Nelson Mandela’s descendants include six children, 17 grandchildren, 19 great-grandchildren – and more. Download full-size image. (Mary Alexander, CC BY 4.0)

Mandela’s father was Mphakanyiswa Gadla Henry Mandela, who died in 1930. His mother was Nonqaphi Fanny Nosekeni, who died in 1968.

Mandela was married three times and had six children.

• READ MORE: Nelson Mandela 1918-2013: the timeline of a lifetime

Marriage and children

In 1944, at the age of 26, Mandela married Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922-2004). They had four children together, three of whom died tragically.

Mandela’s first child, Madiba Thembekile Mandela – known as Thembi – was born in 1945. Thembi died in a car accident in 1969 while his father was in prison. Mandela was not allowed to attend his son’s funeral.

A second child, daughter Makaziwe (or Maki) Mandela, died in infancy in 1948.

Mandela and Evelyn Mase’s third child was Makgatho Lewanika Mandela, a son born in 1950. He died of an Aids-related illness in 2005.

Their fourth and surviving child was a daughter, Pumla Makaziwe Mandela – also known as Maki and named for her infant sister – who was born in 1954.

Mandela and Evelyn Mase divorced on 19 March 1958.

On 14 June 1958 Mandela, aged 40, married Winnie (Winifred) Nomzamo Zanyiwe Madikizela, who was born in 1936.

They had two children, both daughters.

Zenani Dlamini-Mandela was born in 1959.

Zindziswa Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s youngest child, was born in 1960. Zindzi, as she was known, died on 13 July 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. She was buried next to her mother on 17 July, the day before 18 July – her father’s birthday, known worldwide as Mandela Day.

Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela divorced on 19 March 1996.

On 18 July 1998 – his 80th birthday – Mandela married Graça Machel, who was born in 1945. Machel is the widow of slain Mozambican president Samora Machel.

Grandchildren

Nelson Mandela had 17 grandchildren, nine born to the children of Evelyn Mase and eight born to the children of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Grandchildren with Evelyn Mase

Thembi Mandela had two daughters: Ndileka Mandela (born in 1965) and Nandi Mandela (born in 1968).

Makgatho Mandela had four sons: Mandla Mandela (born in 1974), Ndaba Mandela (born in 1983), Mbuso Mandela (born in 1991) and Andile Mandela (born in 1993).

Pumla Maki Mandela has three children: daughter Tukwini Mandela (born in 1974) and sons Dumani Mandela (born in 1976) and Kweku Mandela (born in 1985).

Grandchildren with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

Zenani Dlamini-Mandela has four children: daughters Zaziwe Manaway (born in 1977) and Zamaswazi Dlamini (born in 1979), and sons Zinhle Dlamini (born in 1980) and Zozuko Dlamini (born in 1992).

Zindzi Mandela also has four children: daughter Zoleka Mandela (born in 1980, died 2023) and sons Zondwa Mandela (born in 1985), Bambatha Mandela (born in 1989) and Zwelabo Mandela (born in 1992).

Great-grandchildren

The eldest of Mandela’s 19 great-grandchildren was born in 1984, while he was still in prison, and the youngest in 2017 – a span of 33 years.

Great-grandchildren with Evelyn Mase

Thembi Mandela’s family:

Nandi Mandela has a son: Hlanganani Mandela, born in 1986.

Ndileka Mandela has two children: son Thembela Mandela (born in 1984) and daughter Pumla Mandela (born in 1993).

Makgatho Mandela’s family:

Mandla Mandela has two sons: Qheya II Zanethemba Mandela (born in 2011) and Mntwanenkosi Mandela Ikraam Mandela (born in 2017).

Ndaba Mandela also has two sons: Lewanika Ngubencuka Mandela (born in 2010) and Makgabane Sandlasamadlomo Mandela (born in 2015).

Great-grandchildren with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

Zenani Dlamini-Mandela’s family:

Zaziwe Manaway has three children: son Ziyanda Manaway (born in 2000), daughter Zipokhazi Manaway (born in 2009), and son Zenkosi John Brunson Manaway (born in 2012).

Zamaswazi Dlamini has a daughter: Zamakhosi Obiri (born in 2008).

Zinhle Dlamini has two daughters: Zinokuhle Marlo Dlamini (born in 2014) and Zenzelwe Marli Mandela Dlamini (born in 2016).

Zindzi Mandela’s family:

Zoleka Mandela had four children, two of whom have tragically died. Her daughter Zenani Mandela was born in 1997, and died in 2010. Her son Zenawe Zibuyile Mandela died in infancy in 2011. Zoleka’s surviving children are a son, Zwelami Mandela (born in 2003), and a daughter, Zanyiwe Zenzile Bashala (born in 2014).

On 25 September 2023 Zoleka Mandela herself died after a long battle with cancer. In a statement, the Nelson Mandela Foundation acknowledged her as a “tireless activist for healthcare and justice”.

Zondwa Mandela has two children: daughter Zazi Kazimla Vitalia Mandela (born in 2010) and son Ziwelene Linge Mandela (born in 2011).

Sources

• Nelson Mandela Foundation
• South African History Online
• Globe and Mail
• Daily Dispatch

Researched, designed and written by Mary Alexander.
Updated on 29 September 2024.
Comments? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com

The post Nelson Mandela’s family tree appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

A child plays in a restaurant in Vosloorus, a large township in Gauteng province. (Media Club)

The country has the sixth largest population in Africa – after Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania – and the 24th largest in the world.

Jump to:

South Africa’s population: overview

According to Statistics South Africa’s 2024 mid-year population estimates, South Africa is home to 63,015,904 people.

Black people are in the majority, with a population of 51.5 million – 81.7% of the total. The remaining 18.3% is made up of 5.3 million coloured people (8.5%), 1.6 million Indian/Asian people (2.6%) and 4.5 million white people (7.2%).

Data source: Statistics South Africa mid-year population estimates 2024

These ratios have changed since the country became a democracy in 1994. The percentage of black people has increased, that of coloured and Indian/Asian people has stayed roughly the same, while the share of white people has shrunk.

The 1996 census, the first of the democratic era, recorded a population of 40.6 million. Black people made up 76.7% of the total, coloured people 8.9%, Indian/Asian people 2.6%, white people 10.9% and an uncategorised group 0.9%.

In about 2013 the coloured population overtook the white population as South Africa’s second-largest group.

READ MORE: Geographic distribution of South Africa’s races

Population of the provinces

The population of South Africa’s nine provinces varies enormously.

Data source: Statistics South Africa mid-year population estimates 2024

The most striking difference is between Gauteng and the Northern Cape. Gauteng is a city region of just 18,178 square kilometres – 1.4% of South Africa’s land area – yet it’s home to over a quarter of the country’s people. The arid and rural Northern Cape takes up almost a third of South Africa, but only 2.2% of the population live there.

Then there’s KwaZulu-Natal, home to almost a fifth of the population, and the larger Free State, home to only 4.8%.

Data source: Statistics South Africa Census 2022

In 2024 South Africa’s provincial populations, and their share of the total, were:

• Eastern Cape: 7,176,230 (11.4%)
• Free State: 3,044,050 (4.8%)
• Gauteng: 15,931,824 (25.3%)
• KwaZulu-Natal: 12,312,712 (19.5%)
• Limpopo: 6,402,594 (10.2%)
• Mpumalanga: 5,057,662 (8.%)
• Northern Cape: 1,372,943 (2.2%)
• North West: 4,155,303 (6.6%)
• Western Cape: 7,562,588 (12.%)

READ MORE: The nine provinces of South Africa

Population density

South Africa’s population density is about 46 people per square kilometre, according to 2017 data.

In the provinces, differences in size and population mean different population densities. Gauteng, small but populous, has an average of 785 people for every square kilometre. KwaZulu-Natal has 117 people per square kilometre. The empty Northern Cape has just three people for each square kilometre.

READ MORE: The nine provinces of South Africa

Life, death and HIV

The 2024 estimate of average life expectancy at birth in South Africa is 66.5 years – 69.2 years for females and 63.6 years for males. This is up from a predicted life expectancy of 54.7 years in 2002, before any serious effort to tackle the HIV and Aids epidemic began.

The crude birth rate is 19.6 babies born for every 1,000 people. The total fertility rate is an average of 2.4 babies born to a woman over her lifetime. The crude death rate is 8.7 per 1,000.

Infant mortality (babies who die in their first year of birth) is 22.9 deaths for every 1,000 live births. The under-five mortality rate is 28.6 deaths per 1,000 live births.

These rates show an improvement on child survival since 2002, when infant mortality was 57 deaths and under-five mortality 79.7 deaths per 1,000 live births.

Some 8 million people are HIV positive, making up 12.7% of South Africa’s total population of 63 million. Women are hardest hit by the disease: over a fifth (20.5%) of all women aged 15 to 49 are HIV positive.

The total HIV prevalence rate was lower in 2002, at 8.9% of the population. The higher rate in 2024 reflects progress in the rollout of antiretroviral therapy, as more people live with HIV instead of dying of Aids.

READ MORE: HIV and Aids in South Africa

Age structure

South Africa has 17.3 million children aged 14 or younger, making kids the largest age group in the country and nearly a third (27.5%) of the population.

Poorer provinces tend to have a larger share of children and wealthier provinces a smaller share. In the Limpopo 33.1% of the population is aged 0 to 14 and in the Eastern Cape it’s 31.7%. By contrast, children make up 23% of Gauteng’s population and 22.9% of the Western Cape’s.

For the country as a whole, the second largest age group is from 30 to 44 (24.8%), closely followed by 15 to 29 (24.2%). Older groups are smaller: 13.8% are 45 to 59, 7.5% aged 60 to 74, and 2.2% 75 or older.

Age and race

Click image to find out more.

Data from 2017 reveals that when it comes to age structure and race, South Africa’s population reflects the facts of history and continued inequality.

While black South Africans are in the majority in every age group, this majority decreases as the age of the population rises. Coloured, Indian and especially white South Africans tend to live longer.

Click to view from the start.

Migration

Click image to find out more.

South Africans migrate away from poverty to where the jobs are. They move from poorer provinces to the richer ones, and from rural areas to the cities.

Gauteng is South Africa’s wealthiest province, mostly a city region and the centre of the country’s economy. It has the largest population, constantly swelled by migration.

In the 10 years from mid-2011 to mid-2021, net migration (number of people moving in minus people moving out) into Gauteng increased the province’s population by almost 1.9 million people.

The Western Cape, the third-largest provincial economy with the lowest poverty level, had net migration of 646,529 over the same 10 years. Conversely, KwaZulu-Natal – the second-largest – lost 18,333 of its people to migration from 2011 to 2021. While the province has a large economy, it also has relatively high levels of poverty.

The Eastern Cape has, by far, the highest level of poverty of all the provinces – and the highest number of people moving elsewhere. Its net migration for 2011 to 2021 was a negative 603,044. Limpopo had the second-highest rate of outward migration, at -300,527.

Net migration (people moving in minus people moving out) for South Africa’s provinces, 2011 to 2021:

• Eastern Cape: -603,044
• Free State: -23,128
• Gauteng: 1,856,006
• KwaZulu-Natal: -18,333
• Limpopo: -300,527
• Mpumalanga: 178,386
• Northern Cape: 17,063
• North West: 228,675
• Western Cape: 646,529

Click animation to view from the start.

READ MORE: The nine provinces of South Africa

International migration

South Africa’s international migration rates tend to be positive – more people move here, particularly from the rest of Africa, than leave.

From mid-2011 to mid-2021 net international migration into the country was 2.7 million. Most of the migrants (2.8 million) were from elsewhere in Africa, with a further net migration of 176,120 Indian/Asian people.

The total was offset by the net loss of 286,611 white people to other countries.

Net international migration for South Africa, 2011 to 2021:

• African: 2,850,656
• Indian/Asian: 176,120
• White: -286,611
• Total: 2,740,165

Trends in South Africa’s population from 1960

Age structure

There’s a lot of talk of South Africa’s population being dominated by the youth. But as the graphic below shows, we’re less youthful than we have been for decades.

The end of apartheid, better healthcare, widespread social welfare and greater economic opportunities all mean South Africans are now able to live longer lives – reducing the proportion of children and youth in our total population. See the actual figures for selected years.

READ MORE: Infographic: South Africa’s population and age structure from 1960 to 2015

Urbanisation

From 1960 to the late 1980s, apartheid laws kept families and communities in poor rural areas. Young men alone were allowed to move to the cities, where their labour was valuable.

After the end of apartheid, from the mid-1990s, urbanisation increased rapidly. In the last 20 years, much of the migration from rural areas has been to Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city since 1950.

READ MORE: Infographic: South Africa’s urban and rural population from 1960 to 2015

Life expectancy

Charting South Africans’ life expectancy is to track the country’s modern history. In 1960, a time of terrible apartheid abuse, an average newborn child was expected to have a lifespan of only 52 years – 50 years for boys. In 2015, life expectancy was 62 years.

In between, life expectancy has risen and fallen. The most severe drop was during the crisis of the HIV and Aids epidemic from 1995 to 2005. In 2005, life expectancy was the same as it had been in 1960.

READ MORE: Infographic: Life expectancy in South Africa from 1960 to 2015

Child mortality

The death rate of children is the starkest indicator of the health of a country’s society and economy. In 1974 South Africa’s mortality rate – deaths per 1,000 live births – was 88.1 for infants under a year and 125.5 for under-fives. By 2016 it had dropped to 34.2 for infants and 43.3 for under-fives – the lowest rate yet recorded.

READ MORE: Infographic: Child mortality in South Africa from 1974 to 2016

Researched, written and designed by Mary Alexander. Updated August 2025.
Comments? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com

The post South Africa’s population appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

Kids at a community meeting in Elsies River, Cape Town. South Africa’s Bill of Rights includes a section dedicated to the specific rights of children. (Image: GCIS)

South Africa’s Bill of Rights, chapter 2 of the constitution, is one of the most progressive in the world. It protects the human rights of everyone in the country – citizen, visitor, refugee or migrant.

Its preamble reads:

This Bill of Rights is a cornerstone of democracy in South Africa. It enshrines the rights of all people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom.

The bill was adopted in 1996, just two years after the first democratic elections that finally ended formal apartheid. All laws and organs of state must respect the Bill of Rights. The state must protect and promote the rights it sets out, and make sure they are fulfilled.

But do you really know your rights? Our no-nonsense guide will help you understand your rights, and the rights of everyone else.

You can also read the full text of the Bill of Rights in 11 of South Africa’s official languages.

Jump to your rights:

Equality

Everyone is equal.

You have the right to the same protection by the law as everyone else.

Nobody is allowed to unfairly discriminate against you because of your race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language or birth.

Human dignity

You have inherent dignity.

You have the right to have your dignity respected and protected.

Life

You have the right to life.

Freedom and security of the person

You have the right to freedom.

You have the right not to be deprived of your freedom for no reason, or for an unjust reason.

You have the right not to be put into jail without a trial.

You have the right not to be a victim of violence, whether it’s violence done by other people, or by the state.

You have the right not to be tortured.

You have the right not to treated in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way.

You have the right to control your own body.

You have the right to make your own decisions about pregnancy, childbirth and whether or not you want to have children.

Slavery, servitude and forced labour

Nobody is allowed to enslave you, make you work for no pay, or force you to work.

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Privacy

You have the right to your privacy.

Nobody is allowed to search you or your home, take your belongings, or monitor your private conversations, texts, phone calls or emails.

Freedom of religion, belief and opinion

You have the right to practise any religion you want. Nobody may force you to follow a religion.

