South Africa, fueled African nationalism throughout the region.

Racially discriminatory policies were prompted by settlers' fears of competition from blacks and the growth of black class consciousness; they were given an intellectual underpinning by anthropologists and administrators fearful of rapid social change. The Portuguese espoused policies of African assimilation, yet obstacles to progress for the Afro-Portuguese and acculturated African elite were more rigidly enforced in the 20th century than they had been in the 19th. Before 1945 the ideology of segregation was espoused by virtually all the governments of the region and by most whites regardless of political persuasion. Segregation had different meanings for different groups, but throughout Southern Africa it unified contradictory white interests under a single political slogan, buttressed white power and protected white workers and farmers, and attempted to defuse black militancy at a time of urbanization and social change. For blacks segregation meant exclusion from citizenship; incorporation into a restricted and racially segmented labour market based on the use of migrant labour; government control of movement, urban residence, and trade union organization; the consolidation of the authority of the chiefs; and a recognition or invention of black ethnic identity in the African reserves.

South Africa was at the centre of Britain's Southern Africa policies. Nevertheless, until the 1930s the Union was poor, divided, and dominated by international capital. White settlers were Britain's closest allies. Although it overpowered its immediate neighbours, South Africa's expansionist ambitions in the region were largely blocked.

In 1910 the Union wished to incorporate Basutoland (now Lesotho), Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Swaziland—three landlocked territories that, through a variety of historical accidents, had remained outside South African control. African and humanitarian opposition and Britain's desire for a foothold in the region prevented this incorporation, and the territories remained British protectorates. Until the mid 20th century, however, both Britain and South Africa assumed that the territories would ultimately become part of South Africa.

Although this did not happen, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland were locked into South Africa's economy. All three territories, which had been grain and cattle exporters at the turn of the century, became increasingly dependent on the South African labour market, especially after South Africa implemented protectionist measures for white farmers. Administrators were often South African, and the form of indirect rule they practiced strengthened the authority of conservative chiefs, leaving little room for political progress. This dual administration, as well as the dependent economies of the territories, were severely castigated by the Pim Commission of 1934–35, but, despite modest reforms, the territories remained poor and neglected.

The Union was more successful in acquiring the vast colony of South West Africa, which it conquered from the Germans during World War I. Despite a League of Nations mandate that South West Africa be administered as a “sacred trust” for its indigenous inhabitants, South Africa's concern was to foster mining, which dominated the economy, and to subsidize poor Afrikaner settlement in what was known as the “ Police Zone.” In 1917 Ovamboland, in the north, was annexed; better-watered and therefore more densely populated, Ovamboland had long been able to resist dispossession. During the interwar years South Africa was able to defy the many resolutions passed by the League of Nations urging African social and educational advancement, and the country continued to defy them even when the South African mandate was withdrawn by the United Nations in 1946.

South Africa also had designs on Southern Rhodesia. In 1922, however, when the British South Africa Company relinquished control of Southern Rhodesia, the predominantly British settlers opted for self-government under British rule, and the territory became a self-governing colony the following year. While British subjects of all races were enfranchised, high property qualifications excluded from voting the vast majority of Africans, who formed 95 percent of the population, and an essentially white parliament controlled all the colony's affairs. An imperial veto over discriminatory legislation was rarely exercised. Between the 1920s and '50s the governing party generally remained closely allied to the small group of mining companies that controlled the economy, while the opposition usually represented white farming and working-class interests.

In Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, self-government for the handful of whites was clearly impossible, although in both colonies settlers were given some representation on the Legislative Councils that were established in Nyasaland in 1907 and in Northern Rhodesia in 1924. With the discovery of copper, the white population in Northern Rhodesia increased, but whites never achieved a political dominance comparable to that of their compatriots farther south.

Although copper mining was interrupted by the worldwide depression of the 1930s, by the eve of World War II Northern Rhodesia was a major producer, with nearly nine-tenths of its export earnings coming from copper. In 1939 there were about 13,000 whites in the territory. In Nyasaland the BSAC hoped settlers would develop the territory, but white immigration was restricted by Nyasaland's sluggish economic prospects. In both territories racially discriminatory policies protected the interests of white settlers over those of blacks in every sphere. Nevertheless, the small numbers of whites and British proclamations of the paramountcy of African interests, however limited in practice, differentiated these territories from those farther south.

In Mozambique and Angola, too, settler numbers remained small, despite Portugal's schemes to encourage colonial immigration. Before World War I, colonists consisted mainly of illiterate and unskilled peasants. Power remained in the hands of the governor-general, the highest colonial representative of the Portuguese government. In Angola the collapse of rubber prices in 1913 added to settler problems, and many went bankrupt; in northern Mozambique, campaigns against the Germans during World War I led to famine, forced labour, and high mortality from combat and disease. After the war, however, the colonies attracted new settlers as their economies recovered on the strength of increasing world prices for tropical products. In Angola, diamond production in the northwest was an additional stimulus for settlement.

The republican period in Portugal (1910–26) was accompanied by a flurry of activity among settler political groups, some of them in alliance with the Afro-Portuguese and members of the Creole elite angered by bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. With the inauguration of Portugal's authoritarian “New State” in the early 1930s under António Salazar (Salazar, António de Oliveira), however, immigration schemes were dropped and strict vigilance was exercised over all political and economic activity in the colonies. Consultative institutions disappeared, and grand imperial rhetoric accompanied a return to protectionism, fostering Portugal's needs for cheap raw materials and a closed market.

In the new dispensation, whites, with state assistance, controlled private property and the means of production, while Africans were seen solely as labour. In South Africa after 1912 and the British colony of Southern Rhodesia after 1923, settlers controlled the police and armed forces; elsewhere Africans manned the police and armies of the colonial state, although imperial troops remained the ultimate authority.

Settlers everywhere were united in their determination to assert white supremacy but were divided by class and ethnicity. Particularly in South Africa, South West Africa, and Southern Rhodesia, political struggles among whites were often bitter. In South West Africa, German and Afrikaner settlers lived in uneasy tension, which increased in the 1930s when pro-Nazi demonstrations advocating a German takeover of the colony were common. In the Rhodesias, too, there was antagonism between British settlers and Afrikaners who made their way to the territory in the early years of the 20th century, as well as conflicts between the BSAC and white workers and farmers.

These political struggles were most intense in South Africa, which had the most developed economy, the largest and most diverse population (African, Indian, Coloured, and white), and the most acute class and ethnic differences. In the early 20th century “racial conflict” referred to the conflict between settlers of British origin and Afrikaners. Class warfare between white workers and the mine magnates on the Rand was fierce until the 1920s. The years after the creation of the Union were turbulent, with a civil war between Afrikaners when South Africa joined the British side in World War I. A series of mine strikes culminated in 1922 when recently proletarianized Afrikaners, still dreaming of restoring their republic, and members of the newly formed Communist Party of South Africa joined ranks. A five-day battle between white workers and troops on the Witwatersrand ended with 230 dead and the defeat of the workers after martial law was declared; the ringleaders were later hanged.

