Habitat

Habitat types:

South Africa has seven major terrestrial biomes, or habitat types - broad ecological life zones with distinct environmental conditions and related sets of plant and animal life.
In contrast, the eastern coastline is lush and well watered, a stranger to frost. The southern coast, part of which is known as the Garden Route, is rather less tropical but also green, as is the Cape of Good Hope - the latter especially in winter.

This south-western corner of the country has a Mediterranean climate, with wet winters and hot, dry summers. Its most famous climatic characteristic is its wind, which blows intermittently virtually all year round, either from the south-east or the north-west.

The eastern section of the Karoo does not extend as far north as the western part, giving way to the flat landscape of the Free State, which though still semi-arid receives somewhat more rain.

North of the Vaal River, the Highveld is better watered, and saved by its altitude (Johannesburg lies at 1 740m; its average annual rainfall is 760mm) from subtropical extremes of heat. Winters are cold, though snow is rare.

Further north and to the east, especially where a drop in altitude beyond the escarpment gives the Lowveld its name, temperatures rise: the Tropic of Capricorn slices through the extreme north. This is also where one finds the typical South African Bushveld of wildlife fame.

Those looking for an opportunity to ski in winter head for the high Drakensberg mountains that form South Africa's eastern escarpment, but the coldest place in the country is Sutherland in the western Roggeveld Mountains, with midwinter temperatures as low as -15ºC.

The deep interior provides the hottest temperatures: in 1948 the mercury hit 51.7ºC in the Northern Cape Kalahari near Upington.

Free State

FREE STATE

This landlocked province between the Vaal River in the north and the Orange River in the south is an area of wide, open spaces - an immense rolling prairie, checkered with farmsteads and windmills. Hospitality is one of the province's prized assets and a Free State farm holiday offers a unique opportunity to get to know the friendly people who inhabit this region. One of South Africa's major rivers, the Vaal the flows through the province and there are attractive holiday resorts near two of the river's largest dams.

The mountains of the eastern highlands harbour romantic hideaways and rugged hiking Park in the trails. The Golden Gate National Park in the north-east, with its spectacular sandstone formations, an area of scenic beauty, has a network of nature trails and provides the opportunity to see a variety of antelope and birdlife. The adjoining Qwaqwa National Park is sanctuary to rare species of vulture. Other protected areas include the Mount Everest Game Reserve at Harrismith and the Seekoeivlie Nature Reserve, a birdwatchers' paradise near the small town of Memel. Qwaqwa and many other parts of the Free State are home to the South Sotho people and their culture can be appreciated at the Basotho Cultural Village.
Capital of the Free State is Bloemfontein, known as the 'City of Roses'

Northern cape

NORTHERN CAPE

The Rugged Regions of the Northern Cape appeal to those seeking broad horizons and peace and quiet. It is an area of outstanding natural beauty and contains the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, set in the rolling dunes of the Kalahari Desert. The park is home to the magnificent gemsbok antelope, as well as the delicate springbok and the Kalahari lion, with its distinctive black mane. To the south is the Augrabies Falls National Park, where the river plunges nearly 200 feet into a narrow ravine.

The entire region has only one major town, Upington, the jumping-off point for the Kalahari, the Augrabies Falls and Fish River Canyon, and one city, Kimberley. Kimberley has been dubbed the "City of Diamonds" and its Big Hole bears testament to the diamond-rush days of the last century.

Eastern cape

EASTERN CAPE

Thetsitsikamma Forest runs into the Eastern Cape, a province steeped in history as well as blessed with beautiful beaches and rugged mountain scenery. This is the birthplace of President Nelson Mandela and is the melting pot of three cultures, Xhosa, British and Afrikaner. It is here that battles took place between the early English settlers and the Xhosa.

The country's longest and most magnificent coastline runs from the rugged Tsistikamma Forest area through the famed surfing spots of Jeffreys Bay to the golden beaches of the Sunshine Coast and the Wild Coast.

The coast is dotted with relaxing holiday resorts. Many resorts comprise only a cluster of houses and shops but boast sports facilities such as bowling greens and tennis courts. There are also some excellent spots for fishermen.

Inland are the wooded Amatola Mountains, a paradise for hikers, climbers and trout fishermen, as well as the brooding Karoo Desert. Visitors to the East Cape can experience scenic beauty and the life of villages unwind in a rural retreat or explore the bustling city life. This region includes the major seaport of Port Elizabeth, known as "The Friendly City".