You have the right to your own opinions and beliefs.

Freedom of expression

You have the right to express yourself freely, to say what you want to say.

You have the right to get information from a free and open media.

You have the right to be told new information and ideas, and to tell other people new information and ideas.

You have the right to create any art you want.

You have the right to learn and research whatever you want.

But you can’t abuse your freedom of expression to encourage war or other violence, or promote hatred for other people because of their race, ethnicity, gender or religion.

Assembly, demonstration, picket and petition

You have the right to come together with other people to demonstrate, picket or present petitions – as long as you do it peacefully, and don’t carry weapons.

Freedom of association

You have the right to spend time with anyone you choose.

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Political rights

You have the right to make your own political choices.

You have the right to take part in the activities of any political party, and recruit members for that party.

You have the right to campaign for any political party.

If you are a citizen, you have the right to free, fair and regular elections.

If you are an adult citizen, you have the right to vote in elections for the political party of your choice – and to keep your vote secret. You also have the right to stand for public office and, if elected, to hold that office.

Citizenship

If you are a citizen of South Africa, no-one can take that citizenship away from you.

Freedom of movement and residence

You have the right to freedom of movement – to travel anywhere in South Africa.

You have the right to leave South Africa.

You have the right to live anywhere in South Africa.

If you are a citizen, you have the right to a passport.

Freedom of trade, occupation and profession

You have the right to choose your own trade, job or profession.

Labour relations

You have the right to fair labour practices at work.

Workers have the right to form and join a trade union.

Employers have the right to form and join an employers’ organisation.

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Environment

You have the right to live in an environment that does not harm your health or wellbeing.

You have the right to have the environment protected now, and for future generations.

Property

No-one may take your property away from you.

The state may only take your property for specific reasons – for a public purpose or in the public interest. If it does have to take your property, it has to pay you the right price for it.

Housing

You have the right to proper housing.

The state must work to make sure you have housing.

You have the right not to be evicted from your home, or have your home torn down, without a court ordering it.

Healthcare, food, water and social security

You have the right to basic healthcare. This includes the right to reproductive health care – for contraception, pregnancy and childbirth.

You have the right to the food and water you need.

You have the right to emergency medical treatment. If your life is in danger, no hospital or healthcare worker may refuse to treat you.

If you can’t afford to support yourself or your family, the state must help you.

Children

Every child – anyone under 18– has the right to a name and nationality from birth.

Children have the right to be cared for by their parents or family, or to get proper foster care if needed.

They have the right to basic food, shelter, healthcare and social support.

Children must be protected from abuse and neglect.

They also have the right to be protected from work that is harmful or takes advantage of them.

Find out more about children’s rights.

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Education

You have the right to basic education, whether you are a child or an adult.

You have the right to further education.

In public schools, universities and colleges, you have the right to be educated in the official South African language of your choice – where this is possible.

Language and culture

You have the right to use whatever language you want, and take part in any cultural life – as long as this doesn’t infringe on the rights of others.

Cultural, religious and linguistic communities

You have the right to enjoy your culture, practise your religion and use your language.

You may also form, join and maintain cultural, religious and language organisations.

But you can’t exercise these rights in a way that infringes on the rights of others.

Access to information

You have the right to access any information held by the state.

You have the right to get any information held by someone else if you need it to protect or exercise your rights.

Just administrative action

You have the right to fair, legal and reasonable decisions by government or public officials.

If a decision harms your rights, you must be given written reasons.

The law must allow you to challenge unfair decisions in court or through an independent body. It must also make sure the government respects your rights and that public services run efficiently.

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Access to courts

You have the right to have any legal dispute settled in a fair public hearing by a court or by another independent and unbiased body.

Arrested, detained and accused people

If the police arrest you, you have the right to remain silent. They must tell you this right as soon as possible, and explain what could happen if you do speak.

You have the right to speak to a lawyer.

No-one can force you to say anything that could be used against you in court.

You must be brought to court as soon as possible – within 48 hours, or by the end of the first court day after 48 hours.

At your first court appearance, the court must either charge you with a crime or explain why you are being kept in jail. Otherwise, you must be released.

Limitation of rights

Some of your rights are limited if exercising those rights would infringe on the rights of others. Rights may also be limited under strict conditions such as a state of emergency.

These limitations may only be set out in laws that apply to everyone, and only if the limitation is reasonable and can be justified in a democratic society. The importance of the right must be examined, as must the purpose of the limitation and whether there are less restrictive ways to achieve the purpose.

Rights can never be limited without good reason. And some core rights – non-derogable rights – may never be limited, even under a state of emergency.

The non-derogable rights are:

• Equality
• Human dignity
• Life
• Freedom from torture and cruel treatment
• Freedom from slavery and forced labour
• Children’s rights
• The rights of arrested, detained and accused people

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The text in all languages

Read the full text of the Bill of Rights (PDF) in 11 of South Africa’s official languages:

Afrikaans | English | isiNdebele | isiXhosa | isiZulu | Sepedi | Sesotho | Setswana | siSwati | Tshivenda | Xitsonga

Constitutional and statutory bodies

Constitutional Court of South Africa – The highest court in South Africa on constitutional matters. It interprets, protects and enforces the constitution.

South African Human Rights Commission – Independent state institution established by the constitution to promote, monitor and assess observance of human rights.

Public interest law centres and legal advocacy organisations

Legal Resources Centre – Nonprofit public interest law centre that provides legal services to poor and marginalised communities.

Section27 – Public interest legal organisation focusing on access to healthcare services and basic education.

Lawyers for Human Rights – Nongovernmental organisation offering legal services and advocacy, including refugee and migrant rights programmes.

Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University – Human rights law clinic engaged in legal research, strategic litigation and advocacy.

Academic and research-based human rights centres

Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria – Academic department and advocacy centre working to promote human rights through education, research and litigation.

African Centre for Migration & Society at Wits University – Research institute focused on human mobility, migration and related policy issues in the Southern African region.

Social justice and community advocacy organisations

Black Sash – Nongovernmental organisation promoting social justice and access to social protection in South Africa.

Equal Education – Movement advocating for equality and quality in public education, involving learners, parents and community members.

Sonke Gender Justice – Civil society organisation that supports gender equality and works to prevent gender-based violence.

Ahmed Kathrada Foundation – Nonprofit organisation promoting nonracialism, constitutional democracy and active citizenship.

Migrant, refugee and anti-xenophobia organisations

Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town – Nonprofit organisation providing support and advocacy for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA) – Civil society network that promotes the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in South Africa.

International human rights bodies in South Africa

Unicef South Africa – South African office of the United Nations Children’s Fund, focusing on child rights, education, health and protection.

UNHCR regional office for Southern Africa – The United Nations Refugee Agency’s regional office supports and protects refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa and neighbouring countries.

Amnesty International South Africa – Branch of the global human rights organisation, focusing on advocacy, campaigns and research on human rights in South Africa.

Human Rights Watch (Africa division) – Monitors and reports on human rights developments in South Africa and across the region, with periodic investigations and advocacy.

News and information

GroundUp – Independent news service reporting on community-level issues, socioeconomic rights, service delivery, housing, education, migration and legal developments.

Spotlight – Public interest health journalism platform monitoring South Africa’s response to TB, HIV, health systems performance and health rights.

Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism – Nonprofit health media organisation producing evidence-based reporting on public health policy and social justice impacts.

Africa Check – Nonprofit fact-checking organisation verifying public claims and data across Africa to support informed public debate and counter misinformation affecting policy and rights.

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Image credits

All images are in the public domain, licensed as Creative Commons (CC). Credit for specific images as follows:

• Political rights, citizenship, children, communities, just administration, arrested & accused people courtesy of GCIS. Licensed CC BY-ND 4.0.
• Slavery, servitude & forced labour courtesy of Image Journeys. Licensed CC BY-ND 2.0.
• Limitation of rights courtesy of JackAZ Photo. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
• Human rights bodies courtesy of Brian Smithson. Licensed CC BY 2.0.
• All other images courtesy of MediaClub. Licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

Researched, written and designed by Mary Alexander.
Updated August 2025.
Comments? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com.

Disclaimer: This is a guide. It is not legal advice.

The post The plain language guide to South Africa’s Bill of Rights appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

Map of South Africa showing the percentage of households living in poverty in each municipality, according to data from the Statistics South Africa Community Survey 2016.

South Africa’s poorest province is the Eastern Cape. The wealthiest province is Gauteng. Around 880,000 of the mostly rural Eastern Cape’s people live in poverty. In Gauteng, a city region with the best opportunities for jobs, some 610,000 people live in poverty.

These numbers are calculated from Statistics South Africa’s 2016 Community Survey.

Poverty in South Africa has deep historical roots that show up in more recent movements of people.

Map of South Africa showing estimated numbers of people living in poverty. The numbers are calculated from the population, poverty headcount and average household size of each municipality.

The reason so many South Africans live in poverty, in a middle-income country, is apartheid and colonialism. Apartheid was a crude attempt at social engineering designed to make black South Africans a cheap and plentiful source of labour. It was preceded by centuries of Dutch and then British colonialism that had the same goal, but with cruder mechanisms.

Colonialism and apartheid excluded the majority of people from meaningful participation in the economy. It made South Africa poorer than it should have been.

South Africa has a wealth of resources. But for centuries, this potential was squandered.

A government policy designed to keep most of its people poor seems absurd. But until 1994 South Africa was not a democracy. The only electorate the government had to please was white people.

Colonial and apartheid planners purposefully built a system that prevented black South Africans from earning, prospering and contributing to the wealth of the country. That sucked the potential for growth out of the economy.

Click animation to view from the start.

Today, geographical patterns of poverty on the map of South Africa still correspond to the apartheid “homelands”, barren rural regions far from cities, packed with people but with little infrastructure, no development and few jobs. Municipalities with high percentages of people living in poverty are today often found in regions that were once homelands.

But when we look at total numbers of people living in poverty, the cities stand out. Cities have larger numbers of people, so more people living in poverty are likely to be found there.

Migration from the rural areas to the cities is an important feature of recent South African history. Apartheid laws confined the poor to the rural areas. Once those laws were lifted in the late 1980s, poor people began to move to the cities – where they often stayed poor. And they keep moving.

How is poverty measured?

People are living there. Children play and adults work in Alexandra township, one of the poorest areas in Gauteng. Alex lies on the border of the wealthy suburb of Sandton, said to be the richest square mile in Africa. (CA Bloem)

Poverty is easy to see, but less easy to define – or to measure across a city, a province or a country. Many measures of poverty use money. If a person lives on less than a certain threshold income they are considered to be living in poverty.

Income is used for the three national poverty lines developed in South Africa. These are the food poverty line (set at R531 per person per month in April 2017), the lower-bound poverty line (R758) and the upper-bound poverty line (R1,138).

Another picture can be painted when we look beyond income to the other ways people experience poverty. How does poverty reveal itself in people’s health, their level of education, the dwelling they live in, how they cook their food, the water they drink? Poverty examined according to different types of deprivation is known as multidimensional poverty.

For its 2016 Community Survey, on which the maps on this page were based, Statistics South Africa used the South African Multidimensional Poverty Index.

Click animation to view from the start.

The index calculates the poverty of households according to four aspects of life: health, education, living standards and economic activity.

These four are known as the dimensions of poverty. Each dimension is assessed according to different indicators.

The poverty indicators

The health dimension has only one indicator: child mortality, or whether a child under the age of five living in the household has died in the past year.

Education has two indicators. One is years of schooling, or whether no person in the household aged 15 or older has completed five years of schooling. The other, school attendance, looks at whether any school-age child seven to 15 years old does not attend school.

Living standards has seven indicators, to do with fuel, water, sanitation, type of dwelling and ownership of assets. What fuel does the household use for lighting, heating and cooking? Is there piped water in the dwelling? Does the household have a flushing toilet? What kind of dwelling does the household live in? What does the household own?

Economic activity is measured by joblessness: whether all the adults, people aged 15 to 64, are out of work.

Each household is scored according to these indicators. If the score is 33.3% or more, the household is living in poverty – they are “multidimensionally poor”.

Intensity of poverty

The score also measures the intensity of poverty.

In the 2016 Community Survey, the average intensity of the poverty experienced by multidimensionally poor people in the nine provinces ranged from 40.1% in the Western Cape to 44.1% in Gauteng.

* Estimate

In Gauteng, only 4.6% of the population live in poverty. But the poverty experienced in Gauteng, the wealthiest province, is the most intense.

The multidimensional poverty index is not intended to replace the other important measures of poverty.

The food poverty line, for example, is the rand value below which people are unable to buy enough food to give them the minimum daily energy requirement for adequate health.

The multidimensional index, Statistics South Africa says, should rather be seen as “a complementary measure to these money-metric measures”.

How do we fight poverty?

According to the World Bank, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. This is not only inequality of income. As the bank said in a report: “Inequality of opportunity, measured by the influence of race, parents’ education, parents’ occupation, place of birth, and gender influence opportunities, is high.”

South Africa’s social welfare system attempts to reduce the worst deprivations of poverty. This “social wage” is paid to the poor in a number of ways.

It includes free primary healthcare, no-fee schools, RDP housing and housing subsidies, free basic water, electricity and sanitation for the poorest households, and social grants.

When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, social protection was introduced as a short-term measure to ease the dire poverty created by apartheid. But social grants are now the only livelihood of many South Africans, and remain essential to reducing poverty.

Sources

• Statistics South Africa Community Survey 2016
• Community Survey 2016: Provinces at a Glance
• The South African Multidimensional Poverty Index
• Statistics South Africa: Poverty Trends in South Africa
• World Bank and Statistics South Africa: Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in South Africa
• South African Social Security Agency: New social grant amounts
• South African Social Security Agency: Statistical reports

Read more

• Animation: Measuring the dimensions of poverty in South Africa
• Infographic: Exploring poverty in South Africa’s provinces
• The provinces and ‘homelands’ of South Africa before 1996
• Map: Distribution of South Africa’s races
• The nine provinces of South Africa
• Infographic: Population density in South Africa’s provinces
• The economies of South Africa’s provinces
• South Africa’s population

Researched, written and designed by Mary Alexander.
Updated 8 July 2025.
Comments? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com

The post Mapping poverty in South Africa appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

In 1990 Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo reunited after three decades apart – the first in prison, the second in exile. (University of the Western Cape Robben Island Mayibuye Museum Archive, courtesy of GCIS)

“Mandela and Tambo” read the brass plate on the door of the attorneys’ shabby offices in downtown Johannesburg. It was late 1952, four years after the National Party victory, and the two young partners of South Africa’s first black-owned law firm were busy.

“Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients,” Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, published in 1994. “We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers.

“For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort. To reach our offices each morning, we had to move through a crowd of people in the hallways, on the stairs, and in our small waiting room.”

Oliver Tambo’s memories presaged Mandela’s. “For years we worked side by side in our offices near the courts,” he wrote in his 1965 introduction to Ruth First’s No Easy Road to Freedom. “To reach our desks each morning, Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting room into the corridors.”

• READ MORE: Nelson Mandela 1918-2013: the timeline of a lifetime

An exhibit at today’s Chancellor House Museum shows the famous 1952 photograph by Jürgen Schadeberg of Nelson Mandela inside the law offices he shared with Oliver Tambo. (Johan Wessels / CC BY SA 2.0)

Tambo and Mandela were highly educated young men, the products of independent missionary schools and the University of Fort Hare. They thought they knew what racial injustice was all about. But their experience of overflowing human misery in their cramped lawyers’ offices opened their eyes to the real suffering of ordinary people.

“Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in white area illegally.” Ernest Cole describes this image from the 1960s in his book House of Bondage. (© Ernest Cole Family Trust / The Hasselblad Foundation)

Tambo wrote: “South Africa has the dubious reputation of boasting one of the highest prison populations in the world.

“Jails are jam-packed with Africans imprisoned for serious offences – and crimes of violence are ever on the increase in apartheid society – but also for petty infringements of statutory law that no really civilised society would punish with imprisonment.

“To be unemployed is a crime … To be landless can be a crime … To brew African beer, to drink it or to use the proceeds to supplement the meagre family income is a crime … To cheek a white man can be a crime. To live in the ‘wrong’ area – an area declared white or Indian or coloured – is a crime for Africans.”

Beginnings

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela and Oliver Reginald Tambo met at Fort Hare in the 1930s.

The institution was renowned for producing leading African intellectuals for more than 40 years until its proud academic standards were gutted by the apartheid government in 1959. Govan Mbeki was a graduate, as was Robert Sobukwe, Dennis Brutus and Can Themba.

Fort Hare was the start of a partnership – as friends, attorneys and comrades – that would last 60 years.

Mandela would become South Africa’s most famous political prisoner and first democratically elected president, while Tambo joined the struggle in exile and served as president of the African National Congress from 1967 to 1991.

The Union Hall and gardens of the University of Fort Hare in 1930. (Wikimedia Commons)

The two had different memories of their first meeting. Mandela, always the sportsman, recalled it being on a football field. Tambo, a studious young man, remembered it as at a campus protest.

On Sundays, Mandela would venture out to teach bible classes at rural villages near Fort Hare.

“One of my comrades on these expeditions was a serious young science scholar whom I had met on the soccer field,” he wrote.

“He came from Pondoland, in the Transkei, and his name was Oliver Tambo. From the start, I saw that Oliver’s intelligence was diamond-edged; he was a keen debater and did not accept the platitudes that so many of us automatically subscribed to … It was easy to see that he was destined for great things.”

In 1965 Tambo wrote: “At the age of l6, Nelson went to Fort Hare and there we first met: in the thick of a student strike.”

Tambo recalled that he and Mandela were “both born in the Transkei, he one year after me. We were students together at Fort Hare University College. With others we had founded the African National Congress Youth League. We went together into the Defiance Campaign of 1952, into general strikes against the government and sat in the same Treason Trial dock.”

The landscape near the village of Qunu in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape. Nelson Mandela was born in Mvezo village, but spent his childhood in Qunu. (Rodger Bosch, Media Club South Africa)

Life in Johannesburg

After Fort Hare, Tambo went on to teach maths at St Peter’s School in Johannesburg. The school was eventually shut by the Nationalist government because, like Fort Hare, it gave its black students a quality education.

“From this school, killed by the government in later years because it refused to bow its head to government-dictated principles of a special education for ‘inferior’ Africans,” Tambo wrote, “graduated successive series of young men drawn inexorably into the African National Congress, because it was the head of our patriotic, national movement for our rights.”

An aerial view of Johannesburg in the late 1940s shows a prosperous young city fed by gold mining. It doesn’t show the daily suffering and indignity of the black labour needed to mine the gold. (SA Ports and Railways Archive, View from Above)

Mandela, meanwhile, fled to Johannesburg from his Transkei home to escape an arranged marriage.

In the city, Tambo wrote, Mandela “had his first encounter with the lot of the urban African in a teeming African township: overcrowding, incessant raids for passes, arrests, poverty, the pinpricks and frustrations of the white rule”.

In Johannesburg both joined the ANC. They became part of a group of young ANC members who increasingly thought the organisation was not taking strong enough action to fight white rule.

The Youth League

Mandela wrote: “Many felt, perhaps unfairly, that the ANC as a whole had become the preserve of a tired, unmilitant, privileged African elite more concerned with protecting their own rights than those of the masses.” They proposed forming a youth league “as a way of lighting a fire under the leadership of the ANC”.

In 1943, a delegation including Mandela, Tambo, Anton Lembede, Peter Mda and Walter Sisulu visited Alfred B Xuma, the head of the ANC.

“At our meeting, we told him that we intended to organise a youth league and a campaign of action designed to mobilise mass support,” Mandela wrote. “We told Dr Xuma that the ANC was in danger of becoming marginalised unless it stirred itself and took up new methods.”

The ANC Youth League was formed in 1944 with Lembede as president and Tambo as secretary. Sisulu became the treasurer and Mandela was part of the executive committee.

The Defiance Campaign

The National Party victory in the white elections of 1948 came as a surprise to many – including Mandela. The stated election manifesto was overtly apartheid: cementing, legislating and extending black repression and white minority rule.

“The victory was a shock,” Mandela wrote. “I was stunned and dismayed, but Oliver took a more considered line. ‘I like this,’ he said. ‘I like this.’ I could not imagine why. He explained, ‘Now we will know exactly who our enemies are and where we stand.’”

The battle lines were drawn. The softer policies of negotiation and compliance with white leadership had achieved nothing. The next year, 1949, there was a jump in ANC membership, which previously had lingered at around 5 000. It began to establish a firm presence in South African society.

In 1952, Mandela and Tambo were key in organising the Defiance Campaign. The ANC joined other anti-apartheid organisations in defiance against the restriction of political, labour and residential rights, during which protesters deliberately violated oppressive laws. The campaign was called off in April 1953 after the apartheid parliament voted in new laws prohibiting protest meetings.

Arrest and exile

In June 1955, the Congress of the People, organised by the ANC and Indian, coloured and white organisations at Kliptown near Johannesburg, adopted the Freedom Charter. This became the fundamental document of the struggle. In the same year, Tambo became secretary-general of the ANC after Sisulu was banned under the Suppression of Communism Act.

In December 1956, Mandela and Tambo were among 156 leaders, key members of the Congress Alliance, arrested and charged with treason. They included almost all of the executive committee of the ANC, as well as the South African Communist Party, the South African Indian Congress, and the Congress of Democrats. A total of 105 Africans, 21 Indians, 23 white and seven coloured leaders were arrested.

The trial was to last until 1961, with the state gradually reducing the number of accused until all charges were eventually dismissed.

In 1958, Tambo became deputy president of the ANC. But in 1959 he was served with a five-year banning order. Tambo was sent abroad by the ANC to mobilise opposition to apartheid. In 1967, he became president of the ANC after the death of Chief Albert Luthuli.

In the year after Tambo’s exile, 1960, came the Sharpeville massacre. The ANC leadership concluded that non-violence was no longer the answer to the struggle against apartheid.

In 1961 the ANC army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), was formed. Mandela was its first leader. MK operations in the 1960s mostly targeted government facilities. Mandela was arrested in 1962, convicted of sabotage, and in 1964 sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.

Endings

“Nelson Mandela is on Robben Island today,” Tambo wrote in 1965.

He added:

His inspiration lives on in the heart of every African patriot. He is the symbol of the self-sacrificing leadership our struggle has thrown up and our people need. He is unrelenting, yet capable of flexibility and delicate judgment.
He is an outstanding individual, but he knows that he derives his strength from the great masses of people, who make up the freedom struggle in our country.

Tambo died in April 1993, a year short of South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. South Africa’s future was still uncertain.

Mandela gave the eulogy at Tambo’s funeral.

“Go well, my brother, and farewell, dear friend,” he said.

He added:

As you instructed, we will bring peace to our tormented land.
As you directed, we will bring freedom to the oppressed and liberation to the oppressor. As you strived, we will restore the dignity of the dehumanised. As you commanded, we will defend the option of a peaceful resolution of our problems. As you prayed, we will respond to the cries of the wretched of the Earth.
In all this, we will not fail you.

Researched and written by Mary Alexander
Updated July 2024

The post Mandela and Tambo: A lifetime as comrades appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

Fossil technician Sipho Makhele deep underground in the darkness of the Sterkfontein Caves near Johannesburg. The caves are part of the Cradle of Humankind, one of South Africa’s 12 Unesco World Heritage Sites. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee)

11 July 2025 • Photos and text by Ihsaan Haffejee

Itumeleng Molefe remembers the day neighbours came rushing into his family’s home in Rustenburg, a town northwest of Johannesburg. His father was famous because they had just seen him on TV, they said. “People were screaming, yelling and celebrating. It was very cool to experience.”

Nkwane Molefe, Molefe’s father, and his colleague Stephen Motsumi had just made one of the greatest discoveries in our bid to understand human origins. Fossil technicians at the Sterkfontein Caves, the pair worked under paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke to unearth the fossil skeleton of an ancient hominin known as Little Foot.

Discovered in the 1990s, it is the most complete hominin fossil yet found, with 90% of the skeleton unearthed. Little Foot was a female Australopithecus who died nearly four million years ago. Her brain was about the size of a chimpanzee’s but she walked upright on the ground, like us.

The Sterkfontein Caves near Johannesburg lie within the Cradle of Humankind, one of South Africa’s 12 Unesco World Heritage Sites. Some of the science’s most important fossils have been discovered there.

Fossil technician Itumeleng Molefe working in the Sterkfontein Caves, as his father did before him. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee)

Today Molefe continues the work of his now-retired father. He too is a fossil technician in the caves, searching for fossils that may help unlock the mysteries of our past.

“Our work is important,” he said. “It helps our understanding and knowledge of the world we live in. The best part of my job is that we are constantly learning, discovering new things.” He added: “You have to have passion for this job to do it well, because it’s not easy.”

Fossil technicians play a vital role in Sterkfontein, doing far more than just extracting rocks. They spend hours painstakingly separating fossil from rock without damaging the fossil. They then cast replicas of the fossils for scientists to study, with the precious originals stored away for safekeeping. They also catalogue the finds, making sure everything is properly labelled and organised.

Fossil technician Abel Molepolle with an undated photo of his father David Molepolle, who joined the Sterkfontein Caves team in 1967. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee)

Many of the fossil technicians have been doing this job for decades, amassing huge knowledge of the caves and their fossils.

Dr Job Kibii, head of the Sterkfontein Caves, said the technicians’ knowledge and experience was an invaluable resource for researchers. “These guys might not have degrees, but they actually know everything. In fact, a number of them have actually taught the professors and researchers who come to the site.

“They show them how to distinguish between different fossils: which are from [non-human] animals, and which are from hominins. And then the professors eventually would go ahead and do the description. But initially they learned from these guys that this is what you should be looking for.”

Fossil technician Abel Molepolle casting a replica of a fossil from the Sterkfontein Caves. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee)

The legacy of colonialism and the skewed power dynamics of race and class have meant that, over the years, the work of fossil technicians – often black and with no formal higher education – has not been recognised. Their important contributions have been relegated to the footnotes of the pages that document their findings.

Technician Andrew Phaswana with fossil casts. Phaswana and his team create moulds from the original fossils and then cast replicas. These are used for scientific study while the precious originals are stored for safekeeping. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee)

‘It is an academic contribution’

Kibii said the scientific community’s lack of recognition had been a disservice to fossil technicians. He is now actively working to educate scientists doing research at the site on the importance of the technicians’ work.

“I want them to be included in the actual publications, in the actual descriptions of those specimens, so they can be recognised with academic contribution,” he said. “Because it is an academic contribution.”

Sipho Makhele excavates in the Sterkfontein Caves’ Silberberg Grotto, close to where the Australopithecus fossil Little Foot was discovered. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee)

“We are not asking for much,” said technician Sipho Makhele. “We are just asking to be acknowledged for the work we do.”

Makhele too has family ties to the site, as the third generation to work in the caves. It may go on to a fourth. “Now my young daughter is also interested and has begun her university studies in anthropology,” he said.

“So, we will keep digging and digging. There’s still plenty to find down there.”

An undated old photo of fossil technicians at the Sterkfontein Caves. Itumeleng Molefe’s’s father, Nkwane Molefe, is second from right. Steven Motsumi is fifth from right. The pair unearthed the famous Australopithecus fossil Little Foot while working under paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke.

Inside the Sterkfontein Caves, where some of the world’s most important human fossils have been discovered. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee)

Originally published by GroundUp on 30 June 2025.
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post The workers who hunt for fossils in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

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English has been spoken in South Africa for more than 200 years, at least since the British military seized the Cape of Good Hope settlement from the Dutch in 1795 to keep the Cape out of the hands of revolutionary France, then a Dutch ally.

Since then South Africa’s everyday English has gradually absorbed many words from African languages.

These influences include Afrikaans, a South African language that grew out of a variety of Dutch spoken in the 1500s. South African English also borrows from African languages such as isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho and Setswana, and the indigenous languages of the Khoesan and Nama people.

Here and there are words imported by people from British, Portuguese and Dutch colonies: India, Mozambique, Malaysia and Indonesia. Later immigrants – people from Greece, Lebanon, Hungary, and European Jewish communities – added new words to local English.

English is the language of public life: government, business and the media. It’s estimated that half of South Africa’s people have a speaking knowledge of the language.

This glossary explains some of the words used when English is spoken in South Africa.

A: aardvark to aweh

aardvark (noun) – African burrowing mammal Orycteropus afer, with a tubular snout and long tongue which it uses to feed on ants and termites. From the Afrikaans aard (earth) and vark (pig).

aardwolf (noun) – African burrowing mammal Proteles cristatus, a member of the hyena family, which feeds mainly on termites. From the Afrikaans aard (earth) and wolf (wolf)

An aardwolf in the Hamerton Zoo in the UK. (Spencer Wright / CC BY 2.0)

abakwetha (noun, plural) – Young Xhosa men being initiated into manhood at initiation school. From the isiXhosa umkwetha, plural abakwetha.

abba (verb) – Carry an infant secured to your back with a blanket. From the Khoesan.

accrual (noun) – South African legal principle whereby a person going through a divorce may, if the value of their property has increased less than that of their spouse, claim at half of the difference in the accumulated value of their joint property.

Africanis (noun) – Indigenous African dog, thought to be related to other landrace dogs such as the dingo. Known for its intelligence, disease resistance and adaptation to its environment, the dog evolved in association with humans, instead of being artificially bred. The name was coined by University of KwaZulu-Natal expert Johan Gallant, from “Africa” and “canis”, the Latin for dog.

Afrikaans (noun) – South African language, developed out of the Dutch spoken in the country since the first Dutch East India Company settlement in the Cape, established in 1652. Afrikaans was considered a dialect of Dutch – known as “Cape Dutch” – until recognised as a language in the late 19th century. From the Dutch for “African”.

Afrikaner (noun) – Afrikaans-speaking South African. From the Dutch Afrikaan (an African).

Afrikaner (noun) – Indigenous South African Bos indicus breed of long-horned beef cattle.

ag (exclamation) – Expression of frustration, outrage, impatience or resignation: “Ag no! I spilled coffee on my keyboard again!”

Amakhosi (noun) – Affectionate term for the Kaizer Chiefs football club. From the isiZulu for “chiefs”.

amakhosi (noun, plural) – Traditional leaders; chiefs (plural). From the isiZulu.

amasi (noun) – Thick curdled milk, also known as maas; similar to yoghurt. A traditional drink, amasi is now produced commercially. From the isiXhosa and isiZulu.

Anglo-Boer War (noun) – War between the British and the Boers, the forebears of today’s Afrikaners, from 1899 to 1902. While strictly the Second Boer War – the first being fought from 1880 to 1881 – it was by far the more significant conflict. Today the Anglo-Boer War is better known as the South African War. This recognises that while the declared war was ostensibly between the British and Boers, other people – Africans and Indians – also took part, and were victims of the conflict.

