40 Fun Facts About South African History

Vasco da Gama named the coast of today's KwaZulu-Natal 'Natal' after sighting it on which day in 1497?

Christmas Day gave the region its name, since Natal refers in Portuguese to the birth of Christ. Vasco da Gama saw the coast on 25 December 1497 on his way to India, and the provincial coat of arms later carried a Star of Bethlehem.

South Africa's longest river was named in 1779 by Robert Gordon, a VOC garrison commander, after which royal dynasty?

The House of Orange, the Dutch ruling family, was honoured by Gordon on a trip into the interior from Cape Town. At 2,432 km the Orange River is the longest in the country and feeds irrigation and hydroelectric schemes.

Mandela cast his 1994 vote at Ohlange school, founded in 1901, to lay a wreath on which first ANC president's grave?

John Dube founded Ohlange with his wife Nokutela as the Zulu Christian Industrial School and is buried in its grounds. Mandela picked the school deliberately so that his first vote honoured the man who first led the movement.

Which future British prime minister, captured as a war correspondent in 1899, escaped a Boer prison camp in Pretoria?

Winston Churchill was covering the war for the Morning Post when Boer shelling derailed his armoured train at Chieveley. That December he slipped out, hid in a mine and stowed away on freight trains, and the escape attracted much publicity.

Women who marched on Pretoria against pass laws in 1956 sang that to strike a woman is to strike what?

A rock, the marchers sang, is what the government had struck, and the line became the slogan of women's resistance. Some 20,000 women delivered anti-pass petitions to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956, now National Women's Day.

A teenage prophetess's 1856 visions led the Xhosa to kill what, expecting the dead to rise and expel the settlers?

Their cattle, the source of Xhosa wealth and food, were slaughtered on the word of 15-year-old Nongqawuse, and crops were destroyed too. The famine that followed in 1856–57 devastated Xhosaland on the eastern frontier.

The 1948 election that brought the National Party and apartheid to power was won despite the party doing what?

Winning fewer votes than its rival did not stop Daniel Malan's Nationalists: the United Party polled well over a tenth more votes, but first-past-the-post and over-weighted rural seats handed the Nationalists a majority of seats.

In 1893 a young Mohandas Gandhi was thrown off a train for refusing to leave a first-class carriage at which station?

Pietermaritzburg's station is where Gandhi sat shivering all night, weighing whether to go home to India or protest for his rights; he chose to protest, boarded the next day, and stayed in South Africa for 21 years.

At the 1838 Battle of Blood River, 464 Voortrekkers held off thousands of Zulu from inside what defensive formation?

A wagon laager, ox wagons drawn into a closed ring, let the trekkers fire from cover at attackers who could not reach them; they had drilled the tactic every evening on the march. The date, 16 December, became sacred to Afrikaners.

Mandela presented the 1995 Rugby World Cup in a Springbok shirt carrying which number, the same as the captain's?

6 was the number on the shirt and cap Mandela wore to hand the Webb Ellis Cup to Pienaar, a scene later ranked 70th in a British television list of the greatest sports moments. The Springboks had beaten New Zealand 15–12 after extra time.

Which animal, made of wood covered in gold foil, is the most famous artefact from the medieval kingdom of Mapungubwe?

A rhinoceros of gold foil over wood lay in a royal grave on Mapungubwe Hill, near where the Shashe meets the Limpopo. The kingdom exported gold and ivory to the east coast in exchange for glass beads, cloth and glazed ceramics.

At which 1879 battle did a Zulu army wipe out a British column, the army's worst defeat by an indigenous foe?

Isandlwana, on 22 January 1879, saw some 20,000 Zulu warriors overrun about 1,800 British, colonial and native troops less than two weeks into the invasion of Zululand. Britain had to rebuild its force before taking Ulundi in July.

The 16 June anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising, which began as a school protest, is marked by which public holiday?

Youth Day remembers the schoolchildren who marched against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which forced black schools to teach half their subjects in Afrikaans. Internationally the same date is the Day of the African Child.