The South Africa Act of 1909 enfranchised white adult males, but, except for a diminishing proportion of black male property holders in the Cape, neither blacks nor women were enfranchised. Although white women received the vote in 1930, in 1936 Cape African men were removed from the common voters roll, and in 1956 the Coloured voters of the Cape were similarly disenfranchised. White men effectively were given control over the majority of blacks, and they retained this control until the first democratic, nonracial election in South Africa in April 1994.

Everywhere in early 20th-century Southern Africa the priority of administrations was for labour and revenue, and an extensive tax system was developed to address both needs. Where land shortages did not suffice to push Africans into the labour market, taxation frequently did. In many areas the colonial state was weak, and colonial administrators feared rousing widespread resistance; efforts to collect taxes were often followed by flogging, hut burning, and the confiscation of crops or cattle. Violence was often most intense where administrations were weakest. In areas that had been under colonial rule for more extended periods, legislation forced Africans who had not already been dispossessed of their land into the labour market.

As long as Africans had access to land, however, they had some bargaining power. Money for taxes could be earned by increasing crop production or by selling cattle. In many areas women did most of the farming, and young men worked periodically on white farms and in mines to earn money for cattle, fertilizer, seed, and plows. In the long run, however, Africans became locked into the money economy, and land shortage and indebtedness brought ever-increasing numbers into the labour market.

At the beginning of the 20th century the vast majority of Africans in the subcontinent still lived by farming, though in many areas they had become rent- or labour-paying tenants (tenant farming) and sharecroppers on land claimed by settlers, syndicates, and speculators. During the 20th century these various forms of tenancy were transformed into wage labour, as white farms became increasingly capitalized.

Throughout the subcontinent, lands were reserved for sole African occupation by administrations fearful that total dispossession would lead to widespread African resistance. In South Africa, mining capitalists also came to see the utility of the reserves in subsidizing cheap labour: the limited agricultural production of the reserves supported the families of migrants, who could then be paid as single workers. On the other hand, white farmers wanted to take over the African reserves for their own use, eliminate competition from African producers, and reduce the employment status of Africans from tenancy to labour service. The Native Lands Act of 1913 and supplementary legislation in 1936 harmonized these conflicting interests, setting aside about one-eighth of South African land for the some 4,000,000 Africans, while reserving the rest for about 1,250,000 whites.

In Swaziland the 3,000 whites who had gained land as temporary concessions from the king in the late 19th century retained virtually two-thirds of the total in land settlements in 1908 and 1915. In response the Swazi royal family gained much popular support by establishing a national fund to repurchase the alienated lands, and by 1968 it had acquired almost half of the total. Basutoland, which had been deprived of its most fertile lands in the 19th century, was a de facto reserve, although, as in Bechuanaland, land remaining in African hands was inalienable.

In Southern Rhodesia, too, where the BSAC developed commercial farming to attract immigrants and raise revenue, even the limited African reserves that had been set aside at imperial insistence were a subject of constant contention. The crucial legislation was the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which barred African landownership outside the reserves, except in a special freehold purchase area set aside for “progressive farmers.” The best land was allocated to whites; less than one-third went to Africans, while about one-fifth remained unassigned. From 1937 Africans not required as labour on white-owned lands were removed to the reserves, which became increasingly congested.

These land acts were part of a battery of legislation aimed at fostering settler agriculture. Throughout the region white capitalist agriculture was possible only with extensive state support, which was not granted to Africans. African farmers attracted state support only when cattle disease threatened to spread from black areas to white or when soil conservation became a matter of concern. The worldwide depression of the 1930s, which severely affected white farmers, intensified discrimination against African peasant production, and by the 1940s many rural areas were almost entirely dependent on migrant remittances.

Initially, similar policies were pursued north of the Zambezi. In Northern Rhodesia the colonial office attempted to increase settler numbers by opening nearly 12 million acres of the colony's best lands for white farming, while reserves were drawn up for African occupation. Although the reserves were large, like the reserves to the south, they were far from the railway line, contained poor soils, and were soon overcrowded and eroded. It was only after World War II that white landownership was limited in Northern Rhodesia and attempts were made to address African rural poverty.

In the Shire Highlands a handful of settlers owned nearly 34 million acres, while about one-eighth of all land belonged to the African Lakes Company until 1930, when it reverted to customary use. The plantations remained poor and inefficient until the 1920s and '30s, when tobacco and tea replaced coffee and cotton. Low pay, forced-labour practices, and squalid working conditions meant the plantations depended on labour tenants, sharecroppers, and migrants from Mozambique and the more marginal north.

South of the Shire Highlands, however, the administration began to encourage Africans to produce cash crops from about 1910. Despite this evidence of African enterprise, however, racial bias and Nyasaland's poverty tended to handicap peasant agriculture. By the 1930s increased numbers of migrants sought work in South Africa and Rhodesia, especially after the 1913 ban on recruiting “tropical” Africans for the South African mines was lifted.

Despite the status of South West Africa, Africans did not regain the land lost to the Germans; by 1946 the whites (who formed less than one-tenth of the population) controlled over three-fifths of the land in the Police Zone. Located on arid lands capable of supporting only sparse human and animal populations, the African reserves served as labour reservoirs, subject to police raids and pass laws. As settler farms on the better lands in the centre and south of the territory blocked older patterns of transhumance, independent pastoral production became difficult. While a few African families were able to retain their hold on rural resources, the majority were forced to seek work in town. Farther north, where the Ovambo retained control over their more fertile lands, restrictions on their access to markets meant that by the 1930s they, too, were increasingly seeking work in the colonial economy.

In the areas reserved for sole African occupation, governments made use of African political structures, creating “tribes (tribe)” where none had existed and governing through compliant indigenous chiefs (chief) and headmen. Imperial authorities at first sought to curb and undermine the powers of chiefs, whom they saw as the embodiment of their people and as potential leaders of resistance; this was as true in the 19th-century Cape as it was in the Rhodesias and South West Africa in the early 20th century. Once the powers of the chiefs had been limited, however, fears of “detribalization” and the potential radicalization of African workers confronted administrations. In response, colonial governments throughout the region moved to bolster chiefs, granting them increased authority over their subjects while seeking to maintain their subordination to the colonial state and establishing local advisory councils as a substitute for popular enfranchisement and representation in central government. This creation of “tribal” institutions frequently created new identities and political interests.

