South Africa is located at the southern tip of Africa . It is bordered by Namibia , Botswana , Zimba

Christian 68% (includes most Whites and Coloured, and about 60% of Blacks), Muslim 2% (includes adventure cruise virginia beach most Malays, 40% of Indians and some immigrants from Africa), Hindu 1.5% (60% of Indians), Indigenous adventure cruise virginia beach beliefs, Animist, other religions and people without religion 28.5%
South Africa is located at the southern tip of Africa . It is bordered by Namibia , Botswana , Zimbabwe , Mozambique , Swaziland and Lesotho (which is completely surrounded by South Africa). It is a vast country with widely varying landscapes and has 11 official adventure cruise virginia beach languages, as well as an equally diverse population. South Africa is renowned for its wines and is one of the world's largest producers of gold. South Africa has the strongest economy in Africa, and is an influential player in African adventure cruise virginia beach politics. In 2010, South Africa hosted the first Football World Cup to be held on the African continent.
If you want to travel in southern Africa then South Africa is a good place to start. While you can fly into any country in southern Africa, most flights will route through South Africa anyway. South Africa is also a good place to get used to traveling adventure cruise virginia beach in the region (though some would argue that Namibia is better for that). Of course South Africa is not only a jumping off point, it is itself a superb destination rich in culture, adventure cruise virginia beach fauna flora and history.
Outsiders' views of South Africa are colored by the same stereotypes as the rest of Africa. Contrary to popular belief, South Africa is not devastatingly poor with an unstable government. adventure cruise virginia beach South Africa is to a large extent two countries within one . On the one hand it is a first world state, especially adventure cruise virginia beach the major cities such as Cape Town and Johannesburg, and and on the other hand it is under-developed adventure cruise virginia beach and has large scale poverty. South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world where opulence and severe poverty can often be observed together. The rural part of South Africa remains among the poorest and the least developed parts of the world and poverty in the townships can be appalling, progress is being made. The process of recovering from apartheid, which lasted almost 46 years, is quite slow. In fact, South Africa's United Nations Human Development Index which was slowly improving in the final years of apartheid, has declined dramatically since 1996, largely due to the AIDS pandemic, and poverty levels appear to be on the increase. South Africa boasts a well-developed infrastructure and has all the modern amenities and technologies, much of it developed during the years of white minority rule. The government is stable, although corruption is common. The government and the primary political parties generally have a high level of respect for democratic institutions and human rights.
The tip of Africa has been home to the Khoisan ( collective name for Hottentot (Koi) and Bushmen (San) ) people for thousands of years. Their rock art can still be found in many places throughout South Africa adventure cruise virginia beach . It is estimated that Bantu tribes may have started to slowly expand into the northernmost areas of what is today Southern Africa at around 2,500 years ago and by around 500 AD the different cultural groups as we know them today had been established in the lush areas to the north and east of the what is today known as Eastern South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The desert and semi-desert areas of the Western and Northern Cape provinces, as well as the western parts of the Eastern Cape province remained unsettled by the Bantu as the arid climate, limited seasonal rainfall, sparse vegetation and scarcity of natural sources of water could not sustain large migrations of people and herds of cattle, cattle adventure cruise virginia beach being the primary livestock reared by the Bantu and fulfilling numerous adventure cruise virginia beach cultural and economic functions within the tribal society (cattle served as a rudimentary currency and basic unit of exchange with a mutually agreeable value between bartering parties, thus fulfilling the function of money). The "Khoisan" existed in these areas as nomadic hunters, unable to permanently settle as the movement of desert game in search of dwindling water supplies during winter months determined their own migration. Not until the "Boers" (see next paragraph) moved into these areas and established boreholes and containment ponds could any permanent settlements be established in these areas. Today, with more reliable sources of water and modern methods of water conservancy the agricultural activity remains limited mainly to sheep and ostrich ranching as these animals are better suited to the sparse adventure cruise virginia beach feed and limited water.