Anglo-Zulu War (noun) – War between the British and the Zulus, fought in 1879. Most famous for the battle of Isandlwana, in which the British colonial army suffered their greatest single military defeat ever.

apartheid (noun) – Literally “apartness” in Afrikaans, apartheid was the policy of racial segregation implemented by the National Party from 1948 to 1994. It continued British colonial labour exploitation of South Africa’s black majority, and their exclusion from the country’s mainstream economic, educational and social life.

askies (exclamation) – Sorry, excuse me, I apologise. From the Afrikaans “ekskuus” (excuse me).

atchar (noun) – A spicy relish of Indian origin, much like a mix between chutney and a pickle and usually made from green mangoes. From Persian.

aweh (exclamation) – Enthusiastic yes, absolutely.

B: babbelas to bushveld

babbelas (noun) – Hangover. From the isiZulu ibhabhalazi (hangover).

bagel (noun) – Overly groomed materialistic young man, and the male version of a kugel. From the Yiddish word for the pastry.

bakgat (exclamation and adjective) – Fantastic, cool, awesome. From the Afrikaans.

bakkie (noun) – Utility truck, pick-up truck. Diminutive of the Afrikaans bak (container).

Basotho (noun, plural) – The South Sotho people, principally those living in Lesotho. The singular is Mosotho.

Downtown Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. The demonym for the country’s citizens is Basotho. (Stefan Krasowski / CC BY 2.0)

berg (noun) – Mountain. From the Afrikaans.

bergie (noun, derogatory) – Originally referred to homeless people who sheltered in the forests of Cape Town’s Table Mountain. It’s now a derogatory word for homeless people, generally. From the Afrikaans berg (mountain).

big five, the (noun) – Africa’s famous five wildlife species: lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino.

biltong (noun) – Dried and salted meat, similar to beef jerky, although it can be made from ostrich, kudu or any other red meat. The privations of early white colonialism made drying and salting, often with vinegar and spices, an essential means of preserving meat. From the Afrikaans, originally from the Dutch bil (rump) and tong (strip or tongue).

bioscope (noun, dated) – Cinema or movie theatre, originally a word widespread in Commonwealth countries such as South Africa and Australia that, although generally out of use, has survived longer in South Africa because of the influence of the Afrikaans bioskoop.

biscuit (noun) – Both a cookie and a term of affection for a person.

bittereinder (noun) – Bitter-ender or diehard; Boer who refused to surrender and continued to resist after defeat at the end of the Anglo-Boer War.

blesbok (noun) – South African antelope Damaliscus dorcas phillipsi, with a reddish-brown coat and prominent white blaze on the face. From the Afrikaans bles (blaze) and bok (buck).

bliksem (verb and noun) – To beat up, hit or punch – or a mischievous person. From the Afrikaans for “lightning”. See donder.

blooming (adjective and adverb) – Very, extremely, used with irritation: “My laptop’s a blooming mess after I spilled coffee on the keyboard.”

bobotie (noun) – Dish of Malay origin, made with minced meat and spices, and topped with an egg sauce. The recipe arrived in South Africa during the country’s Dutch occupation, via slaves from Dutch East India Company colonies in Jakarta, in today’s Indonesia. From the Indonesian bobotok.

boekenhout (noun) – The Cape beech tree Rapanea melanophloeos, or its wood. From the Afrikaans beuk (beech) and hout (wood).

boep (noun) – Pot belly, paunch; generally associated with the conformation of older – or beer-drinking – men. Shortened form of the Afrikaans boepens (paunch), from the Dutch boeg (bow of ship) and pens (stomach).

boer (noun) – Farmer. From the Afrikaans and Dutch.

Boer (noun) – Member of a nation descended from the Dutch settlers who arrived in South Africa in 1652, with some intermingling with French Huguenots, German immigrants, indigenous people and others. The Boers trekked by oxwagon from the Cape into the South African hinterland, formed short-lived republics, and went on to fight a major war with the British empire, the Anglo-Boer War. Today’s white Afrikaners are the descendants of the Boers. From the Afrikaans and Dutch for “farmer”.

Boer Goat (noun) – Hardy and productive South African goat breed, a cross between indigenous and European goat types. From the Afrikaans boer (farmer).

Boerboel, Boerbul, Boerbul (noun) – Large and powerful South African breed of dog, crossbred from the Mastiff and indigenous breeds such as the Africanis and Ridgeback, originally for farm work. From the Afrikaans boer (farmer) and Dutch bul (Mastiff).

boerewors (noun) – Savoury sausage developed by the Boers, the forebears of today’s Afrikaners, some 200 years ago, and still popular at braais across South Africa. Also known as wors. From the Afrikaans boer (farmer) and wors (sausage, Dutch worst).

Boerperd (noun) – South African horse breed, the product of cross-breeding indigenous horses with breeds introduced by early European settlers. From the Afrikaans boer (farmer) and perd (horse).

boet (noun) – Term of affection, from the Afrikaans for “brother”.

bok (noun) – Buck. From the Afrikaans.

bokkom, bokkem (noun) – South African salted fish hung on an outdoor rack for wind-drying – a kind of fish biltong. From the Dutch bokking, bokkem (smoked herring).

Bokkom for sale in a Western Cape farm shop. (Andy Carter / CC BY 2.0)

boma (noun) – In South Africa, an open thatched structure used for dinners, entertainment and parties. Originally a form of log fortification used to keep livestock in or enemies out. The word is used across Africa and is of uncertain origin.

bonsella (noun) – Bonus, surprise gift, something extra, or bribe. From the isiZulu bansela (offer a gift in gratitude).

Bonsmara (noun) – South African breed of beef cattle, cross-bred for both hardiness in local conditions and high production from Shorthorn, Hereford and indigenous Afrikaner cattle. The name comes from Professor Jan Bonsma, who developed the breed, and the Mara research station where it was first produced.

bontebok (noun) – African antelope (Damaliscus dorcas dorcas) with a white-and-brown hide, related to the blesbok. From the Afrikaans bont (pied) and bok (buck).

boom (noun) – Marijuana, dagga. From the Afrikaans for “tree”.

bosberaad (noun) – Strategy meeting or conference, usually held in a remote bushveld location such as a game farm. From the Afrikaans bos (bush) and raad (council).

brah (noun) – Brother, friend, mate. Shortening of “brother”.

braai (noun) – Meat cooked outside; equivalent of barbeque. From the Afrikaans for “roast”.

bredie (noun) – Originally mutton stew, introduced by Malay slaves brought to South Africa by the Dutch East India Company. It now refers to any kind of stew. Tomato bredie – stewed tomato and onions served with pap at a braai – is a favourite. From the Afrikaans, originally perhaps from the Portuguese bredo.

broekie lace (noun) – Ornate wooden or metal fretwork found on the verandahs of Victorian and Edwardian houses, mainly in the Western Cape. “Broekie” is Afrikaans for panties.

bru (noun) – Term of affection, shortened from Afrikaans and Dutch broer, meaning “brother”.

Buccaneers (noun) – Affectionate term for the Orlando Pirates football team. From the historical word for “pirate”.

bunny chow (noun) – Curry served in a hollowed-out half-loaf of bread, with the hollowed-out piece of bread placed on top. The dish originated in Durban’s immigrant Indian community, who arrived in what was then the colony of Natal from 1860 onwards.
It is believed that bunny chow was a convenient food on the go for Indian labourers working in the colony’s sugarcane plantations.
“Chow” is a South African informal for food, perhaps from “chow-chow”, a relish that gets its name from the French chou (cabbage). The origin of “bunny” in bunny chow is, according to one theory, that the meal was first sold at a Durban restaurant run by Banias, an Indian caste. Also see “kota“.

Bushman (noun) – Member of a population group indigenous to southern Africa, with a far deeper history than any other settlers in the region. Bushmen are also known as San. There is some debate on the political correctness of the use of “San” versus “Bushman”.

bushveld (noun) – South Africa’s tropical savannah ecoregion, a terrain of thick scrubby trees and bush in dense thickets, with grassy ground cover between. From the Afrikaans bos (bush) and veld (field).

C: café to cousin

café, caffee (noun) – Convenience store, similar to a bodega. See spaza shop.

A Casspir armoured vehicle on display at Ysterplaat Air Force Base in Cape Town. (Bob Adams / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Casspir (noun) – South African armoured vehicle, infamously deployed in townships during the anti-apartheid uprisings of the 1980s. Originally designed as a landmine-proof vehicle for use in South Africa’s border war with Angola, in the same era. Casspir is an anagram of SAP and CSIR: the customer was the South African Police (SAP), and the developer the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

chakalaka (noun) – a spicy vegetable dish traditionally served as a sauce or relish with bread, pap, samp, stews or curries

check you (exclamation) – Goodbye, see you later.

china (noun) – Friend, mate. From the Cockney rhyming slang “china plate” = “mate”.

chiskop, chizkop, cheesekop, kaaskop (noun) – Bald person, particularly one with a shaved head. Kop is Afrikaans for head; the origin of the chis part is unclear. Otherwise known as kaaskop; kaas is Afrikaans for “cheese”.

chommie (noun) – Friend, mate. From the UK English chum, with the Afrikaans diminutive “ie”.

chop (noun) – Fool, idiot; often used affectionately.

Clever Boys, the (noun) – Affectionate term for the University of the Witwatersrand football club, Wits FC.

cooldrink, colddrink (noun) – Sweet fizzy drink such as Coca-Cola.

cousin, cuzzy (noun) – Friend, mate.

D: dagga to dwaal

dagga (noun) – Marijuana. From the Khoesan dachab.

dagha (noun) – Building mortar or plaster traditionally made with mud mixed with cow-dung and blood. Today it also refers to regular cement mortar and plaster. From the isiZulu and isiXhosa udaka (clay, mud).

dassie (noun) – Rock hyrax or Cape hyrax (Procavia capensis), a small herbivore that lives in mountainous habitats. From the Afrikaans das (badger).

deurmekaar (adjective) – Confused, disorganised or stupid, from the Afrikaans word of the same meaning.

dinges (noun) – Thing, thingamabob, whatzit, whatchamacallit, whatsizname or person with a forgotten name: “When is dinges coming around?” From the Afrikaans and Dutch ding (thing).

An unnamed man is photographed with his dompas in 1985. (UN Photo / CC BY-NC-ND)

doek (noun) – Woman’s head scarf. From the Afrikaans.

dolos (noun) – Blocks of concrete in an H-shape, with one arm rotated through 90º. The dolos is a South African invention, with the interlocking blocks piled together to protect harbour seawalls and preserve beaches from erosion. The word comes from the Afrikaans for the knuckle bones in a sheep’s leg. The plural is dolosse.

dompas (noun) – Passbook black South Africans were required by law to carry at all times in “white” urban areas during the apartheid era. From the Afrikaans dom (dumb, stupid) and pas (pass).

donga (noun) – Ditch or deep fissure caused by severe soil erosion. From the isiZulu and isiXhosa udonga.

donner (verb) – Hit, beat up. From the Afrikaans donder (thunder). See bliksem.

dop (noun and verb) – Small tot of alcoholic drink. Also failure: “I dopped the test.” From the Afrikaans.

dorp (noun) – Small rural town. From the Afrikaans and Dutch dorp (village).

droë wors (noun) – Dried boerewors, similar to biltong. From the Afrikaans droe (dry) and wors (sausage).

Durbs (noun) – The city of Durban.

dwaal (noun and verb) – Lack of concentration or focus: “Sorry, I was in a bit of a dwaal. Could you repeat that?” Or, as a verb: “I was dwaaling down the street, going nowhere.” From the Afrikaans for err, wander or roam.

E: Egoli to ekasi

Egoli (noun) – Johannesburg, and the title of a local soap opera set in the city. From the isiXhosa and isiZulu for “place of gold”; Johannesburg is historically South Africa’s primary gold-producing area, and the country’s richest city.

eina (exclamation and adjective) – Ouch! or Ow! Can also mean “sore”. Example (exclamation): “Eina! I just cut my finger.” Example (adjective): “That cut was eina.” From the Khoesan /é + //náu.

eish (exclamation) – Expression of surprise, wonder, frustration or outrage. Example: “Eish! That cut was eina!” From the isiXhosa and isiZulu.

ekasi See kasie

F: Fanagolo to fynbos

Black, white and Chinese labourers in a South African gold mine some time between 1890 and 1923. The pidgin language Fanakolo developed to allow communication between the many different people brought to work on the mines. (Carpenter Collection, US Library of Congress)

Fanagolo, Fanakolo (noun) – Pidgin language that grew up mainly on South Africa’s gold mines to allow communication between white supervisors and African labourers during the colonial and apartheid era. It combines elements of the Nguni languages, English, and Afrikaans. From the Nguni fana ka lo, from fana (be like) and the possessive suffix -ka + lo (this).

fixed up (exclamation) – That’s good, yes, sorted. Example: “Let’s meet at the restaurant.” The reply: “Fixed up.”

flog (verb) – Sell. “I’ve had enough of this laptop. I think it’s time I flogged it.”

for sure, sure, sure-sure (exclamation) – Yes; general affirmative.

frikkadel (noun) – Meatball or rissole. From the Afrikaans, originally from the French fricandeau (fried sliced meat served with sauce).

fundi (noun) – Expert. From the Nguni umfundisi (teacher, preacher).

fynbos (noun) – “Fine bush” in Afrikaans, fynbos is a vegetation type unique to the Cape Floral Region – a Unesco World Heritage Site – made up of some 6 000 plant species, including many types of protea.

G: gatvol to Griqualand

gatvol (adjective) – Fed up. From the Afrikaans.

gemsbok (noun) – Large African antelope (Oryx gazella) with long, straight horns. From the Afrikaans gems (chamois, a European goat-antelope) and bok (buck).

gogga, goggo (noun) – Insect, bug. From the Khoikhoi xo-xon.

A gogga. (Pimthida / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

gogo (noun) – Grandmother or elderly woman. From the isiZulu.

gramadoelas (noun) – Wild or remote country. From the Afrikaans, perhaps originally from the isiXhosa and isiZulu induli (hillock).

grand apartheid (noun) – The most systematic and rigid implementation of apartheid, such as the creation of the “homelands” under the policy of “separate development”, during the 1960s and 1970s.

graze (verb) – Eat.

Griqua (noun, plural and singular) – South African population group, or a member of that group, descended from a mix of early (from 1652) European blood with that of the indigenous Khokhoi, San and Tswana. They generally speak Afrikaans, and have their own church, the Protestant Griqua Church. “Griqua” is a Nama word.

Griqualand (noun) – Two South African regions historically occupied by the Griqua. Griqualand East, on the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal frontier, was settled by Adam Kok III and over 2 000 Griquas after a trek across the Drakensberg mountains in 1861. Today the region is centred around the town of Kokstad (Kok’s city). Griqualand West is the area around Kimberley, the capital of the Northern Cape. “Griqua” is a Nama word.

H: hamerkop to howzit

Howzit Kitty! (JD Hancock / CC BY 2.0)

hamerkop (noun) – South African marsh bird (Scopus umbretta), related to the storks, with a prominent crest on the head. From the Afrikaans hamer (hammer) and kop (head).

Hanepoot (noun) – Sweet wine made from the muscat blanc d’Alexandrie grape cultivar, and an alternate name for this cultivar.

hang of a (adjective) – Very or big, as in: “It’s hang of a difficult” or “I had a hang of a problem”.

hey (exclamation) – Expression that can be used as a standalone question meaning “pardon?” or “what?” – “Hey? What did you say?” Or it can be used to prompt affirmation or agreement, as in “It was a great film, hey?”

homelands (noun) – The spurious “independent” states in which black South Africans were forced to take citizenship under the policy of apartheid. Also known as bantustans.

howzit (exclamation) – Common South African greeting that translates roughly as “How are you?”, “How are things?” or just “Hello”. From “How is it?”