Industrial development and increasing Westernization often made indirect rule through chiefs inappropriate to changing African needs, however. The extension of the market economy intensified divisions, especially as chiefs became identified with unpopular colonial policies and no longer had sufficient land to dispense to their followers. The state recognition of chiefs, the imposition of “tribal boundaries,” and land shortages meant that dissatisfied commoners could no longer check arbitrary rule by attaching themselves to alternative polities, as they had in precolonial times. Although urban migration provided some outlet, restrictions on African movement into the colonial towns, together with the often squalid living conditions and low wages, meant that moving to the towns was not an easy option.

At the beginning of the 20th century by far the strongest demand for labour came from the gold mines of South Africa. With the creation of the Union of South Africa there was for the first time a state strong enough to ensure the effective implementation of the laws and labour policies that had developed in Kimberley and on the Witwatersrand to control the workforce. The development of South Africa as the most powerful and industrialized country in modern Africa was built upon the labour of a poorly paid, mistreated, and disenfranchised workforce drawn from the entire subcontinent.

The early years of the century also saw intensified recruiting of African labour from Northern Rhodesia, Mozambique, and Nyasaland for the hundreds of small mines working scattered gold deposits in Southern Rhodesia. Because mining profits were so low in Southern Rhodesia, wages, food, housing, and health conditions were cut back ruthlessly, and disease and mortality rates were exceptionally high. Where possible, black workers bypassed the Rhodesian mines and made their way to the Witwatersrand.

Across the Zambezi the absence of mineral wealth meant that Africans in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia migrated (human migration) to the mines in Katanga (Shaba), Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa in search of money for food and taxation; the opening up of the copper mines shifted some migrant routes to the Copperbelt. In the interwar years Northern Rhodesia and northern Nyasaland were no more than massive labour reservoirs.

In Angola and Mozambique, too, the economy was sustained by labour migration as the recruitment of labour for South African, Rhodesian, and German enterprises provided revenue for tax and trade. The Portuguese government attempted to control the flow of labour from Mozambique to the gold mines through a series of conventions with the South African government. Tax fees on migrants were a major source of state income, while deferred pay ensured the migrant's return, tax payment, and purchase of Portuguese manufactures. Mozambique also received a fixed proportion of the Transvaal's railway traffic. In a similar system in Angola, contract labour was sent to São Tomé; when this system was terminated after allegations of slavery arose in 1908, the São Tomé planters also turned to Mozambique for labour.

Most Mozambican migrant labour came from the region south of the Save River. Farther north the Portuguese had granted wide mining, agricultural, and commercial concessions to chartered companies in the 1890s. Based on the old prazos system, the chartered companies controlled more than half of the colony's lands. Under Salazar the concessions were allowed to expire, but this brought little respite. Southern Mozambique was entrenched as a labour reserve for the Rand; elsewhere in the colony, as in Angola, Africans had to produce fixed quotas of cotton and rice. Confiscations and assaults were legion, despite a plethora of protective legislation. By 1945 more than four-fifths of Portugal's raw cotton came from Mozambique and Angola.

It is difficult to determine the precise impact of migrant labour in Southern Africa in the 20th century. In south-central Africa, for example, the major agricultural communities probably did not send migrants, and the majority of migrants usually came from areas already decimated by slaving and raiding. In other regions, earnings from migrant labour were often used, at least initially, to increase agricultural production, and many migrants maintained their links with the rural areas and retired there in old age. However, many Africans became dependent on the money economy and became locked into the migrant labour system; rural impoverishment resulted from the increasing congestion and soil erosion on the reserves. The division of labour in the countryside began to change, and the burden of agriculture fell increasingly on women and children, although this trend, too, was uneven and may not have existed in some areas until well into the 20th century.

The cheapening of black labour through migrancy rendered skilled white workers vulnerable to attempts by mine owners to reduce costs by substituting cheaper semiskilled black labour for expensive overseas workers. Whites demanded a “colour bar” to protect their access to certain jobs. Initially formulated to reconcile white workers to Milner's decision to import Chinese labour, the colour bar was formally established in South Africa under the Mines and Works Act of 1911 and its amendment in 1926. At the same time, industrial conciliation legislation introduced after a 1922 strike excluded blacks from the wage-bargaining machinery. These examples were followed in the Rhodesias as well, although in the Copperbelt white workers were weaker and the liberal impulse of government stronger, so that by the 1950s a skilled black workforce began to emerge there.

Mining shaped Southern Africa's experience of industrialization, although during the 19th century towns in the Cape and Natal engaged in small-scale manufacturing. This accelerated in response to the demands of the mining industry, but not until World War I did manufacturing make a significant contribution to the economy. By the end of the war the future of the mining industry seemed in doubt, while dispossessed rural Afrikaners (Boer) began to enter the cities in search of work. The state thus encouraged the development of the manufacturing industry.

Although the plight of poor Afrikaners was frequently attributed to their refusal to do manual labour, they were at a double disadvantage in the towns. Unlike Africans—who had some access to the land—Afrikaners were totally dependent on their urban wages and lacked the skills of English-speaking workers. It was in response to this that the “civilized labour” policy, which favoured employers using white labour, was devised in the 1920s. The policy probably was more effective in spurring capital-intensive manufacturing and the employment of poorly paid Afrikaner women than in eliminating white poverty: by 1930 one in five Afrikaners was classified as “poor white.” They formed an important constituency for the anti-imperialism of Afrikaner nationalism, which developed in the interwar years.

To meet the needs of Afrikaners in the cities, South Africa from 1924 promoted manufacturing through a number of techniques: the levying of tariffs, the use of the gold tax to subsidize infrastructure development, the provision of inexpensive food to manufacturing workers, and the imposition of stringent controls to ensure low wages for black labourers. However, the insulation of South Africa's fledgling industries from international competition during the worldwide depression and World War II may have been the most important factor in its economic expansion. Although Southern Rhodesia attempted some of the same strategies, its economy remained overshadowed by South Africa even after the establishment of the British Central African Federation in 1953. The development of manufacturing in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia led to a sharp increase in the number of urban Africans in both territories. Until the war years their welfare needs were largely ignored.

African peoples, who were so painfully drawn into the capitalist economy of Southern Africa and were subjected to ever-increasing administrative, economic, and political control, did not acquiesce in their subordination without resistance. Most engaged in daily struggles to survive and devised individual strategies to resist exploitation. Yet they did not all experience their subjection in the same way, and to some extent this weakened resistance. The 20th century witnessed the rise of new classes, with the emergence of an African petite bourgeoisie and working class in the towns and a considerable degree of stratification in the countryside. Migrant labour both undermined and strengthened the authority of the chiefs, especially in areas where the colonial state was anxious to retain traditional structures for purposes of social control. Alongside the growth of nationalist movements among the educated elite and the organization of trade unions among workers, there was a continuation of royal family politics, a restructuring of ethnic identification, and a resort to millenarian solutions.

