In 1488 Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Dias managed to find the southern sea route around the Cape of Storms (which his royal sponsors immediately changed to Cape of Good Hope) in an attempt to reach the Indian spice trade bypassing hostile Muslim countries. He had to turn around and Vasco da Gama managed to complete a full round trip a little later. After the Portuguese started getting insanely rich from the spice trade, some sailors in a Portuguese jail were discussing the journey and they had a Dutchman in the cell next door. That let the secret out and the Dutch and later others got involved in the maritime spice trade with India.
In 1652 the United East India Company set up a resupply post at the Cape. Jan van Riebeeck was assigned written orders to establish only a supply station and not to start a colony nor build a fortress. A suspiciously specific denial, typical of politics. He immediately built two fortresses and a colony, and his sponsors never needed to invoke the CYA paperwork.
The population in the area was originally what used to be called Bushmen and Hottentots. Basically the same people genetically, but hunter-gatherers and herders respectively. Very short of stature, red-skinned, with epicanthic folds (“Chinese eyes”), kinky hair and deep-set eye sockets. A completely different racial group from the black Bantu speakers you may be more familiar with. They spoke click languages. The Portuguese had a bad experience with in the early days, when some sailors decided they didn't like the way their trade had gone and tried to raid the Hottentot camp at night. They were not expecting cavalry and went on to never establish any colonies in the area.
Under Dutch rule many of the Hottentots and Bushmen were absorbed. Most of the population in what was the colony is of mixed descent. Hottentot, European (Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, English), Malay (slaves from the East Indian trade), and black Central Africans (also from the slave trade). French protestants were granted asylum after they lost the religious wars. During the Napoleonic Wars the Netherlands were occupied by the French and England occupied the Cape Colony. It was returned when Napoleon was captured, and the second time around they did not return the colony but awarded it to themselves as compensation for defeating Napoleon. Not that the Dutch king could do anything to stop them--he was in exile in England.
The lingua franca (pun intended) of the area became Dutch spoken in a simplified, partially pidginised form. Words also thrown in from Malay, French, English, German, Hottentot (multiple language families), etc. English rulers tried very hard to exterminate “Kitchen Dutch” and enforce English, sometimes officially and sometimes unofficially.
All of that was in the western half of what is now South Africa. The eastern half had been taken over almost entirely by Bantu speakers originally of Central African origin. The two expanding sides met at the Fish River and started squabbling and raiding. The government in Britain decided to increase the border population for military reasons so they promised 20k acres of farmland to poor people in England who did not know what 20 000 acres of near-desert produced, signing them up with no option to back out later. These became the English Settlers.
In the midst of existing resentment, the English government then announced that they would free all the slaves and pay compensation to the owners. (Keep in mind that these were farmers in debt to the banks.) They declared the slaves to be freed, and did not pay any compensation. People were for example told to come collect it in London and for those who were able to go, they were told that their applications had not been processed yet, check back in a few months. This was perhaps one straw that broke the camel's back (but not as big a factor as the US Civil War) and several waves of migrants moved inland. Some of these were being led by shady con-men.
The migrants established three main republics. The Republic of Natalia was annexed by the English to get its coal. The Orange Free State initially lost a small chunk when a hitherto unheard of diamond-bearing volcano was found in Kimberley and the English took it. Later the world's largest gold deposit (by far) was discovered in the South African Republic (ZAR). There was the first war with the British Empire, but the second they lost. The allied Free State and ZAR after some initial successes on the battlefield tried guerrilla warfare and the response from Rhodes and Kitchener was to exterminate women and children in concentration camps until the government gave in. I should say that the English had also tried and failed to orchestrate an invasion disguised as a popular uprising--the Jameson Invasion--rather like modern colour revolutions. The excuse for the Jameson Invasion and the war was that the government was not handing out infinite citizenships to foreigners shortly upon arrival. (Sound familiar?)
Under the English the four colonies were later combined into the Union of South Africa.
I'm skipping a lot of important detail around the World Wars and other polities.
The Dutch and early English rulers were content with being in charge and lording it over people, possibly viewing their own race as superior as the case may be, but did not have our modern ideologies of good and bad races. That had to wait for the 20th Century English elites with their love of Darwin and eugenics. Starting in the early 20th Century they began really enforcing a policy of reservations (under various names) for Bantus. Coloureds (which is to say mixed Hottentots) had some political rights if they were rich enough to be, shall we say, “uplifted.” Asiatics were banned from the Free State. It is during this time period that the English missionary schools gave birth to black nationalism, in the form of organisations with some kind of pan-Bantu outlook.
