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South Africa has a mixed environmental heritage. Its national parks, reserves, and botanical gardens are among the best-managed conservation areas in the world, but there are serious environmental problems too. The most serious environmental threats are uncontrolled livestock grazing, rampant urban development, and surface disturbance and pollution associated with mining. Many problems originated from political and socioeconomic policies associated with the apartheid period that ended in 1994. Apartheid policies forcing black people to live in separate homelands, called bantustans, led to overpopulation in these areas. Intensive settlement, livestock grazing, fuelwood cutting, and overfarming on limited areas of land in turn led to soil erosion, land degradation, deforestation, desertification, and bush encroachment (proliferation of bush vegetation of little value for grazing). These problems are prevalent in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Air pollution is significant, due to the widespread use of open fires for cooking and heating. Carbon dioxide emissions from power plants are another major cause of air pollution, leading to acid rain in the High Veld region. Pollution is also severe in Mpumalanga Province, where the stable character of the atmosphere prevents pollution from dispersing. Concern for the environment has grown since the country’s emergence from apartheid, and efforts are under way to save a number of endangered species, including the black rhinoceros, the pangolin, and the humpback dolphin. Extensive areas have been reforested to conserve soil. South Africa’s extensive system of protected areas includes several national parks as well as hundreds of nature reserves and a number of private game reserves. Together, these areas protect about 5.3 percent (2004) of the country’s total land area. The government has actively encouraged the voluntary participation of private landowners in the protected area system, which represents an important source of income for the country. In some cases the government has chosen to raise funds by selling off some of its parks to private developers.
The land now known as South Africa was originally populated by San hunter-gatherers. About 2,000 years ago people in some of these communities, the Khoikhoi, began raising livestock when they acquired animals from Bantu-speaking peoples moving southward across the Limpopo. These Bantu peoples today account for three-quarters of the total population. White settlement began in 1652 with the arrival of the Dutch, who gradually spread into the interior as farmers. They lived isolated lives, developed their own language, called Afrikaans, and increasingly segregated themselves from indigenous Bantu peoples, whom they encountered in the interior. French Huguenot and German settlers were later absorbed into this group, known as Afrikaners. British settlers arrived beginning in the early 1800s, and Indians came in the late 19th and early 20th century. The majority of Indians were brought as indentured laborers to work on the sugar plantations of Natal. A substantial Portuguese minority developed in the late 20th century. The offspring of whites and slaves imported by the Dutch from Southeast Asia and other parts of Africa, and later the offspring of whites and Bantu peoples, created a sizable Coloured, or mixed-race, population. Under South Africa’s 20th-century policies of racial segregation, known as apartheid, the black majority population was forced to live in particular areas, called bantustans. In order to work in urban areas, some blacks were permitted to live in townships on the fringes of cities. Bantustans and townships became greatly overpopulated, and were neglected by the white government. With the end of apartheid in the 1990s, such exclusionary policies ended and bantustans and townships have been incorporated into provincial and civic administrations.
The estimated total population of South Africa in 2007 was 43,997,828. The overall population density (2007 estimate) is 36 persons per sq km (93 per sq mi), but this varies widely across the country. Rural population densities are highest in the former bantustans and much lower in historically white-populated areas of commercial farming, especially in semiarid western areas. Some 58 percent of the population is urban, including most of the whites, Asians, and Coloureds. The largest cities in South Africa include Johannesburg (3,225,812, 2001), the commercial capital and metropolis of the goldfields; Durban (3,090,122), the country’s leading port; Cape Town (2,893,247), the legislative capital; Pretoria (1,985,983), the administrative capital; Port Elizabeth (1,005,779), an industrial city and major port; and Soweto (858,649), a former township outside Johannesburg.
South Africa has a multiracial and multiethnic population. Blacks constitute 79 percent of the population. The main black ethnic groups are Zulu, Xhosa, North Sotho, Tswana, South Sotho, and Tsonga. Whites account for 10 percent of the population: More than half are Afrikaners, and most of the rest are of British descent. Coloured people account for 9 percent of the population, and Asians (mainly Indians) 2 percent. The white, Asian, and Coloured populations are highly urbanized. The largest concentrations of Asians and Coloured people are found in KwaZulu-Natal and the three Cape provinces, but lesser numbers of both groups live in Gauteng. English-speaking whites and Afrikaners live in all cities, but Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, and Pietermaritzburg have more English speakers, whereas Afrikaners are predominant in Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and many of the industrial and mining towns on the Witwatersrand. More than half of the blacks are urbanized, mostly living in formal, low-income townships or informal, rapidly growing settlements. Millions of blacks still live in rural communities in the ten former bantustans. The black population of Johannesburg and the rest of Gauteng Province is ethnically mixed, but in other cities one group tends to be dominant: Zulu in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, Sotho in Bloemfontein, and Xhosa in Port Elizabeth, East London, and Cape Town.
Until apartheid ended in 1994 only Afrikaans and English were official languages, although they represent the home languages of only a fraction of the total population. Afrikaans is spoken not only by Afrikaners but also by many Coloured people. English is the primary language of many whites, but also is spoken by most Asians. The 1994 constitution added nine African languages to the list of recognized, official languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho or Pedi), Tswana, Sesotho (Southern Sotho), Tsonga, Venda, Ndebele, and siSwati. Some of these African languages are mutually understood and many blacks can speak two or more of them, in addition to English and Afrikaans. Together these 11 languages are the primary languages of 98 percent of South Africans. Many Indians also speak Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Gujarati, and Urdu. In practice English and, to a lesser extent, Afrikaans retain a dominant position, with English as the main medium of instruction in schools and most universities. Afrikaners attach great value to their language, however, and struggle to keep it as a medium of instruction and to resist any threat to undermine its status.
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