I: imbizo to isiZulu

imbizo (noun) – Gathering called by a traditional leader, or any meeting or workshop. From the isiZulu biza (call, summon)

imbongi (noun) – Traditional praise singer. From the isiXhosa and isiZulu.

indaba (noun) – Conference or expo. From the isiZulu and isiXhosa for “matter” or “discussion”.

inyanga (noun) – Traditional herbalist and healer. From the Nguni.

is it (exclamation) – Is that so?

Iscamtho, isiCamtho (noun) – Tsotsitaal (gangster language), a widely-spoken township patois made up of an amalgam of words from isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and some English. From the isiZulu camto (speak).

isiNdebele (noun) – Nguni language of the Ndebele people.

isiXhosa (noun) – Nguni language of the Xhosa people.

isiZulu (noun) – Nguni language of the Zulu people.

J: ja to just now

Johannesburg, a city also known as Joeys, Jozi and Egoli. (South African Tourism / CC BY 2.0)

ja (exclamation) – Yes. From the Afrikaans.

jawelnofine (exclamation) – Literally, “yes (ja in Afrikaans), well, no, fine”, all in a single word. An expression of resignation or puzzlement similar to “How about that?”

jislaaik (exclamation) – Expression of outrage, surprise or consternation: “Jislaaik, I spilled coffee on my laptop!” From the Afrikaans.

Joburg (noun) – Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city. Once informal, it is now used on the City of Johannesburg logo.

Joeys (noun) – Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city

jol (noun, verb and adjective) – Celebration, fun, party (noun); celebrate, have fun, party, dance and drink (verb). A person who does these things is a joller. From the Afrikaans for “dance” or “party”; perhaps related to “jolly”. Occasionally spelled “jawl” or “jorl”.

Jozi (noun) – Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city

just now (adverb) – Soonish, not immediately.

K: kaaskop to kwela-kwela

kaaskop, chiskop, chizkop, cheesekop (noun) – Bald person, or person with a shaved head. “Kop” is Afrikaans for head. “Kaas” is the Afrikaans for cheese. Why “cheese head” means bald person is not clear.

kasie (noun) – Shortened form of the Afrikaans lokasie (location), the older word for township – the low-income dormitory suburbs outside cities and towns to which black South Africans were confined during the apartheid era.

Kasie street scene. (Jason Sayer / CC BY-ND 2.0)

khaya (noun) – Home. From the Nguni group of languages.

Khoekhoe (noun) – Standardised spelling of “Khoikhoi” in the Khoekhoe Nama languages.

Khoikhoi [also Quena] (noun) – Indigenous Khoesan people living in southwestern South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, including the Nama, and their languages. From the Nama for “people people” or “real people”.

Khoisan (noun) – Collective term for the Khoi and San people of South Africa. Also Khoesan.

kiepersol (noun) – Cabbage tree. From the Afrikaans, originally perhaps from the obsolete Indian English kittisol (parasol). The tree has some resemblance to an umbrella.

kif (adjective) – Cool, good, enjoyable. From the Arabic kayf (enjoyment, wellbeing).

kikoi (noun) – Patterned cotton cloth. From the Kiswahili.

Kiswahili (noun) – Swahili, the language.

knobkierie (noun) – Fighting stick with a knob on the business end. From the Afrikaans knop (knob) and the Khoesan kirri or keeri, (stick).

koeksuster (noun) – Also spelled koeksister. Traditional Malay and Afrikaner sweet, made from twisted yeast dough, deep fried and dipped in syrup. The right-wing enclave of Orania in the Northern Cape even has its own statue to the koeksister. The word comes from the Dutch koek (cake) and sissen (to sizzle).

koki (noun) – Coloured marker or felt-tip pen. From a local brand name.

kombi (noun) – Minibus taxi. From the Volkswagen proprietary name Kombi, from the German Kombiwagen. Volkswagen minibuses were the first used in the initial stages of South Africa’s minibus taxi transport revolution of the early 1980s, although today other vehicle makes are used.

konfyt (noun) – Sweet fruit preserve. From the Afrikaans, originally from the Dutch konfit.

koppie (noun) – Small hill. From the Afrikaans.

korhaan (noun) – Group of species of long-legged African bird (genus Eupodotis) found in open country. From the Dutch korhaan (black male grouse), from korren (too coo) and haan (cock).

A korhaan in the Kruger National Park. (Bernard Dupont / CC BY SA 2.0)

kota (noun) – A quarter loaf of bread hollowed out and filled with combinations of atchar, polony (Bologna), Russian sausages, slap chips, cheese, eggs, chilli sauce and more. A street food variant of the more suburban bunny chow. From the English “quarter”.

kraal (noun) – Enclosure for livestock, or a rural village of huts surrounded by a stockade. The word may come from the Portuguese curral (corral), or from the Dutch kraal (bead), as in the beads of a necklace – kraals are generally round in shape.

krans (noun) – Cliff; overhanging wall of rock. From the Afrikaans.

kudu (noun) – Large African antelope (Tragelaphus strepsiceros and Tragelaphus imberbis). From the Afrikaans koedoe, originally from the isiXhosa i-qudu.

kwaito (noun) – Music of South Africa’s urban black youth, which first emerged in the 1990s. Kwaito is a mixture of South African disco, hip hop, R&B, ragga, and a heavy dose of house music beats. From the Tsotsitaal or township informal amakwaitosi (gangster).

kwela (noun) – Popular form of township music from the 1950s, based on the pennywhistle – a cheap and simple instrument used by street performers. The term kwela comes from the isiZulu for “get up” or “climb on”, also township slang for police vans, the kwela-kwela. It is said that the young men who played the pennywhistle on street corners also acted as lookouts to warn those drinking in illegal shebeens of the arrival of the cops.

kwela-kwela (noun) – Police van, or minibus taxi. From the isiXhosa and isiZulu for “climb on”.

L: laatlammetjie to loerie

Central Johannesburg at night, without loadshedding. (Pascal Parent / CC BY NC-ND)

laatlammetjie (noun) – Youngest child of a family, born to older parents and much younger than their siblings. The word means “late lamb” in Afrikaans.

laduma! (exclamation) – A yell to celebrate a goal scored in a football match, from the isiZulu for “it thunders”.

lapa (noun) – Open-sided enclosure, usually roofed with thatch, used as an outdoor entertainment area. From the Sesotho for “homestead” or “courtyard”.

lappie (noun) – Cleaning cloth. From the Afrikaans, originally from the Dutch for “rag” or “cloth”.

lekgotla (noun) – Planning or strategy session. From the Setswana for “meeting” or “meeting place”.

lekker (adjective and adverb) – Nice, good, great, cool or tasty. From the Afrikaans.

load-shedding (noun) – Planned electricity blackout in a specific area, to relieve pressure on South Africa’s national power grid.

location (noun) – South African township; lokasie or kasie in Afrikaans.

loerie (noun) – Number of species of large fruit-eating African bird (genus Tauraco and others). From the Afrikaans, originally from the Malay luri (parrot).

loskop (noun) – A ditz, a scatterbrain. Afrikaans for “loose head” or “lost head”.

M: maas to Mzansi

maas, amasi (noun) – Thick curdled milk, similar to yoghurt. Maas is both made at home and can be bought ready-made. From the isiXhosa and isiZulu.

Madiba (noun) – Affectionate name for Nelson Mandela, and the name of his clan.

madumbe (noun) – South African potato-like tuber (Colocasia esculenta and Colocasia antiquorum), cultivated mostly in KwaZulu-Natal, greyish in colour and rather tasty. From the isiZulu amadumbe.

makarapa (noun) – A plastic miner’s helmet cut, moulded and painted to make headgear worn by fans at football matches. From isiXhosa.

mal (adjective) – Mad. from the Afrikaans.

mama (noun) – An affectionate or polite name for older women.

mamba (noun) – Species of large and venomous African snake – the black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis), the green mamba (Dendroaspis angustipecs), and other species. From the isiZulu imamba.

mampara (noun) – An idiot; a stupid or silly person. The Sunday Times newspaper shames wrongdoers in public life with its Mampara of the Week award. From Fanagolo.

mampoer (noun) – Strong brandy made from peaches or other fruit, similar to moonshine. An Afrikaans word with uncertain etymology; perhaps from the Pedi chief Mampuru. See witblitz.

A mampoer still in the town of Groot Marico, North West province. (South African Tourism / CC BY 2.0)

marula, maroela (noun) – South African woodland tree (Sclerocarya birrea caffra) with sweet yellow fruit. The fruit is now used in a locally produced commercial liqueur marketed as Amarula. From the Sesotho morula.

Matabele (noun) – Nguni-language-speaking people of Zimbabwe, and the majority population group in that country.

mbube (noun) – Style of South African township music developed in the 1940s by Zulu migrants to urban areas. The first example of the style was the song Mbube by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds. The song was copied as Wimoweh by Pete Seeger in 1952, and as The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens in 1961. It also featured in Disney’s hit animated film The Lion King. Solomon Linda died in 1962 with less than R100 in his bank account. His family couldn’t afford a headstone for his grave. The song is said to have generated some US$15-million in royalties. Linda’s descendants were only compensated for seven decades of copyright infringement in 2007, for an undisclosed amount. “Mbube” is isiZulu for “lion”.

mealie (noun) – Maize or corn. A mealie is a maize cob, and mealie meal is maize meal, mostly cooked into pap, South Africa’s staple food. From the Afrikaans mielie.

melktert (noun) – “Milk tart”, a traditional Afrikaner dessert. From the Afrikaans.

MK (noun) – Abbreviation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the African National Congress army in exile.

mlungu (noun) – White person. From the Nguni. The plural is abelungu.

moegoe (noun) – Fool, buffoon, idiot or simpleton. From Afrikaans and Tsotsitaal.

moer (verb) – Hit, punch, beat up. From the Afrikaans “murder”.

mokoro (noun) – Dugout canoe used in Botswana.

mopani, mopane (noun) – South African tree of the northern bushveld, Colophospermun mopane, and the bioregion associated with the tree.

mopani worm (noun) – Moth caterpillar that feeds on the leaves of the mopani tree. Fried, the caterpillar is also a traditional dish.

morogo (noun) – Spinach; more specifically African spinach. From the Setswana and Sesotho “wild spinach” or “vegetables”.

Mosotho (noun) – A South Sotho person. The plural is Basotho.

mossie (noun) – Cape sparrow or house sparrow, but sometimes used to refer to any small undistinguished wild bird. From the Afrikaans, originally from the Dutch mosje, a diminutive of mos (sparrow).

mozzie (noun) – mosquito.

muti, muthi (noun) – Medicine, typically indigenous African medicine, from the isiZulu umuthi.

Mzansi (noun) – South Africa. From the isiXhosa for “south”.

N: naartjie to now-now

An Nguni cow showing the breed’s distinctive patterned hide, on a beach in Morgan’s Bay on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape. (GarethPhoto / CC BY NC-ND 2.0)

naartjie (noun) – Tangerine (Citrus reticulata). From the Afrikaans, originally from the Tamil nārattai.

Nama, Namaqua, Namaqualander (noun) – Khoikhoi people of South Africa’s Northern Cape province and southwest Namibia, one of those people, and the language they speak. From the Nama word for themselves.

Namaqualand (noun) – Arid region of South Africa’s Northern Cape province and southwestern Namibia, inhabited largely by the Nama people and known for its annual explosion of desert flowers.

Namaqualand daisy (noun) – South African daisy Dimorphotheca sinuate, with bright yellow, orange or white flowers, which once a year carpets the arid northwest region of Namaqualand with colour.

Ndebele (noun) – Two groups on Nguni people, one found in southwest Zimbabwe and the other in northeast South Africa, or a member of one of these groups. Their language is isiNdebele.

nê (exclamation) – “Really?”, “Oh yeah?” or “Is that so?”. Used sarcastically or as an invitation to agreement, similar to “yes?”, as in: “This is a lekker kota, nê?” From the Afrikaans.

Nguni (noun) – Breed of indigenous South African long-horned cattle (Bos indicus) long associated with the Zulu and Xhosa people, with beautiful and varied black, brown, white and tan patterns on their hide.

Nguni (noun) – Wide and diverse group of people who speak Bantu languages, or one of these languages, living mainly in southern Africa. Nguni peoples include the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi (also known as Swati), with the corresponding languages of isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele and siSwati.

Nkone (noun) – Breed of indigenous long-horned Zebu (Bos indicus) beef cattle, with a piebald hide.

now-now (adverb) – Shortly, in a bit: “I’ll be there now-now.”

O: oke to oribi

oke, ou (noun) – Man, similar to guy or bloke. The word ou can be used interchangeably. From the Afrikaans ou (old).

ola (exclamation) – Hello, greetings, how are you.

oribi (noun) – Small African antelope (Ourebia ourebi) with a reddish tan back and white underparts.

P: pap to protea

pap (noun) – Porridge made from mealie meal (maize meal) cooked with water and salt to a fairly stiff consistency – “stywepap” being the stiffest. The staple food of South Africa. “Pap” can also mean weak or tired. From the Afrikaans.

papsak (noun) – Cheap box wine sold in its foil container, without the box. From the Afrikaans pap (soft) and sak (sack).

pasop (verb) – Beware or watch out. From the Afrikaans.

Perlé (noun) – Semi-sweet, slightly sparkly and somewhat cheap South African wine. From the German Perlwein (slightly sparkling wine).

The flat land of the platteland. A misty road in the Karoo. (Johann Barnard / CC BY NC-ND 2.0)

perlemoen (noun) – Abalone (Haliotis midae), a large shellfish much like a giant mussel. A delicacy, perlemoen fetch a high price internationally, putting the species under constant threat from poachers.From the Middle Dutch perlemoeder, mother of pearl: perl means pearl, moeder means mother.

phuza (noun) – Alcohol, liquor. “Phuza face” describes a person with a face puffy and bloated from drinking. From the isiXhosa and isiZulu, “drink”.

piet-my-vrou (noun) – The red-chested cuckoo (Cuculus solitarus). The name, mimicking the bird’s call, means “Peter my wife” in Afrikaans.

platteland (noun) – Farmland, countryside. Literally “flat land” in Afrikaans (plat means flat), it now refers to any rural area in which agriculture takes place.

potjie (noun) – Rounded and three-legged cast-iron pot, with a lid, used for cooking stew over an open fire. From the Afrikaans diminutive for “pot”.

potjiekos (noun) – Food – mostly long-stewed meat and vegetables – cooked in a potjie. A potjie, in Afrikaans, is a three-legged cast-iron pot used for cooking over an open fire; kos is Afrikaans for “food”.

protea (noun) – Group of South African fynbos plant species (genus Protea) with distinctive cone-like flower heads. The king protea is the country’s national flower.

Q: quagga to quiver tree

quagga (noun) – Extinct South African zebra (Equus quagga), with stripes only on its forequarters and a reddish-brown hide behind its stripes, native to South Africa’s Cape provinces. The species was indiscriminately hunted in the colonial era, until its last living specimen died at the Amsterdam zoo on 12 August 1883.

Quena (noun) – Khoikhoi

quiver tree (noun) – Tree-like aloe plant (Aloe dichotoma), mostly found in the desert regions of Namibia and South Africa’s Northern Cape province. The plant’s branches were used by the San Bushmen to make quivers for their arrows.