The English slowly handed partial control over to groups of white Dutch/Afrikaans speakers who were constructing a national mythos around the inland migrations of the 19th Century and Calvinism around the same time frame that a new national mythos was being built by Moustache Man in Germany. Many quite rightly identified more with Adolf Hitler and Germany than with English rulers who had just a few years ago locked their relatives in camps and starved them to death.
At first in the pre-World War era the government allowed Dutch to be an official language in addition to English, as a condition of the Peace of Vereeniging. Later law clarified this by saying that Dutch was official, but Afrikaans was understood to be included in the term. Then it became Afrikaans, with Dutch stated to be included in the term, and later it just said Afrikaans.
During and after the war German intelligence service involvement was stamped out and the country would pivot to a US-centric geopolitical view.
The nationalists, not necessarily affiliated with Hitler, began implementing racial policies in what is both a continuation of English policy, and going further than it, as they gained more influence. It was ironically very much Social Darwinist even as they would deny Darwinism. In the 60s, with the Empire weak and colonies declaring independence, the National Party declared independence and officially pursued a policy of segregation--translated as apartness i.e. apartheid--copied almost verbatim from the US.
A black nationalist organisation started in the English missionary schools in the early years of the century was the African National Congress (ANC). Like other organisations of its sort it was heavily infiltrated by communists in the postwar era under orders from Stalin. The technique was to take advantage of dissatisfaction with political and economic repression (easy under the circumstances) and of course to reframe common decency and humanity (ubuntu in Nguni) in communist terms. Despite its supposedly universal black character I should say that the organisation was a Xhosa creation and largely Xhosa-run until very recently. (Xhosa were the Nguni tribe who clashed with whites in the vicinity of the Fish River.)
One of its young and hot headed members at the time, Rolihlahla aka Nelson (because the English missionary teacher couldn't pronounce that) decided that he wanted to start a military wing and achieve his political goals by means of terrorist attacks. He was not the only one to do so--a group of genocidal maniacs had split off to form what they called the Pan Africanist Congress with the goal of killing anything slightly pale--but his group stayed in the ANC despite his elders in the party warning him that it was a counterproductive idea. He and his ilk would go on to get the ANC, communist party, and the various affiliated and rival organisations banned.
Nelson Mandela sat in prison for terrorist attacks. The National Party government, feeling much pressure from sanctions and Western liberalism in general, tried to release him on the condition that he would denounce violence. He refused.
The government got increasingly into debt because of bad policy, sanctions, running a war partly on behalf of US geopolitical interests in Angola and Namibia, and general naivete around usurers. So when the international bankers called up their loans in the middle of the night they pretty much had to do as they were told, which meant putting commies in charge.
The charismatic leader of the resistance at the time was Nelson Mandela the poor political prisoner in Western media, but Chris Hani the (more) violent revolutionary locally. Hani was the leader of the communist party who unashamedly wanted to kill all whites and make no compromise. Whether it was the government, a private act, foreign power, or rival faction, even Mandela, nobody knows, but someone decided to resolve the issue by removing Hani. Janus Walus (I might be misspelling it) and Clive Derby Lewis killed him and refused to talk to this day. Lewis died a few years ago, having refused to talk with the promise of medical parole, and Walus has finished his sentence and will now be deported to Poland.
With the old leader removed and the Soviet Union collapsing right at the convenient time, the government basically just released Mandela & friends and negotiated a deal in which we get a far left blue-haired liberal system with racial payback, while they don't get prosecuted for anything.
Mandela and his friends wanted to institute Soviet-style communism, but the Soviet Union had just collapsed and they found themselves broke with no backer. So they had to go with the blue-haired liberalism which the bankers prescribed.
The ANC government has a policy, official and unofficial, and especially in education, of portraying Afrikaans as the language of oppressors which should be stamped out in favour of English. Whites are a sizable minority of Afrikaans speakers, but that doesn't stop the government from suppressing it. (Standard Afrikaans probably is majority white, but certainly not if you include Cape dialect.)
(continued with liturgical context)
