This is South Africa [antikvár]

South African Profile he association of a people with the land they live in is always difficult to understand. This is particularly so In countries where national, regional and local affairs, together with a number of strong cultural identities create an intricate web of allegiances and affiliations. At this point in its history, South Africa is even more complex than most as it moves towards the new century, albeit sometimes rather uncertainly, but with a sense of great hope, the likes of which the country and all its people have never before experienced. Re-admittance into the world community and the relative speed, peace and goodwill with which the country has created a new order have been heady experiences. A feeling of common purpose and national pride pervades, but it does not entirely mask the political and social divisions that lie beneath the thin veneer, and it would be a brave person, and probably a fairly stupid one, who would venture a tight definition and declare with confidence that This is South Africa'. Even an introductory essay such as this will, inevitably, run a gauntlet of criticism for bias, omission, oversimplification and prejudice. For how can one tell the story of South Africa completely and to the satisfaction of all in the space of a few thousand words? Quite simply one cannot, and the text and captions for this book make no pretence at doing so. All that is offered is a series of glimpses, some more personal, others more broadly based, that will give the casual reader, particulariy the newcomer or tourist, a few pointers to this endlessly fascinating and very lovely land of endless opportunity. The Shaping of the Land South Africa is a very big country. Even its subdivisions into nine provinces are mosdy sizeable, the exception being the densely populated economic and financial powerhouse of Cauteng. an almost continuous connurbatlon formed around the two major cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. The land, t ,2 million square kilometres in extent, sprawls from the Limpopo River In the north to the southern extremity of Cape Agulhas, where Africa peters out rather unimpressively In a jumble of low, windswept sand dunes and shallow reefs. South Africa's western shores are scoured by the cold waters of the Benguela Current driving up from the Antarctic, its eastern areas by the warm waters of the Agulhas Current sweeping down from the tropical Indian Ocean. Even though one would expect a fair variety of landscapes in a country as large as South Africa, it is difficult to comprehend just how much physical diversity there Is. Reduced to simple terms, however, three major features determine the shape and the form of the land: a coastal plain that fringes the entire subcontinent; a vast inland plateau and, separating the two, an irregular chain of rugged mountains which, here and there, rather begrudgingly allows road and rail access between the coast and the interior. In the east, and forming a great, virtually continuous escarpment running down from the Northern Province, across the northern limits of KwaZulu-Natal and then on Into the Eastern Cape, is the mighty Drakensberg range. In KwaZulu-Natal, where the Quath-lamba - the Zulu name for the range (the word means 'barrier of spears') - soar to heights of more than 5 000 metres, this alpine wilderness Is at its most spectacular. In winter thick snow can blanket the peaks and often the lower slopes, briefly softening the rough face of Africa, But for most of the year the crags are bare and challenging. Inviting legions of climbers and hikers. In the Western Cape the mountain ranges are no less dramatic, but were borne of very different forces. More than 300 million years ago, when the continents were wrenching themselves free of the single land mass known as Pangaea, the heaving and buckling