Discover South Africa [antikvár]

THE LAND AND I T S PEOPLE South Africa ,s a big country; five times the size of Britain, about as large as Holland, Belgium, Italy, France and Germany put together. It stretches from the Limpopo River in the north to blustery Cape Agulhas, nearly 2,000 kilometres to the south, from Namaqualand along the barren western seaboard 1,500 kilometres to subtropical KwaZulu-Natal and the humid Indian Ocean coast: a total land area of just under 1.3 million square kilometres. Enclosed within South Africa are the separate kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland. Far up the Atlantic coastline, beyond the desolate reaches of the Gariep River (until recently known as the Orange), is Namibia, a vast and beautiful country of diamonds, desert and human division that the League of Nations mandated to South Africa after the First World War and which finally gained its independence in 1990. Flanking the Republic's far northern regions are, in clockwise order, the independent states of Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique - a rich territorial diversity. Indeed, diversity is probably the single word that best illustrates both South and southern Africa. The canvas is kaleidoscopic; variety, contrast and sometimes conflict are vividly evident in the bewildering mix of race and language, creed, colour and culture. The diversity is there, too, in the nature of the land; in its geological formations and regional In the arid far-western part of the country lies the lonely, hauntingly beautiful Richtersveld (opposite), a mountain desert that, despite appearances, is renowned for its plant life. Above, from left to right: a Cape Town woman and her fruit and vegetable stall; a Xhosa girl in her traditional finery; and a street barber showing off his capabilities. climates; its mountains, plains and coasts; its rich farmlands, its bushveld scrub and deserts, each of the many different parts supporting its owh distinctive plant and animal life. Truly, a world in one country. PLATEAU AND PLAIN In physical terms a significant portion of the land is very old. The subcontinent comprises 22 physiographic regions - different geological areas. Some of the rock strata in the valley of the Limpopo and in the Northern Province were formed 4,000 million years ago - not all that long, on the geological calendar, after planet Earth itself began to cool. Others, those belonging to the Kalahari group, are a mere 2 million years old. In between is a score of classifications that, together, tell a large part of the earth's story. This variety accounts for South Africa's broad-based wealth of mineral resources. The ancient Swazian and Rondian formations, for instance, include gold-bearing reefs that, since their discovery just over a hundred years ago, have transformed the Witwatersrand's quietly rural Highveld into a giant conurbation, recognized for the past half century and more as one of the world's mining and financial capitals. More recently gold, extensive reserves of it, was located in the Free State. Also in the north-central regions, but farther to the west, there are rich