R: rand to rooinek

Red ants remove people’s belongings during a mass eviction at Fatti Mansions in Hillbrow, Johannesburg in July 2017. (YouTube)

rand (noun) – South Africa’s currency, made up of 100 cents. The name comes from the Witwatersrand (Dutch for “white waters ridge”), the region in Gauteng province in which most of the country’s gold deposits are found.

ratel (noun) – Honey badger, (Mellivora capensis). Found throughout Africa, as well as in the Middle East and Asia, the ratel is one of the world’s smallest but fiercest carnivores. The animal has been classed the world’s most fearless animal for many years. “Ratel” is also the name given to the basic infantry fighting vehicle of the South African military’s mechanised infantry battalions.

red ants (noun) – Security forces used by the Johannesburg city council to evict people from shacks, flats and other dwellings. The name comes from the red overalls they wear.

Ridgeback (noun) – Formerly Rhodesian Ridgeback, a breed of southern African dog developed from a mix indigenous dogs such as the Africanis and sturdy working European breeds. The Ridgeback has short reddish fur, rising to a distinctive ridge on its back.

robot (noun) – Traffic lights.

rock up (verb) – Arrive somewhere, often unannounced or uninvited. Example: “I was going to go out but then my china rocked up.”

rooibos (noun) – Afrikaans for “red bush”, this popular South African tea made from the Cyclopia genistoides bush is gaining worldwide popularity for its health benefits.

rooinek (noun) – English-speaking white South African, from the Afrikaans for “red neck”. It was first coined by Afrikaners to refer to immigrants from England, whose white necks were particularly prone to sunburn. See soutpiel.

S: samoosa to Swazi

samoosa (noun) – Small, spicy, triangular-shaped savoury pie deep-fried in oil, introduced to South Africa by the Indian and Malay communities. In the UK they are called “samosas”. From the Persian and Urdu.

San (noun) – Southern African Bushmen, a member of that group, or their language. From the Nama sān (meaning “aboriginals”, “settlers” or gatherers). There is some debate on the use of “San” versus “Bushman”.

sangoma (noun) – Traditional healer or diviner. From the isiZulu isangoma.

sarmie (noun) – Sandwich.

scale, scaly (verb and adjective) – To scale something means to steal it. A scaly person is not to be trusted.

separate development (noun) – Grand apartheid euphemism for segregation and the “homelands” policy. The argument was that the different races, separated in a single country, would be allowed to develop according to their own ability and culture. The reality was gross exploitation and poverty for black South Africans, and undeserved and unbalanced prosperity for the country’s white people.

Sepedi (noun) – Another name for Sesotho sa Leboa, the Northern Sotho language of the Basotho people.

Sesotho (noun) – Southern Sotho language of the Basotho people.

Sesotho sa Leboa (noun) – Northern Sotho (literally “Sotho of the north”) language of the Basotho people. Identified in Founding Provisions of the South African Constitution, which deals in part with language rights, as “Sepedi”.

Setswana (noun) – Bantu language of the Tswana people.

shame (exclamation) – Broadly denotes sympathetic feeling or pleasure. Someone admiring a baby, kitten or puppy might say: “Ag shame!” to emphasise its cuteness. Also used to express sympathy. As writer Jacob Dlamini says: “Only in South Africa would people use the word shame when a baby is born (“Shame, what a beautiful baby!”); when that baby falls and hurts itself (“Shame, poor thing!”) and when that baby dies (“Ag shame, what a shame!”). To us, shame is just one of those words that have become something of an omnibus. We use it to mean whatever we want it to mean.”

sharp (exclamation) – Often doubled up for effect as “sharp-sharp!”, the word is used as a greeting, a farewell, for agreement or just to express enthusiasm.

shebeen (noun) – Township tavern, illegal under the apartheid regime, often set up in a private house. Similar to a US prohibition-era speakeasy. From the 18th-century Anglo-Irish síbín, from séibe, “mugful”.

Shona (noun) – A member of a Bantu-language-speaking group of people found in northern parts of South Africa, but mostly in southern Zimbabwe, and their language.

Songololo. (Marco Zanferrari / CC BY SA 2.0)

shongololo, songololo (noun) – Large brown millipede, from the isiXhosa and isiZulu ukushonga (to roll up).

shot (noun) – Good, yes, it’s been done.

shweet (noun) – Good, yes.

siSwati (noun) – Nguni language of the Swazi people.

sjambok (noun and verb) – Stout leather whip made from animal hide. As verb, to hit someone or something with the whip. From the Dutch tjambok, from the Urdu chābuk.

skelm (noun and adverb) – Shifty or untrustworthy person; a criminal. As an adverb, to do something on the sly. From the Afrikaans, from the Dutch schelm.

skinner (noun and verb) – Gossip, to gossip. A person who gossips is known as a skinnerbek (gossip mouth). From the Afrikaans.

skollie (noun) – Gangster, criminal, from the Greek skolios, crooked.

skop, skiet en donner (noun) – Action movie. Taken from Afrikaans, it literally means “kick, shoot and beat up”.

skrik (noun) – Fright: “I caught a big skrik” means “I got a big fright”. From the Afrikaans.

skrik vir niks (adjective) – Scared of nothing. From the Afrikaans.

slap chips chips) (noun) – French fries, usually soft, oily and vinegar-drenched. Slap is Afrikaans for “limp”.

smokes (noun) – Cigarettes.

snoek (noun) – A fish (Thyrsites atun) of the southern oceans. From the Afrikaans.

snotsiekte (noun) – Malignant catarrhal fever, a disease to which wildebeest are prone, characterised by excessive production of nasal mucous, or snot. From the Afrikaans snot (snot) and siekte (sickness).

sosatie (noun) – Kebab on a stick. Afrikaans, from the South African Dutch sasaattje, from the Javanese sesate. Java, like the Cape, was a Dutch East India Company colony.

Sotho (noun) – Member of a group of people living mainly in Lesotho, Botswana and the northern parts of South Africa, and their languages.

South African War (noun) – Modern term for the Anglo-Boer War of 1880 to 1881, to more accurately reflect that while the named combatants were the British and Boers, other communities – such as Africans and Indians – also took part.

soutpiel (noun) – English-speaking white South African, literally “salty penis” in Afrikaans. The idea is the soutpiel has one foot in South Africa, the other in England, with the penis dipped in the ocean between. See rooinek.

Soweto (noun) – South Africa’s largest township, in the south of the City of Johannesburg municipality. From the abbreviation of South Western Townships.

Base jumping off the Orlando Towers in Soweto. (Annette Lyn O’Neil / CC BY NC-ND)

spanspek (noun) – Cantaloupe, an orange-fleshed melon. The word comes from the Afrikaans Spaanse spek, meaning “Spanish bacon”. The story goes that Juana Smith, the Spanish wife of 19th-century Cape governor Harry Smith, ate melon instead of bacon for breakfast, and her Afrikaans-speaking servants coined the word.

spaza shop (noun) – Convenience store, similar to a bodega. From slang for “camouflaged”. See cafe.

spookgerook (adjective) – Literally, in Afrikaans, ghost-smoked – mad, paranoid or high.

springbok (noun) – South African gazelle Antidorcas marsupialis, known for leaping in the air (“pronking”) when disturbed, under predator attack or as display. The springbok is South Africa’s national animal. From the Afrikaans spring (jump or spring) and bok (buck).

Springboks (noun) – South African national rugby team, known affectionately as the Bokke. From the springbok, South Africa’s national animal.

stoep (noun) – Porch or verandah. From the Dutch (via Afrikaans) stoep, steps or a raised elevation in front of a house, related to “step”.

stokvel (noun) – Informal savings club, where members make a regular equal payment very week, fortnight or month. Every month or year a single member is then given the entire pot.

stompie (noun) – Cigarette butt. From the Afrikaans stomp (stump). The term “picking up stompies” means intruding into a conversation towards its end, without knowing what had been discussed.

stroppy (adjective) – Difficult, uncooperative, argumentative or stubborn. Originated in the 1950s, perhaps as a shortening of obstreperous.

struesbob (exclamation) – “As true as Bob”, as true as God, the gospel truth.

sure, sure-sure, for sure (exclamation) – Yes; general affirmative.

Swallows (noun) – Moroka Swallows, a South African Premier Soccer League football team with a home base in the Soweto suburb of Moroka.

Swazi, siSwati (noun) – The Swazi people, and their language.

T: takkie to tune

takkie, tekkie (noun) – Basic running shoe or sneaker. Possibly from “tacky”, meaning “cheap” or “of poor quality”.

tannie (noun) – “Auntie” in Afrikaans, but used for any older woman.

The long morning wait for a ride in a taxi. (Rafiq Sarlie / CC BY ND 2.0)

taxi (noun) – Generally a minibus used to transport a large number of people, and the most-used form of transport in South Africa.

to die for (adjective) – Wonderful, beautiful, coveted: “That lipstick is to die for.”

tokoloshe (noun) – Evil imp or spirit, thought to be most active at night. Part of South African folklore and today often the subject of tabloid journalism. From the isiZulu utokoloshe and isiXhosa uthikoloshe (river-spirit).

tom (noun) – Money. Uncertain origin.

toppie (noun) – Middle-aged or elderly man, or father. From either the isiZulu thopi (growing sparsely, a reference to thinning hair), or the Hindi topi (hat).

township (noun) – Low-income dormitory suburb outside a city or town in which black South Africans were required by law to live, while they sold their labour in the city or town centre, during the apartheid era.

toyi-toyi (noun) – A knees-up protest dance. From the isiNdebele and Shona.

trek (noun) – Long and often arduous journey. Best known from the Great Trek, the long journey by oxwagon the forebears of the Afrikaners took from the Cape Colony into the South African interior to escape British colonialism, beginning in the 1820s.

tsessebe (noun) – African antelope (Damaliscus lunatus) found in southern and eastern Africa.

Tshivenda (noun) – Language of the Venda people.

tsotsi (noun) – Gangster, hoodlum or thug – and the title of South Africa’s first Oscar-winning movie. Perhaps a corruption of “zoot suit”, the type of flashy clothing worn by township thugs in the 1950s.

Tsotsitaal (noun) – Township patois, derived from 1950s gangster slang, made up of a mixture of Afrikaans and isiZulu, and largely spoken in Gauteng. From the Tostsitaal tsotsi (gangster) and Afrikaans taal (language).

Tswana (noun) – Member of a group of people mainly found in Botswana and northern South Africa, and their language.

tune, tune me, tune grief, tune me grief (verb) – Cause trouble; challenge me.

U: ubuntu to uMkhonto weSizwe

ubuntu (noun) – Southern African humanist philosophy of fellowship and community, based on the notion that a person is a person because of other people: “I am who I am because of you”. From the isiZulu for “humanity” or “goodness”.

Umkhonto (noun) – Short form of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

uMkhonto weSizwe (noun) – Army of the exiled African National Congress during the struggle against apartheid; since 1994 amalgamated into the South African National Defence Force. From the isiZulu for “spear of the nation”. Not the same as the new uMkhonto weSizwe Party, a political party.

V: veld to vuvuzela

Vetkoek for sale at a food stall in Cape Town. (Gavin Bloys / CC BY NC-ND 2.0)

veld (noun) – Open grassland. From the Afrikaans, from the Dutch for “field”.

veldskoen, velskoen (noun) – Simple unworked leather shoes. From the Afrikaans veld (field) or vel (skin or hide) and skoen (shoe).

Venda (noun) – South African population group largely found in Limpopo province, who speak the Tshivenda language.

verkramp (adjective) – Extremely politically conservative or reactionary. From the Afrikaans for “narrow” or “cramped”.

vetkoek (noun) – Doughnut-sized bread roll made from deep-fried yeast dough, often served with savoury mince-meat. From the Afrikaans vet (fat) and koek (cake).

voema (noun) – Variant spelling of woema.

voetsek (exclamation) – Go away, buzz off. From the Afrikaans, originally from the 19th-century Dutch voort seg ik (be off I say).

voetstoets (adjective) – “As is” or “with all its faults”. A legal term, used in the sale of a car or house. If the item is sold voetstoets the buyer may not claim for any defects, hidden or otherwise, discovered after the sale. From the Afrikaans, originally from the Dutch met de voet te stoten (to push with the foot).

vrot (adjective) – Rotten or smelly. From the Afrikaans.

vuvuzela (noun) – Large, colourful plastic trumpet with the sound of a foghorn, blown by crowds at football matches. From the isiZulu for “making noise”.

W: walkie-talkie to wors

walkie-talkie (noun) – South African delicacy made from the heads and feet of a chicken.

wildebeest (noun) – Gnu; large African antelope of two species (the blue or black wildebeest, genus Connochaetes) with a long head and sloping back. From the Afrikaans wilde (wild) and beest (beast).

windgat (noun) – Show-off or blabbermouth. From the Afrikaans wind (wind) and gat (hole).

witblitz (noun) – Potent home-made distilled alcohol, much like the American moonshine. From the Afrikaans wit (white) and blitz (lightning).

woema (noun) – Speed or power, oomph. From the Afrikaans.

woes (adjective) – Angry, irritated or aggressive. From the Afrikaans.

wonderboom (noun) – Wild fig (Ficus salicifolia), native to southern Africa. Also the name of a suburb of the city of Pretoria, and a South African pop group. From the Afrikaans wonder (wonder or marvel) and boom (tree).

wors (noun) – Short for “boerewors”, a savoury sausage developed by the Boers, the forebears of today’s Afrikaners, some 200 years ago, and still popular at braais across South Africa. Also known as wors. From the Afrikaans boer (farmer) and wors (sausage, Dutch worst).

XYZ: Xhosa to Zulu

Xhosa (noun) – Nguni-language-speaking people of South Africa, found mainly in the Eastern Cape province.

Xitsonga (noun) – Nguni language of the Tsonga people.

yellow rice (noun) – Rice cooked with turmeric and raisins, often served with curry.

zamalek (noun) – Carling Black Label beer.

Zebu (noun) – Long-horned and often hump-backed varieties of cattle (Bos indicus), originally from India but now found in a large number of breeds across Africa. South African breeds include the Nguni and Afrikaner.

zol (noun) – Hand-rolled cigarette or marijuana joint.

Zulu (noun) – Nguni-language-speaking South African population group found mainly in KwaZulu-Natal. Their language is isiZulu.

Sources

Additional information sourced from:

• A Dictionary of South African English by Jean Branford, Oxford University Press USA (1980). ISBN 0195701771
• A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles, Rhodes University Dictionary Unit for South African English
• Glossary of South African English Regionalisms, Wiktionary
• List of South African slang words, Wikipedia

Researched and written by Mary Alexander.
Updated June 2025
Questions? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com

The post The online dictionary of South African English appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

History overlooks the role he played in the protests that led to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, and the first global condemnation of the apartheid state.

“The Africanists take the view that there is only one race to which we all belong, and that is the human race,” Robert Sobukwe said in 1959. “In our vocabulary therefore, the word ‘race’, as applied to man, has no plural form.”

Born in 1924 as the youngest of six children of working-class parents, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was an academic, a lawyer, a lyrical writer and a persuasive orator. He helped found South Africa’s Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and was one of the first to propose a “nonracial” rather than “multiracial” future for the country.

For a time, apartheid authorities saw Sobukwe as more dangerous than leaders like Nelson Mandela.

In 1960, as president of the newly formed PAC, Sobukwe was key in organising protests against the pass laws.

The “dompas” (literally, dumb pass) was a document all black South Africans had to carry to allow them “pass” into apartheid South Africa’s cities – places many had lived all their lives.