Which neighbour, run by South Africa as South West Africa from 1915, finally became independent in March 1990?

Namibia was a German colony seized by South African troops in 1915, then held as a League of Nations mandate that Pretoria refused to give up for decades. The United Nations had renamed the territory in 1968.

What could the Truth and Reconciliation Commission grant someone who fully disclosed a politically motivated crime?

Amnesty from prosecution, civil as well as criminal, was the commission's trade for truth: applicants had to show their acts were political and proportionate and hold nothing back. The first hearing was televised live on 15 April 1996.

Besides resentment of British rule, which 1834 decision across the empire helped push Boer families onto the Great Trek?

The abolition of slavery across British colonies in 1834 was felt as a blow by slave-owning Boers, who also resented anglicisation. Organised trek parties began crossing the Vaal in January 1836 to find land beyond British reach.

Which Zulu king had Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and his party put to death in February 1838 after a land treaty?

Dingane, who took the throne after the assassination of his half-brother Shaka in 1828, killed Retief's delegation at his royal kraal after signing over land, then sent regiments against the trekker camps near Weenen.

From 1860, about 200,000 indentured labourers from India were shipped to Natal mainly to work on which crop?

Sugar cane plantations on the humid Natal coast took the first shiploads, and later arrivals went to coal mines and railways. Their descendants make Durban one of the largest ethnically Indian cities outside India.

How many Victoria Crosses were awarded for the defence of Rorke's Drift in 1879, a record for a single action?

Eleven Victoria Crosses went to a garrison of just over 150 British and colonial troops who held the mission station against 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors. The 1964 film Zulu dramatised the stand for a new generation.

Which Zulu king, deposed after the British burned his capital Ulundi in 1879, was exiled to Cape Town and then London?

Cetshwayo had opposed the war and tried in vain to make peace, and his dignified bearing in London won him public sympathy. In 1883 Britain tried to restore him to part of Zululand, but the attempt failed.

The First Boer War ended with a Boer victory on which summit in February 1881, among Britain's most humiliating defeats?

Majuba Hill was occupied overnight by General Colley's 405 men, who were then picked off by Boer marksmen climbing unseen through dead ground; Colley himself was killed. The British lost 285 men killed, captured or wounded.

Which British campaigner exposed conditions in the Boer War concentration camps where thousands of Boer civilians died?

Emily Hobhouse, a Cornish welfare campaigner, knew nothing of the camps when she sailed for South Africa, then toured them with a single truck of supplies. Her report shamed the government into sending a commission under Millicent Fawcett.

Which Boer general who fought Britain in 1899–1902 became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa in 1910?

Louis Botha had commanded Boer forces against the British, yet within eight years of the peace he led the new dominion and sent troops to seize German South West Africa in the First World War. He died in office in 1919.

In which year was the African National Congress founded in Bloemfontein, as the South African Native National Congress?

1912 makes the ANC older than most of the governments it later faced: it was founded on 8 January to defend black rights after the Union excluded them, and took its present name in 1923. It would not hold power for another 82 years.

The Natives Land Act of 1913 initially confined black land ownership in the Union to roughly what share of the country?

7% of the land was reserved for the black majority, a share later raised to 13%, leaving most people able to live legally on only a sliver of the country. Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa recorded families evicted from white farms.

Which South African prime minister helped draft the preamble to the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in 1945?

Jan Smuts, a Boer general turned British field marshal, was the only signatory of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to also sign the UN Charter. He lost power three years later to the party that built apartheid.

The 1922 Rand Rebellion on the Witwatersrand gold mines was an armed uprising by which group of workers?

White mineworkers rose up when mine owners, hit by a falling gold price, moved to put cheaper black labour into skilled jobs; strikers formed armed units and fought police and troops in March 1922. The revolt was crushed within days.

The anti-pass campaign that ended in the Sharpeville shootings of 21 March 1960 was organised by which breakaway party?