In regions where large centralized states had existed at the time of the colonial takeover, royal politics continued to be of significance. In Barotseland, Swaziland, and Basutoland, where paramount chiefs were recognized by the British, the traditional aristocracy combined with the educated elite to protect their position and demand the redress of grievances. In both Matabeleland and Zululand, where the royal families had been militarily defeated, royalists combined to demand state recognition of the monarchy, while in Nyasaland in the 1930s there was an attempt to create a Tonga paramountcy and to restore the Ngoni king. The struggle for the recognition of the monarchy had anticolonial overtones. In general, the monarchies were most successful in the climate of indirect rule of the 1930s and in areas where settlers were weak.

Nonviolent African opposition to white rule—through the adoption of Western-style political organizations and the formation of trade unions—was longest and most intense south of the Limpopo, where the existence of substantial Coloured and Indian minorities gave an extra dimension to anticolonialism. In South Africa, between 1906 and 1913, Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand) formed the South African Indian Congress and led the first large-scale nonviolent resistance campaign against anti-Indian legislation. He gained limited success, although restrictions on Indian movement and immigration to South Africa remained in force. After his departure in 1914, however, the militancy of the Indian Congress was lost until after World War II, when younger, more radical groups won power from the middle class that had dominated the organization. Nevertheless, Gandhi's example influenced later African nationalists.

The Coloureds of the Cape and Transvaal also mobilized politically in the first nationwide black political organization, the African Political Organization (APO; later African People's Organization), founded in 1902, which sought to unite Africans in opposition to the South Africa Act of 1909. The formation of a separate Coloured Affairs Department to some extent diverted Coloured political energies from joint black action. Coloureds were prominent, however, in the All-African Convention, a body formed in 1935 that represented numerous African organizations. In 1943 the All-African Convention, along with several Coloured organizations, founded the Non-European Unity Movement, which rejected cooperation with the government and sought full democratic rights for all South Africans.

In 1912 educated Africans united various welfare associations, which had developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, into the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress 【ANC】). They aimed to represent African grievances, overcome tribal divisions, and gain acceptance from whites through self-help, education, and the accumulation of property. Demands for industrial education, individual land tenure, and representation in Parliament were accompanied by attacks on the pass laws, the colour bar, and the Native Lands Act of 1913; until the 1940s the ANC's methods remained strictly constitutional and appealed mainly to the educated elite.

The ANC had its counterparts farther to the north, partly because many early nationalists had either studied or worked in South Africa. Native associations and welfare associations evolved among the educated elite from the second decade of the 20th century and gave birth to congresses in Southern Rhodesia in 1934, Nyasaland in 1944, and Northern Rhodesia in 1948, all forerunners of more radical anticolonial movements. Despite regional differences, the class composition and methods of struggle of these organizations were broadly similar until the 1950s, with the South African organizations leading the way.

Although Africans in South Africa were moving into industry by the end of World War I, their trade unions were hampered by pass laws, lack of recognition, and police harassment; strikes were illegal and often were put down with violence. Nevertheless, the period 1918–22 saw a great deal of working-class militancy, and in 1920 Clements Kadalie, a Nyasaland migrant, founded the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU). Initially consisting of dockworkers in Cape Town, the ICU spread rapidly as a mass movement in the towns and in the countryside, where those who had been evicted responded with millenarian zeal to its message. At its height the ICU claimed 100,000 members and had branches as far afield as Southern Rhodesia and South West Africa, but by 1929 it had largely disintegrated. By that time the Communist Party of South Africa was organizing black workers. Black unions appeared elsewhere in the region after World War II.

From the early 1920s the South African government, seeking to preempt black radicalism, attempted to provide channels for the expression of African grievances through a variety of local consultative councils. In the Rhodesias and Nyasaland and, slightly later, in the smaller colonial territories, advisory councils, “tribal representatives,” and rural “native authorities” played a similar role.

In Angola and Mozambique Africans had even fewer political rights, except for a brief republican period (1910–26) when political organizations, trade unions, and the press flourished. For a while it appeared that Africans and settlers in Angola would strive for similar reformist goals, but the Africans broke away to form organizations publicizing black grievances and demanding limited welfare and educational benefits. Crushed even before the advent of Salazar, these groups were revived as social and educational organizations, and it was only during the 1950s that they became overtly political.

Even at their height political organizations and trade unions never reached more than a fraction of the African population, especially in rural areas. In many areas witchcraft-eradication movements became a sensitive barometer of social distress: in 1933–34, for example, amid worldwide depression, drought, and locusts, a cult offering adherents a medicine called mchape that would deliver them from witchcraft swept central Nyasaland and eastern Northern Rhodesia. Antiwitchcraft cults and prophet movements drew on traditional religious and cultural beliefs, offering hope to a sorely pressed and poverty-stricken populace.

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, parts of South Africa had already experienced almost a century of Christian endeavour. The scope of mission work, already entrenched in the Shire Highlands and south of the Limpopo, was vastly extended as new societies appeared on the scene. The Roman Catholic church revived its presence in Angola and Mozambique and spread rapidly in the rest of the subcontinent, after its virtual disappearance by the late 19th century when Baptist and other Protestant missions began working there. The consolidation of colonialism and the new challenges facing African society gave mission activity renewed vitality, and throughout the region black education and health remained largely the responsibility of Christian missions until after World War II.

At the same time, by the late 19th century many missionaries had come to oppose African religious leadership and practiced their own colour bar. Thus, many Africans turned instead to the independent churches that emerged in South Africa in the late 19th century and spread rapidly throughout the subcontinent in the 20th century. Independent churches originated in the countryside but spread rapidly on the Rand, with the formation in 1892 of the Ethiopian church, which was linked to the African Methodist Episcopal church in the United States. Its “back to Africa” ideology was an essential part of what became known as Ethiopianism, a Christian movement that stressed African political solidarity and religious autonomy.

African independent churches were often characterized by a millenarian vision that disturbed missionaries, settlers, and administrators. In some areas whites sought to suppress them. Although the break with a mission church betokened a desire for independence from whites, there were many motives for separatism. In Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, adherents of the millennial Watch Tower sect violently confronted state authority, but among the rural Shona and Kongo in Angola the millenarian churches were not confrontational. Everywhere, however, the independent churches subverted the norms of colonial society but lacked the capacity to transform it.

Unlike World War I, World War II did not involve campaigns on Southern African soil, although large numbers of black and white soldiers fought elsewhere in Africa. Yet in many ways this war had a greater impact. In South Africa manufacturing overtook mining and agriculture in its contribution to the economy, and large numbers of Africans settled permanently in the major cities. In Southern Rhodesia, too, the war boosted the economy, and by its end tobacco farming and secondary industry had emerged as key economic sectors.