In the late 1950s, the pass laws had been extended to include black women. Both the PAC and the African National Congress (ANC) responded with nationwide civil disobedience campaigns.

Breaking the system

Click animation to view from the start.

On the morning of 21 March 1960, aged 35, Sobukwe left his home in Mofolo, Soweto, to lead a small crowd on an eight-kilometre march to Orlando police station.

The crowd had one goal. To be arrested.

The pass laws made every black woman and man in the country a potential criminal – simply for being somewhere without the right documents.

Sobukwe and his comrades were trying to expose the absurdity of those laws by forcing the authorities to arrest, well, everyone. The hope was that with this many “criminals” to process, the pass law system would break down.

Just days before, Sobukwe had resigned his post as a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand and made arrangements for the safety of his family.

A week earlier he had written to South Africa’s commissioner of police, major-general Corrie Rademeyer, informing him that the PAC would be holding a five-day, nonviolent and disciplined protest against the pass laws.

As Sobukwe and his followers approached Orlando police station, they were arrested – as they expected.

What wasn’t expected was that 21 March 1960 would be Robert Sobukwe’s last real taste of freedom.

Sobukwe was so feared by the apartheid government that he would spend the rest of his life confined – in prison and then in internal exile under house arrest.

The Sharpeville massacre

On 21 March 1960, about 70 kilometres to the south of Mofolo in the township of Sharpeville outside Vereeniging, other tragic events were unfolding.

As a crowd of 5,000 peaceful protesters organised by the PAC approached the local police station, police opened fire.

Sixty-nine people were killed and more than 200 wounded, many of them shot in the back.

The Sharpeville massacre, as it became known, was a turning point in South Africa’s history.

It made headlines across the world and sharply intensified international pressure on the apartheid state.

In its aftermath the government imposed a state of emergency, banning both the ANC and PAC as illegal organisations and detaining 18,000 people.

The liberation movements responded by abandoning passive resistance for military struggle, with the ANC forming its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe, and the PAC its armed wing Poqo.

On 1 April 1960, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 134 after a complaint by 29 member states regarding “the situation arising out of the large-scale killings of unarmed and peaceful demonstrators against racial discrimination and segregation in the Union of South Africa”.

The resolution voiced the council’s anger at the policies and actions of the South African government, and called on the government to abandon apartheid.

With world authority behind it, UN Resolution 134 became a powerful weapon for the international anti-apartheid movement.

‘We are the first glimmers of a new dawn’

Sobukwe was born on 5 December 1924 in an apartheid-era “township”, a type of settlement in which black people were forced to live, outside the town of Graaff-Reinet in today’s Eastern Cape province.

The youngest of six children, his family was poor, celebrating Christmas with a new suit of clothes for each child – the only clothes bought during the year.

His father Hubert was a labourer and his mother Angelina a cleaner and cook at a local hospital. Both parents encouraged their children to pursue education, an education Sobukwe’s parents had been denied.

Sobukwe’s education followed the pattern of Nelson Mandela and other African intellectuals of the time.

Like Mandela, he went to high school at the Healdtown Institute, where he rose to be head boy. He then, like Mandela, went on to the University of Fort Hare, enrolling in 1947.

At university, Sobukwe registered for a Bachelor of Arts in English – he had a passion for poetry and drama – as well as Xhosa and Native Administration.

Before Fort Hare he had little time for politics, but his Native Administration studies sparked his interest and set the path for his life.

In 1948 Sobukwe joined the campus branch of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL). A year later he was elected president of the Fort Hare Students’ Representative Council (SRC), where he revealed his talents as a leader and orator.

His speech as outgoing SRC president in October 1949 gave a sense of ideas to come:

Let me plead with you, lovers of my Africa, to carry with you into the world the vision of a new Africa, an Africa reborn, an Africa rejuvenated, an Africa recreated, a young Africa. We are the first glimmers of a new dawn. And if we are persecuted for our views, we should remember, as the African saying goes, that it is darkest before dawn, and that the dying beast kicks most violently when it is giving up the ghost.

After university, Sobukwe took a teaching job in Standerton in today’s Mpumalanga province.

From 1950 to 1954 he was also secretary of the ANC’s Standerton branch.

During this time he became increasingly influenced by the writings of veteran ANC leader, lawyer and academic Anton Lembede, and started to adopt a more Africanist position in the organisation.

‘Race has no plural’

In 1954 Sobukwe was appointed lecturer in African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand – earning him the nickname “the Prof” among his friends and fellow activists – and settled his family in Mofolo, Soweto, south of Johannesburg.

He joined the local ANC but was increasingly critical of what he saw as the organisation’s “liberal-left-multiracialist” policies.

Sobukwe’s antagonism to “multiracialism” – as opposed to “nonracialism” – and his Africanist philosophy came directly out of his appreciation of the absurdity of “race” as a real thing. He set out this view in a famous speech in 1959:

The structure of the body of man provides evidence to prove the biological unity of the human species. All scientists agree that there is no “race” that is superior to another, and there is no “race” that is inferior to others.

The Africanists take the view that there is only one race to which we all belong, and that is the human race. In our vocabulary therefore, the word “race”, as applied to man, has no plural form.

He continued:

Against multi-racialism we have this objection, that the history of South Africa has fostered group prejudices and antagonisms, and if we have to maintain the same group exclusiveness, parading under the term of multiracialism, we shall be transporting to the new Africa these very antagonisms and conflicts.

Further, multiracialism is in fact a pandering to European bigotry and arrogance. It is a method of safeguarding white interests, implying as it does, proportional representation irrespective of population figures. In that sense it is a complete negation of democracy.

Wesley House, the Methodist hostel at the University of Fort Hare where Robert Sobukwe likely stayed during his studies.

Founding the Pan African Congress

As an Africanist, Sobukwe was also a strong advocate for the political unity of the African continent, particularly in the context of the Cold War:

We regard it as the sacred duty of every African state to strive ceaselessly and energetically for the creation of a United States of Africa, stretching from Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar.

The days of small, independent countries are gone.

The pan-African movement was inspired by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, the first African state to gain independence.

Sobukwe said:

Dr Kwame Nkrumah has repeatedly stated that in international affairs, Africa wishes to pursue a policy of positive neutrality, allying herself to neither of the existing blocs but … remaining ‘independent in all things but neutral in none that affect the destiny of Africa’.

It is not the intention of African states to change one master (western imperialism) for another (Soviet hegemony).

In 1957 Sobukwe became editor of the well-regarded newspaper The Africanist, using it as an increasingly critical platform against the ANC’s domination by “liberal-left-multiracialists”. A year later he was instrumental in initiating an Africanist breakaway from the ANC, helping form the Pan Africanist Congress and becoming its first president.

Robert Sobukwe (front row, second from left) with the other founding members of the Pan Africanist Congress in 1957.

Solitary confinement and the Sobukwe Clause

After his arrest on 21 March 1960, Sobukwe was sentenced to three years in prison. He refused the help of an attorney and would not appeal the sentence. He said the apartheid court had no jurisdiction over him, as it was not a court of law or justice.

Just as his three-year term was up the South African government passed the General Law Amendment Act on 3 May 1963. This contained a special clause allowing the minister of justice to prolong the imprisonment of any political prisoner indefinitely.

The Sobukwe Clause, as it became known, was only ever applied to Robert Sobukwe.

• Read testimony by Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe, Robert Sobukwe’s widow, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997

Sobukwe was moved to Robben Island, where he served a further six years in solitary confinement.

He had separate living quarters and was denied contact with other prisoners. But he was allowed books and study materials, and during this time earned a degree in Economics from the University of London.

In 1964, a year after his sentence was supposed to have ended, Sobukwe was offered a job by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the US.

But John Vorster, then the minister of justice and later prime minister of South Africa, refused to allow him to leave the country.

Release and house arrest

Robert Sobukwe with his friend Benjamin Pogrund after Sobukwe’s release from Robben Island in 1969. Pogrund, a journalist, is the author of the biography Robert Sobukwe – How can Man Die Better.

Sobukwe was finally released from jail in May 1969, but banished to the dusty township of Galeshewe outside Kimberley, in today’s Northern Cape province – a place some 500 kilometres equidistant from both Johannesburg and Sobukwe’s home town of Graaff Reinet.

There he was held under house arrest for 12 hours a day, and forbidden from taking part in any political activity.

In 1970 Sobukwe was again offered a job in the US, this time at the University of Wisconsin.

Again apartheid officials refused to allow him to leave South Africa.

While under house arrest Sobukwe studied law, completing his articles in Kimberley and opening his own legal practice in 1975. But soon after, he fell ill.

In July 1977 he applied for permission to seek treatment in Johannesburg. He was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

Despite his failing health, the government deliberately made it hard for Sobukwe to get the treatment he needed by insisting he comply with the conditions of his restrictions.

On 27 February 1978 he died from lung complications at Kimberley General Hospital. He was buried in Graaff Reinet, the town of his birth.

At the launch of the PAC in 1959, Sobukwe said:

We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African.

Here is a tree rooted in African soil, nourished with waters from the rivers of Africa.

Come and sit under its shade and become, with us, the leaves of the same branch and the branches of the same tree.

Read more

• The 16 June 1976 students’ uprising – as it happened
• Nelson Mandela: the timeline of a lifetime
• Mapping poverty in South Africa
• Gallery: the Eastern Cape province

Researched and written by Mary Alexander
Updated 21 September 2024
Comments? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com

The post Robert Sobukwe: ‘There is only one race. The human race’ appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

Street art in San Francisco shows Nelson Mandela addressing the massive crowd who greeted him on the Grand Parade as he gave his first speech, from a Cape Town city hall balcony, after his release on 11 February 1990 from 27 years in prison. (Julie Pimentel, CC BY-NC 2.0)

• READ MORE: Nelson Mandela’s family tree

Jump to:

1910s

18 July 1918 – Nelson Mandela born in Mvezo, Eastern Cape province, South Africa. His mother, Nonqaphi Fanny Nosekeni, is one of four wives of his father, Mphakanyiswa Gadla Henry Mandela, a “chief by both blood and custom“.

His birth name is Rolihlahla. In isiXhosa it literally translates as “pulling the branch of a tree”. But colloquially, it means “troublemaker“.

1920s

1925 – Mandela begins primary school near his home village of Qunu. His teacher names him “Nelson”.

Nelson Mandela with his class at Healdtown College circa 1937 to 1938. Mandela is in the back row, fifth from right. (South African History Online)

In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote: “On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.”

Another story is that the teacher named him “Nelson” after British Navy admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation says it’s “unclear why Miss Mdingane chose the name ‘Nelson’”.

Mandela wrote: “That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess.”

1930s

Nelson Mandela in Mthatha in 1937, aged 19.

1930 – Mandela’s father Mphakanyiswa Gadla Henry Mandela dies. In his autobiography Mandela recalls his father dying when he was nine. He was 12.

Mandela becomes the ward of the Thembu regent, paramount chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo.

1934 – At the age of 16, Mandela undergoes the Xhosa initiation and circumcision ritual. He enrols in the Clarkebury Boarding Institute in Engcobo.

1937 – Enrols in Healdtown, the Wesleyan college in the Eastern Cape town of Fort Beaufort.

1939 – Enrols at the University College of Fort Hare in Alice, Eastern Cape, for a bachelor of arts degree. Here he meets Oliver Tambo.

1940s

1940 – Expelled from university for joining in a protest boycott.

1941 – Fleeing an arranged marriage, Mandela moves to Johannesburg and works briefly as a night watchman on a gold mine.

1941 – Meets Walter Sisulu, an active member of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s major anti-apartheid liberation movement and today the country’s ruling party. Sisulu recommends Mandela for employment as an articled clerk at the law firm Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelmana, and the two become firm friends.

1942 – Begins to attend ANC meetings.

1942 – Completes his bachelor of arts degree by correspondence through the University of South Africa.

1943 – Enrols for an LLB postgraduate law degree at the University of the Witwatersrand.

2 April 1944 – Founds the ANC Youth League together with Anton Lembede, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu.

5 October 1944 – Mandela marries Evelyn Ntoko Mase, his first wife.

Nelson Mandela and his future first wife Evelyn Mase in the bridal party at Walter and Albertina Sisulu’s wedding on 17 July 1944. Mandela was best man. Mandela and Mase were to marry three months later, on 5 October 1944.

1946 – First son Madiba Thembekile (Thembi) born to Evelyn Mase.

1947 – Mandela’s first daughter and second child Makaziwe born to Evelyn Mase. The baby dies nine months later.

1948 – Mandela is elected national secretary of the ANC Youth League.

1948 – The whites-only electorate votes the racist National Party into power in South Africa. Apartheid becomes official government policy.

1949 – The ANC adopts its Programme of Action, inspired by the Youth League, which advocates the weapons of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-cooperation with authority.

1950s

1950 – The government passes the Suppression of Communism Act. This bans the South African Communist Party. It also bans the “ideology” of communism. The Act broadly defines “communism” as anything aimed “at bringing about any political, industrial, social, or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder” or encouraging “feelings of hostility between the European and the non-European races”.

1950 – Mandela’s second son and third child Makgatho born to Evelyn Mase.

1951 – Elected president of the ANC Youth League.

1952 – The ANC launches the Campaign for Defiance of Unjust Laws, later simply known as the Defiance Campaign. Mandela is elected as the ANC’s national volunteer-in-chief and travels South Africa organising resistance.

In one of many acts of protest during the Defiance Campaign of 1952, a group of black South Africans took over a train compartment reserved for whites and rode into Cape Town, shouting the slogan “Africa!” Thirty-four were then arrested by Cape Town police. (Have You Heard From Johannesburg)

1952 – Mandela is arrested and tried with Walter Sisulu and 18 others under the Supression of Communism Act for his role in the campaign. He is sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment with hard labour, suspended for two years.

1952 – Elected president of the Transvaal region of the ANC, and as the first of ANC deputy presidents.

1952 – Opens South Africa’s first black-owned law firm in downtown Johannesburg in partnership with Oliver Tambo.

1953 – Devises the M-Plan – or Mandela Plan – for the ANC’s future underground operations.

1953 – Second daughter and fourth child born to Evelyn Mase, and named Makaziwe in honour of her infant sister.

26 June 1955 – The Congress of the People, and alliance of anti-apartheid movements that includes the ANC, adopts the Freedom Charter at Kliptown in Soweto. The charter declared fundamental tenets of a free South Africa, such as “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.”

Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, young attorneys and partners in South Africa’s first black-owned law firm, in the mid-1950s. (The Peto Collection, University of Dundee)

5 December 1956 – Mandela and 150 others arrested and charged with treason. The marathon Treason Trial of 1956 to 1961 followed. All charges were eventually dropped.

1958 – Mandela divorces Evelyn Mase and marries Winnie Madikizela.

1959 – Third daughter and fifth child Zenani (Zeni) born to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

1959 – The Africanist faction of the ANC breaks away to form the Pan Africanist Congress under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe and Potlako Leballo.

1960s

21 March 1960 – Police open fire on a peaceful demonstration against the pass laws organised by the PAC in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people – many of them shot in the back. The reaction is immediate, with demonstrations, protest marches, strikes and riots across South Africa.

21 March 1960, the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. Sixty-nine people were shot dead by police and a further 180 wounded. (University of the Western Cape Robben Island Mayibuye Museum Archive)

30 March 1960 – The South African government declares a state of emergency, detaining more than 18 000 people, and banning the ANC and other liberation movements.

1960 – Mandela’s fourth daughter and sixth child Zindziswa (Zindzi) born to Winnie Madikizela.