Pan Africanist Congress founder Robert Sobukwe urged people to leave their passes at home and present themselves for arrest, and about 5,000 gathered at the Sharpeville police station. Sobukwe led his own march in Soweto.

The 1977 Gleneagles Agreement committed Commonwealth governments to discourage what with apartheid South Africa?

Sporting contact was the target because rugby and cricket tours mattered so much to white South Africa; the leaders signed at a Scottish hotel in Perthshire, reinforcing their 1971 Singapore Declaration against racism.

Which coalition of hundreds of civic, church and union groups was launched in 1983 to oppose the tricameral parliament?

United Democratic Front activists rallied under the slogan 'UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides' against a constitution that gave Coloured and Indian voters token chambers while excluding black people. It dissolved in 1991 once the ANC was legal.

Who entered the April 1994 election so late that their name had to be added to the printed ballots with stickers?

Inkatha Freedom Party leaders dropped their boycott on 19 April, days before voting, after months of deadly clashes with ANC supporters. The party went on to win KwaZulu-Natal and a place in the Government of National Unity.

Who was the only black player in the Springbok squad that won the 1995 Rugby World Cup on home soil?

Chester Williams, a winger nicknamed 'The Black Pearl', scored four tries in the quarter-final and was later portrayed by McNeil Hendricks in Invictus, whose cast he also coached. He died of a suspected heart attack in 2019, aged 49.

Which state herald designed South Africa's six-colour flag, adopted in March 1994 as a stopgap and then kept?

Fred Brownell's design, its green 'Y' converging into one band, was settled only a week before adoption and put on probation under the interim constitution; on 28 September 1995 the Constitutional Assembly voted to keep it unchanged.

South Africa's national anthem, a 1997 hybrid of 'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika' and 'Die Stem', is sung in how many languages?

Five languages follow one another: Xhosa and Zulu in the first stanza, then Sesotho, Afrikaans and finally English, and every singer uses all of them whatever their mother tongue. Mandela insisted the old 'Die Stem' verse stay in.

The motto on South Africa's 2000 coat of arms, meaning 'diverse people unite', is written in which extinct language?

ǀXam, a Khoisan language, replaced the Latin 'Ex Unitate Vires' ('From unity, strength') of the old arms. Above the motto stand a secretary bird and a protea, with a spear and knobkierie laid down to signify peace.

Which architect designed Pretoria's sandstone Union Buildings, where South African presidents are inaugurated?

Herbert Baker, commissioned in 1909 before the Union even existed, set the 285-metre building on Meintjieskop with two wings and twin domed towers standing for English and Afrikaans. Mandela was sworn in there in 1994.

At noon on 16 December each year, a shaft of sunlight through the Voortrekker Monument's dome strikes what?

A cenotaph in the lower hall catches the ray, which lights the words 'Ons vir Jou, Suid-Afrika' ('We for Thee, South Africa') on the anniversary of Blood River. The granite monument outside Pretoria was inaugurated on that date in 1949.

The 1906 Bambatha Rebellion in Natal, crushed at Mome Gorge, was sparked by the introduction of which new levy?

A poll tax of £1 a head, on top of the existing hut tax, was meant to push Zulu men into wage labour for white farms and mines. The suppression killed 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu and 36 colonial soldiers, and Bambatha's own fate was disputed.

Hosting at short notice in place of Kenya, South Africans saw their team beat Tunisia 2–0 to win which 1996 tournament?

Africa Cup of Nations glory came in the first edition expanded to 16 teams, with a 2–0 final win over Tunisia. Holders Nigeria pulled out at the last moment under pressure from the dictator Sani Abacha, leaving a field of 15.

Which Cape governor gives his name to South Africa's second-oldest town, founded in 1679 and famed for oaks and wine?

Simon van der Stel planted the oaks that earned Stellenbosch its Afrikaans nickname Eikestad, 'City of Oaks'. The town, whose name means 'Van der Stel's forest', is a showcase of Cape Dutch architecture at the heart of the Cape winelands.