South Africa
Capital: Pretoria (executive) · Southern Africa
The rainbow nation at Africa's tip — the Cradle of Humankind, San rock-art galleries, the Zulu kingdom's legacy and eleven-plus official languages.
Ethnic communities
- Zulu (amaZulu)Largest nation; Shaka's kingdom, ceremonial life at eNyokeni
- Xhosa (amaXhosa)Eastern Cape; ulwaluko initiation, praise poetry (izibongo)
- Basotho, Bapedi, BatswanaSotho-Tswana highveld cultures
- Venda & TsongaLimpopo cultures; Lake Fundudzi sacred sites, domba dance
- San & KhoekhoeFirst peoples; world's oldest continuous art tradition
- NdebeleFamed geometric house painting and beadwork
More communities of South Africa
- Bapedi · Sekhukhune's Limpopo kingdom
- Batswana · Kgotla-democracy communities of the northwest
- Basotho · Free State-Lesotho blanket-and-pony culture
- Tsonga-Shangaan · Limpopo lowveld nation of xibelani dance
- Swazi (amaSwati) · Mpumalanga kin of the kingdom
- Venda (VhaVenda) · Sacred-lake nation of domba python dance
- Ndebele (Southern) · Geometric mural and beadwork artists
- Ndebele (Northern) · Limpopo kin of Mzilikazi's road
- San (ǂKhomani, !Xun, Khwe) · First peoples (full profile)
- Nama & Griqua · Khoekhoe nations of the northern Cape
- Cape Coloured communities · Creole heritage of the mother city
- Cape Malay · Bo-Kaap's Muslim culture of Indonesian exile roots
- Mpondo & Thembu · Wild Coast kingdoms within the Xhosa world
- Bhaca & Hlubi · Mfecane-era nations of the midlands
- Indian South Africans · Durban's 1860-indenture heritage
- Afrikaner & English communities · European-descended cultures of the land
Languages
Major languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Setswana, Sesotho, Afrikaans, English, Xitsonga, siSwati, Tshivenda, isiNdebele
Language families: Niger-Congo (Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, Venda, Tsonga); Tuu & Khoe (San, Khoekhoe); Germanic (Afrikaans, English)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Mapungubwe
- • Zulu Kingdom
- • Xhosa polities
- • Bapedi (Maroteng) Kingdom
- • VhaVenda (Thulamela)
Heritage sites
- • Cradle of Humankind
- • Mapungubwe
- • Maloti-Drakensberg rock art
- • Robben Island
- • ǂKhomani Cultural Landscape
Cultural highlights
National heroes of South Africa
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Science, business & activism1918–2011
Albertina Sisulu
Nursing and civic activism
Nurse and organiser of the 1956 women's march on Pretoria who held the internal resistance together through banning orders, detention and her husband's life imprisonment.
- Sportb. 1991
Caster Semenya
Middle-distance running
Two-time Olympic 800m champion whose long legal fight over athletics eligibility rules reshaped debate on sex testing in sport.
- Science, business & activism1922–2001
Christiaan Barnard
Cardiac surgery
Performed the world's first human heart transplant in Cape Town in December 1967, and later refused to operate in segregated wards.
- Science, business & activism1931–2021
Desmond Tutu
Religion and human rights
Nobel Peace laureate in 1984 who named the rainbow nation and chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then criticised the new government just as sharply.
- Music & the artsb. 1935
Esther Mahlangu
Ndebele painting
Brought Ndebele wall painting into contemporary art, painting a BMW art car freehand and exhibiting worldwide into her nineties.
- Music & the arts1939–2018
Hugh Masekela
Jazz
Trumpeter whose Stimela and Bring Him Back Home became anthems of the mines and of the campaign to free Mandela.
- Music & the arts1941–2020
Joseph Shabalala
Isicathamiya
Founded Ladysmith Black Mambazo, taking the migrant hostel harmony tradition to five Grammy awards.
- Music & the arts1932–2008
Miriam Makeba
Music
Mama Africa, whose testimony against apartheid at the United Nations cost her citizenship and 31 years of exile.
- Politics & liberation1918–2013
Nelson Mandela
Liberation and statecraft
Spent 27 years in prison for opposing apartheid, then negotiated the settlement that ended it and became South Africa's first democratically elected president in 1994. Shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with F. W. de Klerk.
- Science, business & activismb. 1960
Salim Abdool Karim
Epidemiology
HIV researcher whose trials showed that an antiretroviral gel could reduce transmission in women, and a leading public voice through the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Sportb. 1991
Siya Kolisi
Rugby
First Black captain of the Springboks and the first to lift the Rugby World Cup, in 2019, then again in 2023.
- Politics & liberation1946–1977
Steve Biko
Black Consciousness
Founded the Black Consciousness Movement, which taught that liberation began with psychological freedom. Killed in police custody at 30; his death turned international opinion decisively against apartheid.
- Sportb. 1992
Wayde van Niekerk
400m
Broke Michael Johnson's 17-year world record from lane eight in Rio in 2016, coached by a great-grandmother in her seventies.
Deep-dive community profiles
Bakgalagadi
The first Sotho-Tswana speakers in the Kalahari — pushed into the desert by later arrivals, made clients of the Tswana states, and now caught between their own land claims and the eviction of the San from the Central Kalahari reserve they share.
Open deep profile →Bakuena
The crocodile people — the senior Basotho lineage from which Moshoeshoe I came, whose totem gave the kingdom its royal house, and whose clan name is carried by chiefdoms across three countries.
Open deep profile →Baphuthi
The Nguni people inside the Sotho kingdom — a community of the southern Lesotho mountains speaking a language of their own, whose chief Moorosi fought a colonial siege to the death in 1879, and whose language is now spoken by a few thousand elders.