Economic expansion during the war led to increased organization among African workers, whose wages lagged far behind the rising cost of living. In South Africa these years saw a wave of African worker militancy, partly inspired by the Communist Party, and a reorganization of the African National Congress by a new, younger urban constituency. The brutal suppression of a 1946 strike by African mine workers further radicalized many African nationalists and brought about a closer alliance between the ANC and the Communist Party. This alliance became even more important after the banning of the party in 1950.

In south-central Africa, too, the end of the war brought an eruption of strikes, particularly a strike by railway workers in 1945, which led to the founding of a large number of African trade unions in Southern Rhodesia. In 1947 the British government dispatched a trade unionist to organize African mine workers in the Copperbelt, while the first union in Nyasaland followed in 1949. With general strikes in Bulawayo and Salisbury in 1948, a new form of political action had emerged.

World War II was important in shaking up the politics of the region in other ways as well. Thousands of Africans had joined the army, and some came back home with widened horizons, while their experiences of demobilization and discriminatory compensation fueled nationalist feeling. The 1941 Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed the right of all peoples to self-determination, also stimulated political activists in Southern Africa. In the 1940s the African National Congress began to demand full democratic rights in South Africa for the first time, and its influence, like that of the trade unions, began to be felt throughout the region, spread partly by returning migrant labourers, who formed similar organizations in neighbouring territories.

For those territories under the authority of the British colonial office, the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of 1940 and 1945 signaled Britain's commitment to the development of empire at a time of internal weakness. Thus, after the war Britain attempted to expand agricultural production through agricultural research stations, extension programs, promotion of technology, and conservation measures. These efforts largely benefited white estate owners rather than African peasants, however, and the attempted restructuring of peasant production prompted considerable rural unrest, providing anticolonial movements throughout the region with a large, disaffected constituency.

After the war the imperial powers were under strong international pressure to decolonize. In Southern Africa, however, the transfer of power to an African majority was greatly complicated by the presence of entrenched white settlers. After an initial phase from 1945 to about 1958, in which white power seemed to be consolidated, decolonization proceeded in three stages: first, the relatively peaceful achievement by 1968 of independence by those territories under direct British rule (the High Commission territories became Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland, and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland became Zambia and Malawi); second, the far bloodier struggle for independence in the Portuguese colonies and in Southern Rhodesia (from 1965 Rhodesia, which achieved independence as Zimbabwe in 1980); and, third, the denouement in South West Africa (which in 1990 achieved independence as Namibia) and in South Africa, where the black majority took power after nonracial, democratic elections in 1994. While at the end of the colonial period imperial interests still controlled the economies of the region, by the end of the 20th century South Africa had become the dominant economic power. The beginning of the 21st century ushered in attempts to finally create unity among all the countries in Southern Africa. Despite the spread of multiparty democracy, however, violence, inequality, and poverty persisted throughout the region.

Paradoxically, World War II and the rise of more radical African political movements initially consolidated white rule in Southern Africa, as evidenced by the victory of the predominantly Afrikaner National Party in South Africa, the creation of the Central African Federation by Britain, and renewed white immigration to the Rhodesias, Angola, Mozambique, and South West Africa. Once again, developments in South Africa dominated the region, although the discrediting of racism in Europe and decolonization in South Asia led to increasing international censure of South African racial policies.

Dissatisfaction with the wartime cabinet and fears of urban African militants lay behind the victory of the Reunited National Party (National Party) (later the National Party 【NP】), which ran on a platform of apartheid (“apartness”) in the white elections of 1948. Although the NP won only a plurality of votes, its victory signified a new Afrikaner (Boer) unity that resulted from 30 years of intense ideological labour and institution building by ethnic nationalists intent on capturing the South African state.

Although the various interests in the NP had different interpretations of apartheid, the party essentially had three connected goals: to entrench itself in power, to promote Afrikaner concerns, and to protect white supremacy. By 1970 these goals largely had been achieved. The NP controlled parliament, and many English speakers voted for the Nationalists—despite their declaration of a republic in 1960–61 and subsequent decision to remove South Africa from the British Commonwealth—believing that the NP alone ensured white domination. Economic and educational policies favoured Afrikaners, who became increasingly urbanized and less economically disadvantaged.

Under Hendrik Verwoerd (Verwoerd, Hendrik Frensch), who served as minister of Native Affairs and later as prime minister (1958–66), apartheid took shape. Controls over African labour mobility were tightened, and the colour bar in employment was extended. From 1959 chiefly authorities in the rural reserves (renamed “Bantu homelands”) were given increased powers and granted limited self-government, though they remained subject to white control. Ethnic and racial distinctions among whites, Africans, Coloureds, and Indians were more strictly defined and policed. Although Coloureds and Indians were subordinated to white rule and humiliated by racial discrimination, they nevertheless were privileged in comparison with Africans.

Black opposition to apartheid policies in the 1950s was led by the ANC (African National Congress) in alliance with other opposition organizations consisting of radical whites, Coloureds, and Indians. In 1955 this Congress Alliance drew up the Freedom Charter, a program of nonracial social democracy. Africanist suspicion of nonracialism and hostility to white Communists, however, led to the formation of the rival Pan-Africanist Congress (Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania) (PAC) in 1959. Both organizations were banned after demonstrations against the pass laws in March 1960 at Sharpeville, in which police killed at least 67 and injured more than 180 African protestors, triggering massive protests. Increasingly draconian security legislation, the banning, exile, and imprisonment of leaders (including Nelson Mandela (Mandela, Nelson), the leader of the ANC), and the widespread use of informants resulted in a period of relative political calm in the 1960s.

The stability of the 1960s encouraged international investment, and the South African economy became far more centralized and capital-intensive. Economic growth made possible unprecedented social engineering, and the political geography of South Africa was transformed as millions of people were removed from so-called white areas to the black homelands. Access to welfare and political rights were made dependent on state-manipulated ethnic identities, which assumed new importance with the creation of the homelands. In 1976 the Transkei homeland was given independence by the South African government, and grants of “independence” followed over the next four years to Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, and Venda, though their “independence” was not internationally recognized.

The victory of the overtly republican National Party in South Africa challenged British interests in the subcontinent. The NP's economic policies appeared to threaten British investments in South Africa at a time when Britain was particularly dependent on its colonial possessions for its sterling balances, while the Nationalists also renewed their demand for the incorporation into South Africa of Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland.

By the mid 1950s it was clear that the three High Commission territories could not be transferred to South Africa and had to be prepared for independence. Limited funds were made available for the provision of social services, education, soil conservation, and infrastructure development, but this assistance did little to reduce the territories' dependence on migrant labour to South Africa. A partial exception was Swaziland, where British- and South African-owned asbestos and coal mines, sugar and timber plantations, and cattle ranches had begun to generate more local jobs after the war.

