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Southern Africa. Southern Africa is marked by sub-tropical, semiarid and temperate climates, in contrast to the tropical savannas and dense jungles of Central Africa. Dramatic landscapes such as, Victoria Falls, the Fish River Canyon Park, the Drakensberg Mountains and…. Map. Directions.
Oct 6, 2023 · Map of Southern Africa. Click to see large. Description: This map shows governmental boundaries, countries and their capitals in West Southern Africa. Countries of Southern Africa: Angola , Tanzania , Zambia , Botswana , Democratic Republic of the Congo , Malawi , Mauritius , Mozambique , Namibia , Seychelles , Lesotho , Madagascar , South ...
- Overview
- Early humans and Stone Age society
- The Khoisan
- The spread of Bantu languages
- Food production
- The rise of more complex states
Southern Africa, southernmost region of the African continent, comprising the countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The island nation of Madagascar is excluded because of its distinct language and cultural heritage.
The interior of Southern Africa consists of a series of undulating plateaus that cover most of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana and extend into central Angola. Contiguous with this are uplands in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Coastal mountains and escarpments, flanking the high ground, are found in northern Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and along the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border. Coastal plains abut the Indian Ocean in Mozambique and the Atlantic in Angola and Namibia.
The Kalahari desert forms the central depression of the Southern African plateau. Its elevation rises to the Great Escarpment, which flanks the plateau in an almost unbroken line from the Zambezi River to Angola. Southern Zimbabwe and much of South Africa are within a region of scrublands and grasslands known as the veld. To the southeast of the veld is the Drakensberg range, which includes the region’s highest peak—Lesotho’s Mount Ntlenyana, at 11,424 feet (3,482 metres). In Namibia the coastal margin includes the extremely dry Namib desert, which, in the south, merges eastward into the great sandy expanse of the Kalahari.
The region is generally drained eastward toward the Indian Ocean, a pattern exemplified by the largest rivers, the Zambezi and Limpopo. The Zambezi is the longest river in the region, and its catchment includes much of Angola, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The only major river flowing into the Atlantic Ocean is the Orange, which drains parts of South Africa, Lesotho, and Namibia.
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The controversies in Southern African history begin with the discovery of a fossilized hominin skull in a limestone cave at Taung near the Harts River north of Kimberley in 1924, followed in 1936 by discoveries in similar caves in the Transvaal (now Limpopo and Gauteng provinces) and Northern Cape province, in South Africa. Other significant hominin finds were made in the Sterkfontein Valley (in Gauteng province) beginning in the 1940s. For some time the significance of these finds and their relationship to the evolution of early humans were unappreciated, perhaps because the finds could not be dated, and stone tools—long regarded as the defining characteristic of early humans—had not been found with them. Since that time, similar but datable discoveries in eastern Africa as well as discoveries in the Makapansgat Valley in South Africa have made it possible to place the South African remains in sequence and identify them as australopithecines, upright-walking creatures who are the earliest human ancestors. The australopithecines who roamed the highland savanna plains of Southern Africa date from about three million to one million years ago. There can be little doubt that for hundreds of thousands of years Southern Africa, like eastern Africa, was in the forefront of human development and technological innovation.
Controversies remain, however. The connections between australopithecines and earlier potentially hominin forms remain unclear, while a number of species of australopithecines have been identified. Their evolution into the species Homo habilis and then into the species Homo erectus—which displayed the larger brain, upright posture, teeth, and hands resembling those of modern humans and from whom Homo sapiens almost certainly evolved—is still fiercely debated. Homo erectus appears to have roamed the open savanna lands of eastern and Southern Africa, collecting fruits and berries—and perhaps roots—and either scavenging or hunting. Acheulean industry appeared during the Early Stone Age (c. 2,500,000 to 150,000 years ago) and was characterized by the use of simple stone hand axes, choppers, and cleavers. First evident about 1,500,000 years ago, it seems to have spread from eastern Africa throughout the continent and also to Europe and Asia during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch, reaching Southern Africa about 1,000,000 years ago; Acheulean industry remained dominant for more than 1,000,000 years.
During this time early humans also developed those social, cognitive, and linguistic traits that distinguish Homo sapiens. Some of the earliest fossils associated with Homo sapiens, dated from about 120,000 to 80,000 years ago, have been found in South Africa at the Klasies River Mouth Cave in Eastern Cape, while at Border Cave on the South Africa–Swaziland border a date of about 90,000 years ago has been claimed for similar Middle Stone Age (150,000 to 30,000 years ago) skeletal remains.