Open deep profile →Basotho
The mountain nation forged by Moshoeshoe I at Thaba Bosiu — refuge-builders of the Maloti highlands whose blankets, conical hats and horsemen made a kingdom in the sky that outlasted every siege.
Open deep profile →Basotho Mineworkers
Generations of Lesotho men who went down South African gold mines on eleven-month contracts, sang the difela poems of the journey, sent home the wages that were the country's largest source of income, and were retrenched in their tens of thousands when the gold ran thin.
Open deep profile →Basotho of Eswatini
Sotho-speaking communities in the north-western highveld of Eswatini, absorbed into a Swazi kingdom whose national identity is emphatically Nguni, and whose language has no place in its schools.
Open deep profile →Bataung
The people of the lion — a Sotho clan whose chief Moletsane raided across the highveld through the Lifaqane and then submitted to Moshoeshoe, and whose descendants hold chieftaincies in Lesotho and the Free State.
Open deep profile →Bathepu (Xhosa-speakers of Lesotho)
The Nguni communities of Lesotho's southern districts — Thembu and Xhosa-descended families who settled the Quthing and Qacha's Nek borderlands, kept their language inside a Sesotho kingdom, and are counted as Basotho by everyone including themselves.
Open deep profile →Batlokoa
The people of the wild cat — the Basotho clan led during the Lifaqane by MaNthatisi, a woman regent whose name terrified the highveld, and who is remembered as one of southern Africa's most formidable commanders.
Open deep profile →Griqua
The people who made states out of the frontier — Khoekhoe, San, enslaved and settler descendants who took a name for themselves, founded republics with constitutions and coinage at Griquatown and Kokstad, lost them to diamonds and annexation, and are still seeking recognition as an indigenous people.
Open deep profile →Hlengwe
The people of the south-eastern lowveld — Tsonga-speaking farmers and hunters of the dry Save and Limpopo country, moved off their land twice for a national park and a sugar estate, and split across three borders.
Open deep profile →Makhoakhoa
One of the older Sotho groupings of the northern lowlands, whose chiefs were among the first to gather under Moshoeshoe at Thaba Bosiu, and whose name appears in every account of how Lesotho was assembled out of the wreckage of the Lifaqane.
Open deep profile →Nama (Khoekhoe)
The southernmost Khoekhoe herders — heirs of the ancient Cape pastoralists, keepers of the click-rich Khoekhoegowab tongue, the Nama stap dance and the /gais praise-poetry, who fought and endured the same colonial wars that struck their Herero neighbours.
Open deep profile →Ndebele
Two proud branches of one Nguni root: Mzilikazi's amaNdebele kingdom at Bulawayo — the Zulu-descended state that ruled western Zimbabwe — and the Southern Ndebele of South Africa, whose electric geometric house-painting and beadwork became a global visual language.
Open deep profile →Pedi (Bapedi)
The Northern Sotho nation of the Leolo mountains — whose Marota kingdom under Sekhukhune fought both Boer and Briton to a standstill, and whose kiba pipe-and-drum orchestras and koma initiation schools still shape Limpopo.
Open deep profile →Ronga
People of Maputo bay and its hinterland, whose Tsonga-related language the city grew on top of, whose ancestors' territory was Delagoa Bay's ivory and slaving frontier, and whose marrabenta music is Mozambique's national urban sound.
Open deep profile →San (Bushmen)
The first peoples of southern Africa — carriers of some of humanity's oldest lineages and its oldest continuous art tradition, whose click languages, trance-dance healing and encyclopedic desert knowledge stretch back tens of thousands of years.
Open deep profile →Shangane of Eswatini
The Tsonga-speaking communities of the eastern lowveld — families of the Lubombo borderlands who move between three countries for work and family, and whose language has no official standing in the kingdom they live in.
Open deep profile →Swazi (emaSwati)
The nation of the Incwala — Africa's great kingship-renewal ceremony — and the Umhlanga reed dance, where the Ngwenyama and the Ndlovukati (Lion and She-Elephant) rule a dual monarchy that danced its way through empire into the continent's last absolute kingship.
Open deep profile →Swazi of Nkomazi
The Swazi of South Africa's eastern lowveld, cut off from their kingdom by a colonial boundary, made citizens of the KaNgwane bantustan, and the community that in 1982 refused to be handed over to Eswatini and won.
Open deep profile →Tsonga (Vatsonga)
The people of the Limpopo lowveld and the Mozambican coast — whose xibelani skirt-dance shakes across three countries, whose timbila-adjacent music and marimba traditions travelled with migrant labour, and whose Gaza history spans an ocean and a mountain range.
Open deep profile →Tswana (Batswana)
The people of the kgotla — southern Africa's great tradition of public deliberation — whose agro-pastoral towns were among precolonial Africa's largest, and whose consensus politics seeded one of the continent's most stable democracies.
Open deep profile →Venda (Vhavenda)
The people of the misted Soutpansberg — guardians of Lake Fundudzi's python god, dancers of the domba snake-initiation, heirs of stone-walled Dzata, whose sacred forests and matriarch-guarded drums kept the mysteries of the far north.
Open deep profile →Xhosa (amaXhosa)
The nation of the Eastern Cape — famed for izibongo praise poetry, the ulwaluko initiation that makes men, click-rich isiXhosa oratory, and a modern lineage of giants from Mandela and Tambo to Miriam Makeba's click songs.
Open deep profile →Zulu (amaZulu)
South Africa's largest nation, forged into a kingdom by Shaka kaSenzangakhona in the early 19th century — famed for its regimental history, izibongo praise poetry, beadwork language and living royal ceremonies.
Open deep profile →