1961 – The Treason Trial ends with all charges against Mandela and his co-defendants being dropped.

1961 – The ANC decides to move from nonviolent to violent means of opposing apartheid. The movement’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), is formed, with Mandela as commander-in-chief.

1961 – In the face of government repression, Mandela goes underground, becoming a master of disguise and managing to evade arrest with such success the media nicknames him the Black Pimpernel.

5 August 1962 – After travelling abroad, and being on the run for 17 months, Mandela is arrested near Howick in Natal and imprisoned in the Johannesburg Fort. He would only be free again in 1990, 28 years later.

The site near Howick where Nelson Mandela was captured in 1962 is today marked by a steel sculpture of his face, which can only be clearly viewed from a specific angle. (Willem van Valkenburg, CC BY 2.0)

25 October 1962 – Mandela is convicted of unlawfully exiting the country and incitement to strike. He is sentenced to five years on Robben Island, the notorious political prison off the coast near Cape Town.

11 July 1963 – While Mandela is in prison, police arrest prominent ANC leaders at their hideout on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg.

1963 – Mandela and his arrested ANC comrades are charged with sabotage and other crimes in the Rivonia Trial.

20 April 1964 – At the opening of the defence case at the Pretoria Supreme Court, Mandela makes his famous statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial, in which he lays out the reasoning in the ANC’s decision to use violence.

Mandela’s statement concludes:

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Listen to the final 90 seconds of the speech:

12 June 1964 – The Rivonia Trial ends with Mandela and all his co-accused – except Rusty Bernstein – being found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela is sent to Robben Island. As a D-group prisoner, the lowest classification, he is allowed one visitor and one letter every six months.

1965 – Mandela’s book No Easy Walk to Freedom is published by Heinemann.

1968 – Mandela’s mother, Nonqaphi Fanny Nosekeni, dies.

1969 – A plan to spring Mandela from jail is infiltrated by secret agent Gordon Winter. Winter is working for the South African authorities, who want Mandela to escape so they can shoot him during recapture. The plot is foiled by British Intelligence.

Mandela’s sons Thembekile (left) and Makgatho with their mother Evelyn Mase in the early 1950s. When Thembekile died in a car crash in 1969, aged just 23, Mandela was not allowed to attend his funeral.

1969 – Mandela’s first-born son Thembi Mandela dies in a car crash, aged 23. Mandela, on Robben Island, is not allowed to attend the funeral.

1969 – Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is jailed at Pretoria Central Prison, where she will spend the next 18 months in solitary confinement.

1970s

1973 – Daughter Zenani Mandela marries Prince Thumbumuzi Dlamini, elder brother of King Mswati III of Swaziland.

1973 – A nuclear particle discovered by University of Leeds scientists is named the “Mandela particle”.

16 June 1976 – In Soweto, South African police open fire on schoolchildren protesting against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. The Soweto Uprising begins, quickly spreading across South Africa. By the end of the year about 575 people have died, 451 at the hands of police. Thousands of young people leave South Africa to join the ANC’s forces in neighbouring countries.

1980s

March 1982 – Mandela is transferred from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town, along with other ANC leaders Walter Sisulu, Andrew Mlangeni, Ahmed Kathrada and Raymond Mhlaba. It is speculated that this is to remove their influence on a new generation of young black activists imprisoned on Robben Island.

26 June 1983 – Sculpture in a city park by Elisabeth Frink, dedicated to Mandela, is unveiled in Dublin, Ireland. As second sculpture was unveiled in Dublin a year later.

A 1984 United Democratic Front poster calling on white, coloured and Indian South Africans to boycott separately organised apartheid elections.

20 August 1983 – The United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition of about 400 civic, church, students’, workers’ and other organisations, formed to fight apartheid inside South Africa. With the slogan “UDF unites, apartheid divides”, its 3- million members were a powerful force in the internal anti-apartheid struggle.

1984 – English ska band The Special AKA release the song “Free Nelson Mandela”, which reaches number nine on the British charts. The song was banned in South Africa, but bootleg tracks found their way into many parties.

February 1985 – President PW Botha offers to free Mandela on condition that he unconditionally rejects violence as a political weapon.

Mandela rejects the offer. In a statement, he says:

“What freedom am I being offered while the organisation of the people remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.”

28 October 1985 – Statue of Mandela is unveiled in Southbank in London by Oliver Tambo, now the exiled president of the ANC.

November 1985 – Minister of Justice and Prisons Kobie Coetsee meets Mandela in Volks Hospital in Cape Town, where Mandela is recovering from prostate surgery. This is the first meeting between Mandela and the National Party government and is followed by a series of tentative meetings that lay the groundwork for future negotiations. But little progress is made.

1985 – Stevie Wonder dedicates his Oscar for the song “I Just Called to Say I Love You” to Mandela. Wonder’s music is then banned by the state-run SABC, the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

1988 – Mandela is transferred from Pollsmoor Prison to Victor Verster Prison near Paarl in the Western Cape. A number of restrictions are lifted, and friends and family are able to meet him.

1988 – The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert is held at London’s Wembley Stadium. It was a focal point of the external anti-apartheid movement, with prominent musicians – including Simple Minds, Santana, Tracy Chapman, Salif Keita, Annie Lennox and Whitney Houston – voicing their support for Mandela.

1989 – President PW Botha Botha is replaced by FW de Klerk.

1990s

The front page of the Sunday Times on 11 February 1990, the day of Nelson Mandela’s release. FW de Klerk is to his right. It was illegal for any photos of political prisoners to be published, so this was the first picture of Mandela the world had seen since 1962. (Sunday Times)

2 February 1990 – President FW de Klerk announces Mandela and other political prisoners will be released and the ANC and other resistance movements unbanned.

11 February 1990 – In the full glare of international media attention, Mandela walks free from Victor Verster Prison in Cape Town.

4 May 1990 – Negotiations to end apartheid between the ANC and the government begin at the presidential residence, Groote Schuur. They issue the Groote Schuur Minute, a joint commitment to resolve the existing climate of violence and intimidation and to remove practical obstacles to negotiation, including indemnity from prosecution for returning exiles and the release of political prisoners.

6 August 1990 – The ANC and the government extend their consensus in the Pretoria Minute, which includes the suspension of the armed struggle by the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe.

1991 – The first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa in decades elects Mandela as president of the party. Oliver Tambo, the previous president, becomes national chairperson.

20 August 1991 – The United Democratic Front is disbanded.

14 September 1991 – The National Peace Accord is signed by representatives of 27 political organisations and national and homeland governments, preparing the way for the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) negotiations.

20 December 1991 – Plenary session of Codesa at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, near Johannesburg.

On 11 February 1990 Mandela made his first public speech, after 27 years in jail, to a crowd of 100 000 gathered on the Grand Parade in Cape Town. There was “no option” but that struggle against apartheid continue until the system was dismantled, he said. “But we express the hope that a climate conducive to a negotiated settlement will be created soon, so that there may no longer be any need for the armed struggle to continue.”

18 March 1992 – After the National Party begins to lose by-elections to the pro-apartheid Conservative party, a referendum of white voters is held to determine if FW de Klerk has their mandate to end apartheid. An overwhelming 68% votes “yes”, allowing negotiations to proceed.

April 1992 – Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela separate.

May 1992 – Codesa II begins the second round of negotiations.

17 June 1992 – The Boipatong massacre. During the night, a heavily armed band of Inkatha Freedom Party loyalists invade the Vaal township of Boipatong and kill 46 people. Mandela accuses the government of complicity in the atrocity and withdraws the ANC from negotiations. The ANC takes to the streets with a programme of rolling mass action.

17 June 1992, the aftermath of the Boipatong massacre. Photographer Greg Marinovich describes the image: “The aunt of nine-month-old Aaron Mathope sits next to his body in Boipatong township, south of Johannesburg, 1992. On this day, 45 people were killed by Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) supporting Zulus. Aaron and his mother were hacked to death, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) found both the IFP and the security forces of the then-white regime responsible.” (Greg Marinovich, University of Cape Town Digital Collections)

7 September 1992 – The army of the spurious “homeland” of Ciskei opens fire on protest marchers near Bhisho, killing 28. The Bhisho massacre brings a new urgency to the search for a political settlement.

7 September 1992, the Bhisho massacre in progress. Photographer Greg Marinovich describes the image: “African National Congress supporters flee towards the South African side of the border with the Ciskei bantustan after they were fired at, killing 29 marchers and wounding dozens, during an ANC march on the Ciskei homeland, 7 September, 1992. The ANC supporters were killed when Ciskei security forces opened fire after the marchers broke through the border in an attempt to force the Ciskeien military leader, Brigadier Oupa Gqozo, to allow free political activity in Ciskei.” (Greg Marinovich, University of Cape Town Digital Collections)

26 September 1992 – Negotiations resume when the government and ANC agree on a Record of Understanding dealing with a constitutional assembly, an interim government, political prisoners, hostels, dangerous weapons and mass action.

1 April 1993 – The Multiparty Negotiating Forum (MPNF) gathers for the first time, with political groupings on the more extreme right and left taking part, as well as traditional African leadership.

On 20 June 1990 Tokyo Sexwale (right) showed Chris Hani, recently returned from exile, around Johannesburg. Hani was murdered three years later, in April 1993.

10 April 1993 – Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party and a senior member of the ANC, is assassinated outside his home by right-wingers intent on derailing negotiations. Instead, faced with a country on the brink of civil war, the main parties push for a settlement. Polish immigrant Janusz Waluś and senior Conservative Party leader Clive Derby-Lewis are later jailed for life for the crime.

18 November 1993 – The MPNF ratifies the interim Constitution in the early hours of the morning. A Transitional Executive Council will now oversee the run-up to a democratic election.

10 December 1993 – Mandela and FW de Klerk are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their different roles in ending apartheid.

December 1993 – Mandela is named Person of the Year by Time magazine, together with FW de Klerk, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin.

27 April 1994 – South Africa’s first democratic elections are held, and Mandela gets to vote for the first time in his life. The ANC wins 62% of the vote.

10 May 1994 – Mandela is inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

1994 – Mandela publishes his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, which he started writing in prison.

1995 – The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is set up in terms of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. It is headed by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

On 27 April 1994 Nelson Mandela, aged 75, got to vote for the first time in his life. (Chris Sattlberger, UN Photo)

1995 – South Africa hosts, and wins, the Rugby World Cup. Rugby was previously seen as a whites-only sport, but Mandela gave the country’s team much high-profile support. After the Springboks beat New Zealand in the final, Mandela presented the trophy to captain Francois Pienaar, an Afrikaner, wearing a Springbok shirt with Pienaar’s number 6 on the back. This important step in reconciliation was popularised in the movie Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Pienaar.

March 1996 – Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela divorce.

18 July 1998 – On his 80th birthday Mandela marries Graça Machel (née Simbine), widow of Samora Machel, the president of Mozambique until his death in 1986.

2 September 1998 – Mandela is appointed the 19th secretary-general of the Non-Aligned Movement.

14 June 1999 – Thabo Mbeki succeeds Mandela as president of South Africa.

2000s

July 2001 – Mandela is diagnosed and successfully treated for prostate cancer.

9 July 2002 – US President George W Bush awards Mandela the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award, in Washington.

2003 – Mandela lends his name to the 46664 Aids awareness and fundraising campaign, named for his former prison number.

June 2004 – Aged 85, Mandela announces that he will be retiring from public life. Citing failing health and the need to spend more time with his family, he said he wanted to be in a position of “calling you to ask whether I would be welcome, rather than being called upon to do things and participate in events. My appeal therefore is: Don’t call me, I will call you.”

2004 – Mandela’s first wife Evelyn Mase dies.

6 January 2005 – Mandela’s oldest living son Makgatho Mandela dies of Aids, aged 54.

18 July 2007 – On Mandela’s 89th birthday he, Graça Machel and Desmond Tutu convene The Elders, a grouping of world leaders set up to contribute their wisdom and independent leadership to solving the world’s toughest problems. Other members include Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus.

18 July 2008 – Mandela’s 90th birthday is marked across the world, with the main South African celebrations held at his home town of Qunu. A concert in his honour is held in Hyde Park, London.

November 2009 – The UN General Assembly announces that Mandela’s birthday, 18 July, is to be known internationally as Mandela Day.

2010s

26 January 2011 – Mandela admitted to hospital with an acute respiratory infection, and discharged three days later.

21 June 2011 – Michelle Obama and her daughters Sasha and Malia visit Mandela at his Houghton home.

Michelle Obama spends time with an ailing Nelson Mandela at his home in Houghton, Johannesburg, on 21 June 2011. (Samantha Appleton, Obama White House)

November 2012 – New South African bank notes are issued with Mandela’s portrait as the main image. South African slang for paper money quickly becomes “Madibas” or “Mandelas”.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mandela’s wife for almost 30 years, at his memorial service in Johannesburg on 10 December 2013. (GCIS)

18 to 26 December 2012 – Mandela is admitted to hospital for tests. He is discharged on 26 December after treatment for a lung infection and gall stones, having spent the longest period in hospital since his release from prison.

9 March 2013 – Mandela is again admitted to hospital, for treatment of lung disorders, in the first of many hospitalisations over the next few months.

18 July 2013 – Mandela celebrates his 95th birthday while again undergoing treatment at a Pretoria hospital. Doctors describe his condition as “stable but critical”.

1 September 2013 – After almost three months in hospital, Mandela is discharged with a full medical team to his home in Houghton, Johannesburg.

5 December 2013 – Mandela dies at his home in Houghton at the age of 95. An official 10-day period of mourning is declared in South Africa.

10 December 2013 – A memorial service for Mandela is held at Soccer City Stadium near Soweto in Johannesburg. It is attended by global leaders and thousands of South Africans.

11 to 13 December 2013 – Mandela’s body lies in state at the Union Buildings in Pretoria for South Africans to say goodbye.

15 December 2013 – Nelson Mandela’s state funeral is held in Qunu in the Eastern Cape, where he is buried.

Researched, written and designed by Mary Alexander.
Updated 10 October 2023.
Comments? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com.

The post Nelson Mandela 1918-2013: the timeline of a lifetime appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

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These maps are based on the 2011 census of the population.

READ MORE: South Africa’s population

According to the census, black South Africans are the majority at 79% of the population, and live both in the cities and across the poorer rural areas.

Indian South Africans, by contrast, are the smallest minority – just 2.5% of the population. They are concentrated in the city of Durban, and to a lesser extent in Cape Town and the urban areas of Gauteng. The first Indians were brought to Cape Town as slaves in 1684, during the Dutch colonial era. But today’s South African Indians are mainly descended from indentured labourers and free “passenger” immigrants who arrived in Durban between 1860 and 1914.

Coloured and white South Africans both make up around 9% of the population, according to the 2011 census. Yet whites are concentrated in the cities, while coloureds  are scattered from the cities to the rural areas – a legacy of apartheid.

For generations white South Africans enjoyed better educational and economic opportunities than any other population group. They were also never subject to any law that restricted where they were allowed to live. So, today,  white people still live where the higher-paying jobs are.

Coloured people are descended from the Khoi and San, from slaves brought to the Cape Colony from 1658 onwards, and from a mixture of all the people of the Cape – African, European and more – before racial classification was a thing. Today most coloured people live in the Western Cape, the Northern Cape and the eastern regions of the Eastern Cape.

All South Africans concentrate in Gauteng, the economic heart of the country. Over a quarter of the population lives in this small province.

Updated 8 July 2021

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The post Map: Distribution of South Africa’s population groups appeared first on South Africa Gateway.