Three Capitals, One Compromise

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

South Africa's three capital cities are not an accident of history so much as a deliberately engineered compromise. When the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State negotiated their union into a single self-governing dominion in 1910, each of the four founding colonies had its own claim to prestige and none was willing to see a rival colony's capital become the capital of the whole country. The solution split the government itself three ways: Pretoria, the former Transvaal capital, took the executive branch and the seat of the presidency; Cape Town, the oldest European settlement and legislative center under Cape rule, kept Parliament; Bloemfontein, the former Orange Free State capital, was given the judiciary and the Supreme Court of Appeal. No single city won, which was exactly the arrangement four proud, recently rival colonies could agree to. More than a century later, after a republic, an end to apartheid and a fully democratic constitution, the three-way split has outlived every government that has governed under it.