Across the complex landscape of the southern part of the African continent, human beings have carved a conflictual history, one that in the last several hundred years has witnessed particularly dramatic scenes: heroic accomplishments set against cruel examples – the apartheid system itself being the principal case in point – of ‘man's inhumanity to man [sic]’. The present chapter will sketch this experience, tracing the long arc of history of those peoples who would ultimately form the citizenry of present-day South Africa. It must be borne in mind, however, that for much of the period covered in this chapter, the lines on the map that eventually came to encompass ‘South Africa’ did not exist: only with the benefit of hindsight can we see, with any clarity, that country ‘in the-making’. Up until a very late date, a diversity of ‘histories’ cut across the territory that is now South Africa, these histories fatefully intersecting in ways that deeply affected and qualified their independent trajectories, even as they also retained and reflected something of their own semi-autonomous structure, dynamics and inner meaning.

This chapter will, in turn, set the stage for an initial focus in the succeeding one (Chapter 2) on the attempt to forge one kind of synthesis of these diversities: the extreme form of institutionalization of racial supremacy represented by the ascendancy, from 1948, of the National Party and its authoritarian apartheid state.