The independence of the majority of Britain's African territories put the independence of the High Commission territories in Southern Africa on the British agenda, despite their continued economic dependence on South Africa and the relative weakness of their independence movements.

Lesotho, with high levels of literacy, was the first to organize. In 1952 Ntsu Mokhehle formed the Basutoland Congress Party (BCP), modeled on the ANC. In 1958 Chief Leabua Jonathan, who was to become Lesotho's first prime minister, founded the conservative Basutoland National Party (BNP), with the support of the South African government, the powerful Roman Catholic church, and the queen regent. Jonathan led the BNP to a narrow victory in the 1965 elections; Lesotho achieved independence in 1966. In Botswana and Swaziland, modern nationalist movements emerged somewhat later and were dominated by members of the royal families, who were able to perpetuate monarchical domination quite effectively through the ballot box. In Botswana, which achieved its independence in 1966, Seretse Khama (Khama, Sir Seretse)—the grandson of the Ngwato chief Khama III—emerged as the first president. In Swaziland, where the presence of white settlers and South African and international economic interests held up full independence until 1968, the Swazi king Sobhuza II emerged as head of state through the overwhelming electoral majority of his Imbokodvo National Movement in the rural areas. Thus, in all three territories conservative governments anxious to avoid provoking South Africa emerged in the first elections after independence.

Botswana was undoubtedly the most successful economically and politically and retained the most open political institutions and the most distance from South Africa. Dominated by a modernizing elite, the country's economy flourished with the expansion of cattle ranching and diamond, nickel, and copper mining. Botswana played a leading role in efforts to coordinate the regional economy. The BCP, with a primarily rural electoral base, ruled Botswana into the mid 1990s.

In Swaziland, Sobhuza II in 1973 declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament and all political parties, and consolidated his rule after a more radical opposition party showed strength in the 1972 elections. In 1978 a new constitution ensured the continued power of the monarchy in alliance with selected chiefs. This ruling elite used its domination of the state and land to accumulate wealth in close collaboration with foreign (mainly South African) investors. Until the death of Sobhuza II in 1982, all opposition to the government and to its close links with South Africa was suppressed. In the 1980s and '90s political repression and competition for power within the ruling group intensified.

Fears that the more radical BCP would win the 1970 elections in Lesotho led Jonathan, supported by South Africa, to declare a state of emergency, annul the election, and suspend the constitution. Opposition leaders fled, and by the late 1970s chronic warfare had erupted in Lesotho's northeastern mountains. Through the 1960s and early '70s Jonathan was South Africa's most reliable regional ally, but he subsequently became an outspoken critic of South African policies. Jonathan's authoritarian rule continued until 1986, when he was deposed in a military coup supported by South Africa.

Alarm at the NP victory in South Africa also stimulated Britain into federating its south-central African territories as a bulwark against Afrikaner nationalism. Even before World War II, Northern Rhodesian whites had begun to consider federation with Southern Rhodesia as a response to growing African assertiveness, and support for federation increased after the war. At the same time, the growing importance of the copper industry in Northern Rhodesia attracted Southern Rhodesian whites to the idea of federation. Wartime collaboration promoted federal ideas among white settlers and in British government circles. It was widely assumed that Southern Rhodesia would provide managerial and administrative skills, Northern Rhodesia copper revenues, and Nyasaland labour for the new entity. Africans in the north, however, feared that federation would prevent political advance and extend Southern Rhodesia's racist laws. Ignoring African opposition, in 1953 Britain's Conservative government brought the territories together in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, commonly known as the Central African Federation.

Prosperity muted African protest in the early years of federation, although dissent mounted in the impoverished reserves of Southern Rhodesia, where disaffection was fueled by attempts to restructure peasant production at a time of growing landlessness and congestion on inferior land. Despite the rhetoric of multiracial partnership, the economic advantages of federation appeared mainly to benefit Southern Rhodesian whites.

By the late 1950s more militant national movements (nationalism) had emerged in the Central African Federation and were attempting to mobilize a disaffected peasantry in all three territories. The emergence of these nationalist movements profoundly disturbed the federal authorities. After sporadic unrest in Nyasaland in 1959 a state of emergency was declared, while in all three territories nationalist leaders were arrested and their organizations banned. The crackdown set off further disorder, and in the northern territories the British were persuaded to move toward decolonization. By 1961–62 the nationalists had been released and new constitutions drawn up, and in 1963 the federation was dissolved. In the following year the Malawi Congress Party under Hastings Banda (Banda, Hastings Kamuzu) and the United National Independence Party (UNIP) under Kenneth Kaunda (Kaunda, Kenneth) won the first universal suffrage elections in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, respectively, and led them into independence as Malawi and Zambia.

Banda and Kaunda differed greatly in their relations with the liberation struggles in the rest of Southern Africa. In the hope of gaining control of northern Mozambique, Banda negotiated with the Portuguese and withheld assistance from Mozambican nationalists, who during the 1960s were beginning their military campaign. He also established close ties with the white South African government, which supplied much of Malawi's direct aid. Malawi thus became the foundation of South Africa's “outward-looking” foreign policy in Africa.

Although initially Zambia was as tied economically to Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies, Kaunda backed the resistance movements there and supported United Nations (UN) sanctions against the white government in Rhodesia. He paid a heavy price. The sanctions closed Zambia's major trade and transportation routes through Rhodesia, and, although alternate routes were established through Angola and new east-west lines through Tanzania were constructed by the mid 1970s, subsequent armed incursions from Rhodesia and South Africa and continued warfare in Angola and Mozambique disrupted the costly new trade and transportation lines. Zambia's economy contracted by nearly half between 1974 and 1979, and its collapse was prevented only by intervention from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

During the late 1970s Malawi, long believed to have successful rural development policies, also faced economic crisis. The lean years of the 1980s saw a widening gap between rich and poor, which was worsened by Banda's support of the Mozambican insurgency movement Renamo and the influx of vast numbers of refugees from the civil war in Mozambique.

White power in Angola and Mozambique remained relatively weak in comparison with South Africa and South West Africa. After the war Portugal sought to maintain its colonies in the face of growing, if still slight, African urban nationalist movements by increasing the settler population dramatically. This was facilitated in Angola by a coffee boom and the discovery of minerals and petroleum and in Mozambique by government-instituted agricultural schemes.

These developments brought little benefit to the majority of Africans, however, who continued to work as ill-paid migrant labourers, their upward mobility blocked by settlers. Even in areas of limited fertility, Africans still had to produce their quota of cotton, rice, or coffee; most of the good land was taken over by wealthy white landowners and multinational companies, and the forced labour codes remained in operation until 1962.