With the emergence of Homo sapiens, experimentation and regional diversification displaced the undifferentiated Acheulean tool kit, and a far more efficient small blade (also called microlithic) technology evolved. Through the controlled use of fire, denser, more mobile populations could move for the first time into heavily wooded areas and caves. Wood, bark, and leather were used for tools and clothing, while vegetable foods were also probably more important than their archaeological survival suggests.
Some scholars believe that the addition of organized hunting to gathering and scavenging transformed human society. The large number of distinctive Late Stone Age (30,000 to 2,000 years ago) industries that emerged reflect increasing specialization as hunter-gatherers exploited different environments, often moving seasonally between them, and developed different subsistence strategies. As in many parts of the world, changes in technology seem to mark a shift to the consumption of smaller game, fish, invertebrates, and plants. Late Stone Age peoples used bows and arrows and a variety of snares and traps for hunting, as well as grindstones and digging sticks for gathering plant food; with hooks, barbed spears, and wicker baskets they also were able to catch fish and thus exploit rivers, lakeshores, and seacoasts more effectively.
Despite the ever-increasing number of radiocarbon dates available for the many Late Stone Age sites excavated in Southern Africa, the reasons for changed consumption patterns and variations in technology are poorly understood. Until the 1960s, population explosion and migration were the common explanations; subsequent explanations have stressed adaptation. Yet the reasons for adaptation are equally unclear and the model equally controversial. Environmental changes do not seem to have been directly responsible, while the evidence for social change is elusive. Nevertheless, the appearance of cave art, careful burials, and ostrich-eggshell beads for adornment suggests more sophisticated behaviour and new patterns of culture. These developments apparently are associated with the emergence between 20,000 and 15,000 bce of the earliest of the historically recognizable populations of Southern Africa: the Pygmy, San, and Khoekhoe peoples, who were probably genetically related to the ancient population that h evolved in the African subcontinent.
In the long run these new groups of herders and farmers transformed the hunter-gatherer way of life. Initially, however, distinctions between early pastoralists, farmers, and hunter-gatherers were not overwhelming, and in many areas the various groups coexisted. The first evidence of pastoralism in the subcontinent occurs on a scattering of sites in the more arid west; there the bones of sheep and goats, accompanied by stone tools and pottery, date to some 2,000 years ago, about 200 years before iron-using farmers first arrived in the better-watered eastern half of the region. It is with the origins of these food-producing communities and their evolution into the contemporary societies of Southern Africa that much of the precolonial history of the subcontinent has been concerned.
When Europeans first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, they encountered herding people, whom they called Hottentots (a name now considered pejorative) but who called themselves Khoekhoe, meaning “men of men.” At that time they inhabited the fertile southwestern Cape region as well as its more arid hinterland to the northwest, where rainfall did not permit crop cultivation, but they may once have grazed their stock on the more luxuriant central grasslands of Southern Africa. Linguistic evidence suggests that the languages of the later Khoekhoe (the so-called Khoisan languages) originated in one of the hunter-gatherer languages of northern Botswana. In the colonial period, destitute Khoekhoe often reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence; herders and hunters were also frequently physically indistinguishable and used identical stone tools. Thus, the Dutch, and many subsequent social scientists, believed they belonged to a single population following different modes of subsistence: hunting, foraging, beachcombing, and herding. For this reason the groups are often referred to as Khoisan, a compound word referring to Khoekhoe and San, as the Nama called hunter-gatherers without livestock (Bushmen, in the terminology of the colonists, is now considered pejorative).
The archaeological remains of nomadic pastoralists living in impermanent polities are frustratingly sparse, but in the upper Zambezi River valley, southwestern Zimbabwe, and Botswana, herding and pottery appear late in the 1st millennium bce. Cattle and milking appear somewhat later than small stock and were perhaps acquired from iron-using farmers in western Zimbabwe or northeastern South Africa. The loosely organized herders expanded rapidly, driven by their need for fresh grazing areas. Along with pastoralism and pottery came other signs of change: domestic dogs, changes in stone tool kits, altered settlement patterns, larger ostrich-eggshell beads, and the appearance of marine shells in the interior, which suggests the existence of long-distance trade.
Most of Southern Africa’s early agricultural communities shared a common culture, which spread across the region remarkably quickly from the 2nd century ce. By the second half of the 1st millennium ce, farming communities were living in relatively large, semipermanent villages. They cultivated sorghum, millet, and legumes and herded sheep, goats, and some cattle; made pottery and fashioned iron tools to turn the soil and cut their crops; and engaged in long-distance trade. Salt, iron implements, pottery, and possibly copper ornaments passed from hand to hand and were traded widely. Some communities settled near exceptionally good salt, metal, or clay deposits or became known for their specialist craftsmen.