There are also two national parks containing unique sub-species, the Mountain Zebra National Park and the Addo Elephant National Park, the last refuge of the Cape Elephant, and several private reserves.

Western cape

The western cape

Sir Francis Drake described it as "the fairest Cape in all the circumference of the World." Situated at the foot of Table Mountain, Cape Town is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, offering outstanding interest and variety to the visitor. Blending the old with the new, it has a relaxed, almost continental atmosphere that will charm even the most sophisticated jet-setter.

East of Cape Town are the famous winelands, around the towns of Stellenbosch and Paarl. The old estate houses are built in the attractive Cape Dutch style and there are plenty opportunities for sampling the vintages. To the east of Cape Town, set along a rugged coastline, are a number of quaint fishing villages and picturesque resorts.

Further into the interior is Namaqualand, a semi -desert area until the rains of June or July turn the arid countryside into a spectacular floral splay in August or September.

East of Cape Town is the Garden Route. Indigenous. forests, lakes, golden beaches and mountains contrast with semi-arid expanses. This enchanting area stretches along the South Cape Coast from the town of Heidelberg, eastwards to the Tsitsitkamma Forest and Storms River. Riverdale, Still Bay, Albertina, Mossel Bay, George, Wilderness, Knysna and Plettenberg Bay are some of the towns that are included in this area. Inland from the Garden Route is the semi-desert Little Karoo, the location of ostrich farms, particularly around the town of Oudtshoorn. In the Swartberg Mountains (photo 39Kb) are the spectacular Cango Caves, (photo 56Kb) with their limestone formations.

The story of Soweto

The Soweto uprising or Soweto riots were a series of clashes in Soweto, South Africa on June 16, 1976 between black youths and the South African authorities. The riots grew out of protests against the policies of the National Party government and its apartheid regime.
June 16 is now celebrated in South Africa as Youth Day.

Roots of the uprising

The origin of the protests are traced back to 1949 and the Eiselen Commission's enquiry into the edification of non-whites. The commission recommended drastic changes, which were implemented through the Bantu Education Act of 1953. The legislation caused many mission schools, through which the majority of black children were educated, to lose government aid and close. Funding for black schools was drawn from taxes paid by black people, who were generally impoverished. The result was a very uneven distribution of teaching resources in black and white schools.
Similarly, the Coloured Person's Education Act of 1963 made coloured education the responsibility of the Department of Coloured Affairs and barred coloured children from white schools. In 1965 the Indian Education Act consigned Indian education to the Department of Indian Affairs.
The funding available for Bantu education was diverted to building schools in Bantustans between 1962 and 1971, and no new schools were constructed in urban areas for non-white students during this time. In 1972 the state committed itself to generating better qualified labourers by improving the education system and between 1972 and 1976 forty new schools were built in Soweto. The learning population in the township multiplied threefold, but still only one in five Soweto children attended schools.

Causes of the protests

Black students in Soweto protested against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974 which forced all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade), according to the Afrikaans Medium Decree; English would be the medium of instruction for general science and practical subjects (homecraft, needlework, woodwork, metalwork, art, agricultural science). Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture [1].
A 1972 poll had found that 98% of young Sowetans did not want to be taught in Afrikaans. The association of Afrikaans with apartheid prompted black South Africans to prefer English. Even the homelands regimes chose English and an indigenous African language as official languages. In addition, English was gaining prominence as the language most often used in commerce and industry. The 1974 decree was intended to forcibly reverse the decline of Afrikaans among black Africans. The Afrikaner-dominated government used the clause of the 1909 Constitution that recognized only English and Afrikaans as official languages as pretext to do so [2]. While all schools had to provide instruction in both Afrikaans and English as languages, white students learned other subjects in their home language.
Punt Janson, the Deputy Minister of Bantu Education at the time, was quoted as saying: "I have not consulted the African people on the language issue and I'm not going to. An African might find that 'the grootbaas' only spoke Afrikaans or only spoke English. It would be to his advantage to know both languages"'.[3]
The decree was resented deeply by blacks as Afrikaans was widely viewed, in the words of Desmond Tutu, then Dean of Johannesburg as "the language of the oppressor". Teacher organizations such as the African Teachers Association of South Africa objected to the decree.[4]
The resentment grew until April 30, 1976, when children at Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their rebellion then spread to many other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Teboho 'Tsietsi' Mashinini, proposed a meeting on 13 June 1976 to discuss what should be done. Students formed an Action Committee (later known as the Soweto Students’ Representative Council)[4] that organized a mass rally for June 16, 1976 to make themselves heard.
In a BBC/SABC documentary broadcast for the first time in June 2006, surviving leaders of the uprising described how they planned in secret for the demonstration, surprising their teachers and families (and the apartheid police) with the power and strength of the demonstration (see 'Radio' section below).
The uprising