The longest, most divided, and bloodiest wars against colonialism in the subcontinent occurred in the Portuguese colonies. War first erupted in Angola in 1961, in a series of apparently unconnected uprisings. The initiative was captured by the urban-based Popular Liberation Movement of Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola; MPLA), under its poet-president Agostinho Neto (Neto, Agostinho). The MPLA was supported by communists in Portugal, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, but its hegemony was contested from the start by Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola; FNLA), based in Congo (Kinshasa), and by Jonas Savimbi (Savimbi, Jonas)'s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola; UNITA), supported primarily by Ovimbundu in the south.

In Mozambique the nationalist organizations were initially more successfully united. The anticolonial struggle was led by Eduardo Mondlane of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique; Frelimo), which was formed in 1962 by exiles in Tanzania. Internal dissent had been crushed by 1964, and Frelimo launched a guerrilla war against targets in northern Mozambique, claiming to have established its own administrative, educational, and economic networks in the northern districts. Despite the assassination of Mondlane in 1969, a new phase of the war opened in 1971 under the leadership of Samora Machel (Machel, Samora), and by 1974 Frelimo controlled much of northern and central Mozambique.

Portugal's initial response to the outbreak of revolt in Angola and Mozambique was all-out war, and by the mid 1960s there were some 70,000 Portuguese troops in each territory. Large numbers of black troops were recruited, and villagers supporting the guerrillas were subjected to savage reprisals. In a bid to attract international support, Portugal opened the colonies to foreign investment in 1963, and by the late 1960s the regime also instituted modest economic and educational reforms to preempt the nationalists and meet rising demands for a semiskilled workforce. But the reforms were too few and too late, and in April 1974 the sheer cost of the wars—together with rising dissatisfaction with the government in Portugal—led to an army coup, the collapse of the Portuguese government, and Portuguese withdrawal from Africa.

When the Portuguese left Luanda in November 1975, Angola was in the throes of a civil war between its divided liberation movements. The war escalated as the United States aided the FNLA-UNITA alliance through Zaire and encouraged a South African invasion of Angola in 1974–75 in the hope of installing a pro-Western government. The Soviet Union supplied weapons to the MPLA, which was aided by Cuban troops. The South African invasion was repelled, but South Africa continued to destabilize the MPLA government over the next 15 years through its covert support for UNITA, which it hoped to install as its client. The MPLA eventually established control of Angola under Neto, but its government was undermined by South African incursions, the flight of most of the settlers at independence, incursions of Kongo peoples from Congo (Kinshasa), hostility from the United States, and its own doctrinaire economic policies.

Portuguese withdrawal also led to Mozambique's independence under a Frelimo government in June 1975, but the flight of skilled expatriates and Mozambique's proximity to hostile regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia caused immediate problems. The country was severely hit by a drastic cutback in recruitment by the South African Chamber of Mines in 1976 and, like Zambia, paid heavily for obeying UN sanctions against Rhodesia and for supporting the liberation movements. Nevertheless, in the early years of independence, Frelimo abolished many of the most hated aspects of colonial rule and greatly increased the availability of welfare resources for the black populace. Mozambican territory was raided by Rhodesia and South Africa in 1979, and this was followed by further South African attacks and the infiltration of the Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana; Renamo), a brutal insurgency group established by Rhodesian intelligence services in 1976–77.

In Mozambique and Angola the unpopularity of the governments' Marxist policies—including the concentration of the population in communal villages, state farms, and cooperatives and attacks on private property, chiefly authority, and religion—eased the way for South African intervention. During the 1980s both Frelimo and the MPLA lost control outside the main urban areas.

African liberation in Rhodesia was closely tied to the independence struggles in Mozambique. The election of 1962—boycotted by African nationalists—was won by the extreme right-wing Rhodesian Front (RF) party, which ran on a platform of immediate independence under white control. The Central African Federation was dissolved in 1963. Britain was unwilling to grant Rhodesia independence; in 1965 the RF, under the leadership of Ian Smith (Smith, Ian), unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent. Under the RF, government policies came even closer to those in South Africa. Although Rhodesia had an ostensibly colour-blind franchise, less than 1 percent of Africans were able to vote. The powers of chiefs were bolstered and discriminatory legislation increased. Despite international pressure, Britain refused to use force against the illegal regime. International economic sanctions were undermined by South Africa, Portugal, and multinational oil companies. White commercial agriculture was heavily subsidized and competed with African peasants, who felt the main burden of the sanctions.

The banning of successive nationalist organizations and the detention and exile of their leadership led to fierce infighting and the emergence of two major liberation organizations, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), under Robert Mugabe (Mugabe, Robert), and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), under Joshua Nkomo (Nkomo, Joshua). With Frelimo's military successes in northeastern Mozambique in 1971–72 and, more important, with the transformation of the power structure in the region after the independence of the Portuguese territories, a new guerrilla strategy began to make headway. Various attempts by the British to resolve the conflict—including a referendum on a new constitution in 1972—all failed, and by the late 1970s the Rhodesian army and the guerrillas pursued the war with increasing ferocity, both sides often intimidating and torturing recruits in the rural areas.

By 1978 it had become clear that the Rhodesian government would not win the war, and Smith, under pressure from Western countries and South Africa, agreed in 1978 to allow the internal African opposition to contest multiracial elections the following year. These elections, however, excluded ZAPU and ZANU. Thus, despite the appointment of a black prime minister, the war continued unabated. In 1979 renewed negotiations in London ultimately led to a peace settlement that established majority rule, and in 1980 Mugabe and ZANU won a landslide electoral victory.

The release of a large number of unemployed, armed young men into the countryside bequeathed a violent legacy, and by 1982 the initial ZANU-ZAPU government coalition broke down in the face of increasing violence in Matabeleland, for which ZANU held ZAPU responsible. Early in 1983 Mugabe sent government forces to punish the people of Matabeleland. Despite the withdrawal of troops and an amnesty in 1988, memories of this brutal counterinsurgency campaign were even more traumatic than recollections of the liberation struggle.

The idea of a one-party state was dropped amid calls for reparations for the massacres in Matabeleland and for greater public accountability. Although the early years of Zimbabwean independence were economically promising, with the return of investment as sanctions were lifted and a series of good harvests, much of the white economy and bureaucracy remained intact, and gross inequalities persisted. Despite its revolutionary rhetoric, ZANU (which ruled Zimbabwe into the mid 1990s) seemed more intent on replacing white government with black than with transforming the lives of the poor.