Archaeologists are divided over whether all these cultural and economic attributes arrived with a single group of new immigrants speaking a new language or resulted from a more piecemeal development of different skills and the adoption of new techniques by indigenous hunter-gatherers, as has already been suggested in the case of herding among the Khoekhoe. Moreover, archaeologists disagree about the routes and modes of dispersal as well as its timing. It seems likely, however, that a movement of immigrants into Southern Africa occurred in two streams and was part of a wider expansion of populations speaking Bantu languages that ultimately derived from the Niger-Congo languages of western Africa some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.
“Eastern-stream” Bantu speakers, associated with the earliest farming communities in the well-watered eastern half of Southern Africa, date from the 2nd to the 5th century ce. Similar pottery has been found stretching from northeastern Tanzania and coastal Kenya through southern Zimbabwe into eastern South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. These early farmers settled on arable soils along coastal dunes, rivers, and valley basins. Where possible, they exploited marine resources, planted cereals, and worked iron; cattle and long-distance trade were insignificant.
Although at first the impact of food production was probably less momentous than is often assumed, agriculture combined with pastoralism and metallurgy could support far larger settled communities than previously had been possible and enabled a more complex social and political organization to develop. Cattle raising led to increased social stratification between rich and poor and established new divisions of labour between men and women; the accumulation of cattle and the continuous site occupation inherent in cereal production enabled the storage of wealth and the deployment of more organized political power. Archaeologists argue about how easily groups made the transition from a way of life based on hunting and gathering to one centred on herding or agriculture, but an increasing number of excavations suggest that these boundaries were often permeable. The relationships established among hunters, herders, and agriculturalists over more than 2,000 years of socioeconomic change ranged from total resistance to total assimilation. For the indigenous people of Southern Africa the frontiers between different modes of subsistence presented new dangers and opportunities.
As the new culture spread, larger, more successful farming communities were established; in many areas the new way of life was adopted by the hunter-gatherers. Even in the apparently inhospitable and isolated Kalahari it is now clear that there was intense interaction and exchange between hunter-gatherers and food producers, leading to the development of hybrid amalgams of pastoralism, agriculture, and foraging. Contemporary Bantu-speaking peoples of Southern Africa are genetically very similar to the Late Stone Age people of Africa; their close relationship also is evidenced by the presence of Khoisan “click” sounds (in Xhosa, Zulu, and Shona) and loanwords in southeastern Bantu and from the iron and stone tools, cattle and wild animal bones, pottery, and ostrich-eggshell beads on early farming sites such as Broederstroom in east-central South Africa and Hola-Hola in Mozambique.
From about the turn of the 1st millennium ce, in some areas of what are now central Zambia, southeastern Zimbabwe, Malawi, and eastern South Africa, changes in ceramic style were paralleled by a change in the location and nature of settlements. More sophisticated techniques of ironworking, more extensive gold and copper mining, and a great increase in stone building suggest the evolution of more complex state structures, the growth of social inequalities, and the emergence of new religious and spiritual ideas. These changes were, however, neither simultaneous nor evenly spread.
The nature of these transitions and the differences among the sites are still poorly understood, and, again, archaeologists disagree as to whether the changes can be explained by local developments or are best explained by the arrival of migrating populations. In part the controversy may reflect regional differences. In most of Zambia and Malawi a sharply distinguishable pottery style appears at this time, probably from southeastern Congo (Kinshasa), and forms the basis of the ceramics made by several different societies. Farther west, however, there are greater continuities with the earlier wares, while in southeastern Africa locally driven increases in population and cattle—which led to expansion into less favourable environments but which also brought new ideas and new methods of political control—may hold the key.
Jul 11, 2023 · Physical map of South Africa showing major cities, terrain, national parks, rivers, and surrounding countries with international borders and outline maps. Key facts about South Africa.
- 1,214,470.00 km 2
- 1,219,090.00 km 2
- Republic of South Africa
The map shows South Africa and surrounding countries with international borders, major geographic features, the location of the national capitals: Cape Town, Pretoria, and Bloemfontein; province capitals, major cities, main roads, railroads, and major airports.
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The southern part of the African continent is called Southern Africa, also to distinguish the region from the state of South Africa, the southernmost country on the continent. According to the United Nations classification of geographical regions, Southern African countries are:
May 4, 2024 · English: Map of South Africa, with provinces, neighbouring countries and oceans labelled in English. Based on File:Map of South Africa with provincial borders.svg.
