Journey Through South Africa [antikvár]

THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLESouth Africa is a big country; five times the size of Britain, about as large as Holland, Belgium, Italy, France and West 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 Natal and the humid Indian Ocean coast: a total land area of 1 123 226 square kilometres.This figure doesn't include the ten national states that lie within the Republic's borders. Four of them - Transkei, Bophutha-tswana, Venda and Ciskei - are fully independent, though this autonomy is not accepted by the world at large. Also enclosed by South Africa are the separate kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland, both enjoying full diplomatic recognition.Farther up the Atlantic coastline, beyond the desolate reaches of the Orange River, 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. Flanking the Republic's far northern regions are, in clockwise order, the independent black 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 climates; its mountains, plains and coasts; its rich farmlands, its bushveld scrub and arid deserts, each of the many different parts supporting its own, distinctive plant and animal life. Truly, a world in one country.PLATEAU AND PLAINIn 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 Transvaal 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 two 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 a hundred years ago, have transformed Transvaal's quietly rural Witwatersrand 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 Orange Free State. Also in the Transvaal, and farther to the west, there are rich iron and manganese deposits. Platinum and chrome are found in the central Transvaal; coal in the Karoo Sequence; diamonds in the Kimberlite pipes of the northern Cape; copper, zinc, uranium, cobalt, nickel - the list,59 commodities in total, extends through almost the entire spectrum of metals and minerals. The only major ingredient missing is oil, and even reserves of that, in as yet undetermined quantities, have been charted off the southern shores.The lie of the land. If you were to look down on South Africa from an orbiting satellite you would see a clear, quite simple topographical pattern. The land falls into two distinct physical regions: the great interior plateau, semicircular and occupying most of the subcontinent; and the 'marginal zone' which is the relatively narrow coastal and hinterland strip fringing the plateau on three sides. A third, strikingly obvious geographical feature is the division between the two regions: the highly (in the most literal sense) conspicuous and continuous necklace of mountains and hills known as the Great Escarpment.