The Making of South Africa: How the Land Was Taken and Divided, 1488–2026

A Hedge on the Liesbeek

In 1660, after the first war with the Khoikhoi of the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck had a hedge of wild almond planted from the Salt River along the Liesbeek to the slopes of Table Mountain, to mark where the Dutch East India Company's land ended. Pieces of it still grow in Kirstenbosch. The hedge enclosed a strip of land a few kilometres wide, and when Khoikhoi leaders demanded their grazing back they were told it had been won in the war and now belonged to the Company. Three centuries later the same idea, that a government could draw a line on the land and decide who might live on which side of it, had produced the homelands of apartheid, ten scattered territories for the black majority.

This map follows that process from the first recorded clash between Europeans and South Africans in 1488 to the reintegration of the homelands in 1994 and the country of today. It is mostly a story of land: who held it, how it was taken and how it was divided again.

The Cape Frontier, 1652–1806

Before 1652 the map is a patchwork of peoples. Khoikhoi herders held the western and southern coasts and the middle Orange; San hunter-gatherers the Karoo, Bushmanland and the Kalahari; Bantu-speaking farmers, among them the Xhosa, Thembu and Mpondo, the Nguni of Natal, the Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda and Tsonga, the wetter east and the highveld. Their borders were zones of shared use, so the map draws each people around its known homesteads, with edges on rivers and escarpments. The Khoikhoi already knew how to deal with ships: in 1488 they drove Bartolomeu Dias's watering party off at Mossel Bay, and in 1510 they killed the Portuguese viceroy Francisco de Almeida and dozens of his men at Table Bay.

The Company's station was meant to grow vegetables for passing ships, but in 1657 it released its first employees as free farmers, and the land they took was Khoikhoi grazing. Doman's war of 1659–60 and Gonnema's war of 1673–77 broke the Peninsula Khoikhoi and the Cochoqua of Saldanha Bay; Stellenbosch was founded in 1679 and French Huguenots were settled at Franschhoek in 1688. Then smallpox, brought ashore with a ship's laundry in 1713, killed most of the Khoikhoi of the western Cape. On the map the tan Khoikhoi colours vanish from the south-west between 1677 and 1713, and the orange of the Company spreads into the space they leave.

In the 18th century the colony grew through its trekboers, stock farmers who took out grazing licences ever further inland. By 1745 the farms reached the Gouritz River; by 1780 it ran across the Karoo to the Sundays and the Great Fish, where the trekboers met the Xhosa. The first of nine Frontier Wars began in 1779. In the north the trekboers' commandos waged a war of extermination against the San of the Sneeuberg and the Roggeveld from the 1770s, and the San who survived were pushed to Bushmanland and the edges of the Kalahari. When Britain took the Cape in 1795, briefly gave it back to the Batavian Republic in 1803 and took it for good in 1806, it inherited a colony that reached deep into the Karoo and a war on its eastern border.

Wars, Treks and Annexations, 1806–1902

The British pushed the Xhosa out of the Zuurveld, between the Sundays and the Fish, in 1811–12, and after Makhanda's attack on Grahamstown failed in 1819 they took the land between the Fish and the Keiskamma as a so-called neutral Ceded Territory, which soon filled with settlers. In the war of 1834–35 the Gcaleka king Hintsa was shot while held hostage by British forces, and the land to the Kei was annexed as Queen Adelaide Province, then given up in 1836. It came back as British Kaffraria in 1847 and joined the Cape in 1866. The cattle-killing of 1856–57, when many Xhosa followed Nongqawuse's prophecy and destroyed their herds and grain, left tens of thousands dead and the survivors' land open to settlers. On the map the teal Xhosa layers shrink step by step until 1879, and the red Transkeian Territories take the land beyond the Kei in pieces between 1866 and 1894.

At the same time the interior was being remade. The wars and migrations of the 1820s and 1830s, the Mfecane, built the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, sent Mzilikazi's Ndebele across the highveld and drew refugees to Moshoeshoe's mountain at Thaba Bosiu. From 1835 some 12,000 to 15,000 Boers left the Cape in the Great Trek, fought the Ndebele at Vegkop and the Zulu at Blood River, and founded republics: Natalia, which Britain annexed as Natal in 1843, the Orange Free State, and the South African Republic north of the Vaal. Their claims were larger than their reach. The Pedi kingdom of Sekhukhune, the Venda of the Soutpansberg and the Ndzundza Ndebele at Mapoch's caves held out inside the Transvaal claim for decades, and the map keeps them in their own colours until they fell, the Pedi in 1879, the Ndzundza in 1883, the Venda in 1898.

Diamonds near Hopetown in 1867 and at Kimberley in 1871 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 made the land worth fighting over at another scale. Britain annexed Griqualand West, with the diamond fields, in 1871, and the Transvaal in 1877; it destroyed the Zulu kingdom in 1879 after Isandlwana and Ulundi; it lost the Transvaal again at Majuba in 1881. Moshoeshoe's Basotho, who lost their western lowlands to the Free State in the wars of 1858 to 1868, asked for British protection and kept the mountains as Basutoland. The South African War of 1899–1902 ended with both Boer republics as British colonies, and in 1910 the four colonies became the Union of South Africa.