On the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of black students walked from their schools to Orlando Stadium for a rally to protest against having to learn through Afrikaans in school. Many students who later participated in the protest arrived at school that morning without prior knowledge of the protest, yet agreed to become involved. The protest was intended to be peaceful and had been carefully planned by the Soweto Students’ Representative Council’s (SSRC) Action Committee[5], with support from the wider Black Consciousness Movement. Teachers in Soweto also supported the march after the Action Committee emphasized good discipline and peaceful action.
Tsietsi Mashininini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School [6]. The students began the march only to find out that police had barricaded the road along their intended route. The leader of the action committee asked the crowd not to provoke the police and the march continued on another route, eventually ending up near Orlando High School.[7] The crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 students made their way towards the area of the school. Students sang and wove placards with slogans such as, "Down with Afrikaans", "Viva Azania" and "If we must do Afrikaans, Vorster must do Zulu".[8]
A 2006 BBC/SABC documentary corroborated the testimony of Colonel Kleingeld, the police officer who fired the first shot, with eyewitness accounts from both sides. In Kleingeld's account, some of the children started throwing stones as soon as they spotted the police patrol, while others continued to march peacefully. Police attempts to calm the crowd verbally, or to disperse the students using dogs and tear gas had no effect. One of the police dogs was caught, set alight and beaten to death. When police saw they were surrounded by the students, they fired shots into the crowd, and pandemonium broke out.[4]
Colonel Kleingeld drew his handgun and fired a shot, causing panic and chaos. Students started screaming and running and more gunshots were fired. The first person to be shot was Hastings Ndlovu, followed by 12-year-old Hector Pieterson. The photograph taken of his body became a symbol of police brutality.
The rioting continued and 23 people, including two white people, died on the first day in Soweto. Among them was Dr Melville Edelstein, who had devoted his life to social welfare among blacks.[9] He was stoned to death by the mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming 'Beware Afrikaaners'.
The violence escalated as the students panicked; bottle stores and beerhalls were targeted as many believed that alcohol was used by the government to control black people. The violence abated by nightfall. Police vans and armored vehicles patrolled the streets throughout the night.
Emergency clinics were swamped with injured and bloody children. It is not known how many injured children sustained bullet wounds because doctors refused to collect such details for fear that police would target the families of such children. In many cases bullet wounds were indicated on hospital records as abscesses.[4]
Emotions ran high after the massacre on June 16. Hostility between students and the police was intense, with officers shooting at random and more people joining the protesters. The township youth had been frustrated and angry for a long time and the riots became the opportunity to bring to light their grievances.
The 1,500 heavily armed police officers deployed to Soweto on June 17 carried weapons including automatic rifles, stun guns, and carbines.[4] They drove around in armoured vehicles with helicopters monitoring the area from the sky. The South African Army was also order on standby as a tactical measure to show military force. Crowd control methods used by South African police at the time included mainly dispersement techniques, and many of the officers shot indiscriminately, killing many people.

Casualties

The accounts of how many people died vary from 200 to 600[10], with Reuters news agency currently reporting there were "more than 500" fatalities in the 1976 riots. The original government figure claimed only 23 students were killed. The number of wounded was estimated to be over a thousand men, women, and children. The government also claimed it gave no order to fire