The first Europeans to reach South Africa were the Portuguese, who named the tipping end of the country "Cape of Good Hope" in 1488, when they managed to sail around it to reach India. But permanent European settlement was only built at Cape Town after the Dutch East India Company adventure cruise virginia beach reached the Cape of Good Hope in April 1652. In the late 1700s, the Boers ( the settling farmers ) slowly started expanding first eastward along the coastline and later upwards into the interior. By 1795, Britain first took control of the Cape, as a consequence of the Napoleonic wars on the Dutch, and in 1820, a large group of British settlers arrived in the region. In 1835, large numbers of Boers started out on the Groot Trek (the great migration) into the interior after becoming dissatisfied adventure cruise virginia beach with the British rule. In the interior, they established their own internationally recognized republics. Some Boers were initially able to get along with the locals adventure cruise virginia beach (as with the Tswana) and in other areas Boers clashed badly with native populations (especially the Zulu). On December 16, 1838, a badly outnumbered Boer unit slaughtered over 3,000 Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
Two wars for control over Transvaal and Natal were fought between the Boers and the British in 1880 and 1899. The second war occurred after British settlers flooded into the area surrounding Johannesburg adventure cruise virginia beach known as the "Witwatersrand" (white water escarpment) in response to the discovery of gold in 1886. The Second Boer War (Afrikaans: 'Die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog' or 'Second War of Independence') was particularly unpleasant, as the British administration contained the Boer civilian population in concentration camps. Thousands of Boer civilians died in the camps from starvation or disease. Boer farms, livestock, crops and homesteads were also largely destroyed.
After peace was restored by the 1902 Treaty of Vereeniging, the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, consolidating the various Boer republics and British colonies into a unified state as a member of the British Commonwealth. In 1961, the Republic of South Africa was formed and SA exited adventure cruise virginia beach the Commonwealth. Meanwhile, during the early 20th century, a number of Afrikaner thinkers began to articulate a philosophy of white supremacy. This philosophy was given a theological foundation by the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, which preached that there would be no equality in church or state.
In 1948, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party came to power and began full implementation of its long-cherished dream of white supremacy, at the expense of blacks and coloreds. In addition, the NP sought to promote Afrikaner culture at the expense of English culture and either co-opted or marginalized English-speaking whites.
The NP introduced adventure cruise virginia beach numerous apartheid laws during the 1950s which mandated classification of all persons into arbitrary adventure cruise virginia beach racial categories (which in many cases resulted in nonsensical results since interracial couplings had been occurring in the country for over 300 years and siblings within the same family could end up in different "races"); limited the vote to white persons (previously, coloreds were able to vote in the Cape Province which made up most of the country's territory); mandated segregation adventure cruise virginia beach of all public amenities (and ensured that nonwhites always got the inferior ones); and divided both cities and the countryside into "group areas."
All adult citizens were required to carry a "passbook," a kind of internal passport. Nonwhites had to obtain special permission from whites to be present in white-only areas. Police (who were always white) could demand to see nonwhites' adventure cruise virginia beach passbooks at any time, arbitrarily strike out the holder's permission to be in a white-only area, and then promptly arrest, fine, and imprison the holder for being present in a white-only area without permission. Some existing neighborhoods (such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District adventure cruise virginia beach Six in Cape Town) were either too prosperous or too racially integrated from the government's perspective; adventure cruise virginia beach they were summarily redesignated as white-only and all nonwhite residents were summarily evicted.
As the Cold War took shape in the early 1950s, the NP attempted to justify apartheid as necessary adventure cruise virginia beach in the face of an alleged communist conspiracy to take over South Africa. The NP's focus on anti-communist propaganda was particularly adventure cruise virginia beach ironic, as South Africa under the NP ended up with a much higher level of state control of the economy than the vast majority of anti-communist countries. Many state-owned enterprises were later spun off into private enterprises after the end of apartheid.
In order to fight communism, state censorship was omnipresent, and the freedoms of speech, press, and public assembly were all vigorously suppressed. The technology of television was also banned and suppressed. It was reluctantly adventure cruise virginia beach allowed into the country only after South Africa suffered the embarrassment of being one of the few countries where the November 1969 moon landing could not be watched live, even by its wealthiest adventure cruise virginia beach citizens.
However, apartheid was never one unified program. adventure cruise virginia beach It existed in a state of constant tension between those Afrikaners who envisioned most of the country completely adventure cruise virginia beach purged of nonwhites and those Afrikaners (particularly businessmen) who recognized that it would take decades, if not centuries, to either create