From Reserves to Homelands, 1913–1994

The Union's first great land law came three years later. The Natives Land Act of 19 June 1913 scheduled about 7 percent of the country as reserves for Africans and forbade them to buy or rent land anywhere else; Sol Plaatje wrote that on the next morning the African “found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth”. The 1936 Native Trust and Land Act promised to raise the reserves to about 13 percent. Apartheid, from 1948, turned the reserves into homelands: ten of them, assigned to the ethnic groups the government defined, with the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 and the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 as the main steps. Between 1960 and 1983 an estimated 3.5 million people were forcibly moved, many of them into the homelands, to make the map match the plan.

Four homelands were declared independent: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979 and Ciskei in 1981. No other country recognised them, and their residents lost South African citizenship. On the map they turn purple at independence and grow afterwards, because Pretoria kept ceding farms and strips of land to consolidate them; the self-governing six turn pink. Look at Bophuthatswana in 1990, seven pieces spread from the Kalahari to Pretoria, or at KwaZulu, in more than twenty pieces between the white-owned farmland of Natal. The homelands ended on 27 April 1994, the day of the first democratic election, when they were reintegrated into a South Africa of nine new provinces.

The land question did not end there. The Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994 lets people claim land lost after 19 June 1913, the day of the Natives Land Act; dispossession before that date, which is most of what happens on this map, is outside it. One of the markers after 1994 shows the ǂKhomani San receiving land near the Kalahari Gemsbok park in 1999.

How to Read the Map

Colours show who held the ground. African peoples have their own colours (tan for the Khoikhoi, olive for the San, teal for the Xhosa, Thembu and Mpondo, blue for the Zulu, Swazi and Ndebele, browns for the Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga and Griqua) and keep them until their land was conquered, annexed or settled. Orange is the Dutch East India Company, red is Britain, greens and gold are the Boer republics, grey is the Union and the apartheid Republic, sea-green is democratic South Africa and pink marks the British protectorates of Basutoland and Swaziland. Basutoland turns red from 1871 to 1884, when the Cape Colony ruled it. The reserves and homelands are khaki, purple for the four nominally independent ones. Pins name the people who led and resisted; small dots are smaller events.

Watch the Cape frontier between 1745 and 1819, when it crosses the Karoo and reaches the Fish; 1848, when British red runs to the Orange and the Kei; 1854, when the Boer republics claim the whole highveld around the Pedi, Venda and Swazi; and 1976 to 1990, when the homelands change colour one by one.

How the Map Was Made

The coast and today's borders come from Natural Earth. The provinces of 1910 and 1994 and the boundaries of Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei, with every piece of land ceded to them after independence and its date, come from Adrian Frith's historical boundary data; the other six homelands from the boundary file of the former homelands published by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. Colonial boundaries follow the lines of the time where they are known: Van Riebeeck's hedge, the Great Fish, Keiskamma and Kei rivers, Macartney's boundary of 1798 as given by Theal, Sir Harry Smith's Orange River line of 1847, the Warden line of 1849 and the Lesotho border of 1869. Rivers come from OpenStreetMap. Events and dates come from South African History Online, Britannica, Wikipedia, J.B. Peires's work on the Xhosa and Mohamed Adhikari's The Anatomy of a South African Genocide on the Cape San.

Some of it is approximate, and the map says so. Pre-colonial territories are zones around known homesteads, and smaller groups are merged with their neighbours. The Cape's frontier of settlement before 1780 is drawn from descriptions, and it is the farms that are shown, not the Company's paper claims. The reserves are drawn from 1913 at their later extent, because there is no digitised map of the 1913 schedule, so the khaki in 1913 is larger than the 7 percent of the caption. The provinces after 1994 keep their 1994 borders and do not show the boundary changes of 2005 and 2006.

Chronological Timeline

• 1488 — Bartolomeu Dias's crew driven off by Khoikhoi at Mossel Bay
• 1510 — Khoikhoi kill the viceroy Francisco de Almeida at Table Bay
• 1652 — The Dutch East India Company builds a fort at the Cape
• 1713 — Smallpox kills most of the western Cape Khoikhoi
• 1779 — The first of nine Frontier Wars with the Xhosa
• 1819 — Makhanda's attack on Grahamstown fails; the Ceded Territory
• 1835 — King Hintsa killed; Queen Adelaide Province
• 1835–38 — The Great Trek; Vegkop and Blood River
• 1848 — Orange River Sovereignty; British Kaffraria
• 1854 — The Orange Free State; the Boer republics recognised
• 1871 — Griqualand West and the diamond fields annexed
• 1879 — The Zulu and Pedi kingdoms conquered
• 1894 — Pondoland annexed: the last of the Transkei
• 1899–1902 — The South African War
• 1910 — Union of South Africa
• 1913 — Natives Land Act: reserves of about 7 percent
• 1948 — The National Party and apartheid
• 1966–68 — Lesotho and Swaziland independent
• 1976–81 — Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei declared independent
• 1994 — First democratic election; the homelands reintegrated