In South West Africa, too, the National Party increased its control in the 1950s and '60s. Long governed as part of South Africa, in 1949 South West Africa became South Africa's fifth province, and its white population was swollen by about 3,000 immigrants. The economy grew dramatically, increasing the mobility of black workers and creating an urban-based black intelligentsia for the first time. Apartheid was extended to South West Africa, however, and in the mid 1960s its reserves were also consolidated into seven ethnically defined homelands under tribal authorities.

The small political associations in South West Africa after the war were profoundly influenced by their South African counterparts, but the first mass organization to protest against South Africa's policies was formed only in 1958; in 1960 this organization became the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). Launched by Ovambo contract workers, SWAPO came to represent most black South West Africans in opposing apartheid, racial inequalities, and economic subordination to South Africa. After years of fruitless peaceful protest, SWAPO began a military campaign against the government in 1966.

Although South Africa did not recognize the authority of the UN, the issue of South African rule in South West Africa came before the UN regularly, and in 1966 the UN called for complete South African withdrawal. This decision was upheld by the International Court of Justice at The Hague in 1971. In 1973 the UN appointed its own commissioner for Namibia (as the territory became known in the 1970s); despite the presence of the UN commissioner and the intensification of SWAPO's military campaign, it was only after Angolan independence in 1975 and increasing international pressure that South Africa's policies began to change.

The independence of Angola prompted changes in South African strategy toward Namibia during the late 1970s, as South Africa attempted to transform the territory into a quasi-independent buffer against more radical change by proposing complex constitutional arrangements for a transitional government. The strategy, based on the co-option of a local black elite as a moderate alternative to SWAPO, was intended to placate international opinion while leaving control of Namibia in South African hands and keeping its military options open. The constitutional proposals were rejected by the international community, however, and in 1978 the UN Security Council (Security Council, United Nations) passed Resolution 435, which set out proposals for a cease-fire and UN-supervised elections. South Africa did not move to implement this resolution, though it had accepted similar proposals earlier.

By the second half of the 1980s—in part because South Africa once more had been drawn into invading Angola—the war in Namibia was becoming increasingly costly for South Africa in military, political, economic, and diplomatic terms. A turning point occurred in 1988 when the South African Defense Force's inability to take Cuito-Cuanavale in Angola revealed South Africa's lack of superior airpower and its inadequate weapons technology. Under joint pressure from the Soviet Union and the United States, South Africa finally agreed to implement Resolution 435, and democratic elections in 1989 were won by SWAPO, led by Sam Nujoma (Nujoma, Sam). In 1990 Namibia finally achieved independence.

The process of decolonization in south-central Africa and the High Commission territories was generally peaceful. By the late 1960s the few remaining nonindependent African countries were all in settler-dominated Southern Africa. The 1970s were a time of escalating wars of liberation in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. The independence of the Portuguese colonies under self-styled Marxist governments was crucial in shifting the balance of power against the remaining white minority states in the subcontinent. International involvement in the region increased, and by 1980 only South Africa and Namibia remained under minority rule.

For the territories of Southern Africa, the continuance of apartheid in South Africa shaped the postindependence years; the liberation of these territories in turn inspired and politicized South Africa's black populace and transformed the balance of power in the region. In response, P.W. Botha (Botha, P. W.), who became prime minister of South Africa in 1978 and led South Africa until 1989, massively increased defense expenditures and began a low-grade war on the neighbouring states, determined to destroy all ANC (African National Congress) bases. At the same time, Botha pursued an internal program of constitutional reform, which strengthened the powers of the state president and increased repression of the black majority. The South African military assumed greater political importance. South Africa destabilized the region by arming internal dissidents, who attacked schools, clinics, railways, and harbours. This intervention was especially devastating in Angola and Mozambique, but South Africa also destabilized eastern Zimbabwe and raided alleged ANC bases in Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho.

For all the apparent success of its social engineering policies, by the late 1960s cracks had begun to appear in the National Party's edifice of control. It subsequently confronted multiple crises, as black opposition again broke to the surface with the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement in 1968, led by the charismatic activist Stephen Biko (Biko, Steve). The movement sought to raise black self-awareness and to unite black students, professionals, and intellectuals. As black political activity increased, the apparently monolithic NP began to fragment.

The economy also began to show signs of weakness by the mid 1970s. Inflation climbed steeply and the economy contracted; a reliance on imported technology contributed to a trade deficit. Whites, who constituted a declining proportion of the population, could not meet the demand for skilled and semiskilled labour. The small internal market and African trade sanctions also hampered growth.

Yet the economic growth of the 1960s had expanded the black working class and increased its confidence, and 1972–73 saw a wave of strikes and rapid growth of the trade union movement. In some sectors the labour activism caused African wages to rise more quickly than white wages. Nevertheless, technological innovation led to high unemployment for the unskilled, and urban conditions for Africans continued to deteriorate as impoverished homeland inhabitants defied the pass laws and sought work in town. For them, the fiction of the independence of the homelands came to have a grim reality in the 1980s, as their homeland citizenship restricted their legal access to jobs and housing in the rest of South Africa.

The revival of labour activism and the independence of Mozambique and Angola further inspired the Black Consciousness movement. In June 1976 the government's determination to impose Afrikaans on black schools provided the flashpoint for prolonged countrywide protests, touched off after police fired on demonstrating students in Soweto (a black township outside Johannesburg). This event transformed political consciousness beyond the youth—although they remained in the forefront of protest thereafter—with far-reaching consequences. Churches were radicalized, large numbers of community organizations sprang up, and there was a resurgence of support for the banned ANC, particularly among young people. By the late 1970s the ANC had decided to reorganize its underground internally, emphasizing political organization within the country.

In response, the government abandoned many aspects of orthodox apartheid: African trade unions were recognized, the pass laws were abolished, and attempts were made to co-opt the African middle and skilled working class (through the granting of limited urban and welfare rights) and to enhance the status of Indians and Coloureds (through constitutional change). The result was to politicize civil society even further, as the state was seen as using welfare for purposes of social control. Government attempts to address problems almost invariably led to fresh confrontations with the alienated black population.

The reform process had stalled by the mid 1980s, and the state attempted to undermine black opposition by cultivating conservative African leaders, notably Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi (Buthelezi, Mangosuthu G.), head of the primarily Zulu Inkatha (Inkatha Freedom Party) movement in Natal, which became the scene of internecine violence. When F.W. de Klerk (de Klerk, F.W.) ascended to the presidency in 1989, he faced continuing African militancy, international economic and cultural sanctions, renewed economic recession, and intensifying war in Angola and Namibia.

On February 2, 1990, de Klerk announced his intention to free Nelson Mandela (Mandela, Nelson), lift the ban on many opposition parties (including the ANC and the PAC), and negotiate with the black majority for a new, nonracial constitution. Agreement on an interim constitution was reached in 1993, and in April 1994 Mandela was elected president of South Africa.