Political context

The repression of the African National Congress and its allies in the 1960s following the Rivonia Trial and the unsuccessful intervention in Zimbabwe's liberation war led to a brief period of relative internal peace in South Africa, but by the mid 1970s the victories of the MPLA and Frelimo in Angola and Mozambique showed that white colonialists could be beaten by military force and at the same time a new Black Consciousness Movement was giving new confidence to young blacks. In this context the Afrikaans issue was, in the view of many participants in the uprising, merely the spark that set the tinder alight - young blacks were looking for the issue over which to confront the apartheid state.
The political context cannot be properly understood unless one places it in a regional setting. The Cold War had resulted in a number of local proxy wars when the various liberation struggles became linked with the global power balance between the USA and the USSR. In this regard Southern Africa was a local theatre of the Cold War. The perceived victory of the liberation forces in neighbouring Mozambique thus provided a trigger for the South African youth to take to the streets.
After the uprising, the African National Congress (which had been rebuilding its underground organization in the country) was quick to offer the young militants an opportunity to receive military training and the ANC also rapidly sought to provide a political focus to the rioting by distributing leaflets calling for the death of the National Party's Prime Minister and the freedom of Nelson Mandela. By November 1976 Murphy Morobe, one of the original leaders of the student revolt was back in Soweto, having received military training, attempting to build a cell of Umkhonto we Sizwe the ANC's military wing.

Aftermath

The aftermath of the uprising established the leading role of the ANC in the liberation struggle, as it was the body best able to channel and organize students seeking revenge and the overthrow of apartheid. So, although the BCM's ideas had been important in creating the climate that gave the students the confidence to strike out, it was the ANC's non-racialism which came to dominate the discourse of liberation amongst blacks.
The Soweto Uprising was a turning point in the liberation struggle in South Africa. Prior to this event, the liberation struggle was being fought outside of South Africa, mostly in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), South West Africa (later Namibia) and Angola. But from this moment onwards, the struggle became internal and the government security forces were split between external operations and internal operations.
For the state the uprising marked the most fundamental challenge yet to apartheid and the economic (see below) and political instability it caused was heightened by the strengthening international boycott. It was a further 14 years before Mandela was released, but at no point was the state able to restore the relative peace and social stability of the early 1970s as black resistance grew.
Many white South African citizens were outraged at the government's actions in Soweto, and about 300 white students from the University of the Witwatersrand marched through Johannesburg's city centre in protest of the killing of children. Black workers went on strike as well and joined them as the campaign progressed. Riots also broke out in the black townships of other cities in South Africa.
Student organizations directed the energy and anger of the youth toward political resistance. Students in Thembisa organized a successful and non-violent solidarity march, but a similar protest held in Kagiso led to police stopping a group of participants and forcing them to retreat, before killing at least five people while waiting for reinforcements. The violence only died down on June 18. The University of Zululand's records and administration buildings were set ablaze, and 33 people died in incidents in Port Elizabeth in August. In Cape Town 92 people died between August and September.
Most of the bloodshed had abated by the close of 1976, but by that time the death toll stood at more than 600.
The continued clashes in Soweto caused economic instability. The South African rand devalued fast and the government was plunged into a crisis.

Town Ships

In South Africa, the term township usually refers to the (often underdeveloped) urban living areas that, under Apartheid, were reserved for non-whites (principally black Africans and Coloureds, but also working class Indians). Townships were usually built on the periphery of towns and cities.Apartheid townships

During the Apartheid Era blacks were evicted from properties that were in areas designated as "white only" and forced to move into townships. Legislation that enabled the Apartheid government to do this included the Group Areas Act. Forced removal from city centres to townships has continued in post-apartheid South Africa. The difference is that under apartheid all black people faced forced removals to townships while now it is only the poor living in shack settlements that face eviction to townships on the peripheries of cities. In Cape Town and Durban this has given rise to mass resistance.[1]
The new townships being built to house people forcibly removed from shack settlements have much smaller houses than those built under apartheid and are often, but not always, even further from city centres than apartheid era townships. However some old townships have seen rapid development since 1994, with, for instance, wealthy, and middle-income areas growing up in parts of Soweto, Chatsworth etc.
Townships for non-whites were also called locations or lokasie (Afrikaans translation), and are often still referred to by that name in smaller towns. The term "Kasie", a popular short version of "Lokasie" is also used sometimes to refer to townships.
Townships sometimes have large informal settlements nearby.
Despite their origins in apartheid South Africa, today the terms township, location and informal settlements are not used pejoratively. However policy makers are, as in the 1950s, once again using the term 'slums' in a highly pejorative way.
Most South African towns and cities will have at least one township associated with them. Today they are often viewed as just one of the many suburbs that an urban area might have.
Tourists should not be misled by what at first they might think is a dirty conurbation. Whilst the majority of township residents are poor, the cleanliness of their homes is often immaculate.
When you see hundreds of finely dressed African workers and shoppers in the town centres, tourists are often surprised to find that the vast majority still live in the townships.