South Africa

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.

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

Four dates matter to the question of when South Africa truly became the country it is today, and each answers a different part of it. 1910 is when the Union of South Africa formed, joining four British colonies into one self-governing dominion, though still under the British crown and, for its Black majority, under no meaningful political rights at all. 1931 is when the Statute of Westminster gave the Union full legislative sovereignty equal to Britain's own, ending the last formal colonial subordination while leaving the domestic racial order untouched. 1961 is when a republic was declared, cutting the last constitutional tie to the British monarchy, again without extending the franchise. Only 1994, with the country's first election open to citizens of every race, ending the apartheid system that had governed since 1948, produced a South Africa whose government could claim to represent the whole population it governed. This atlas records 1910 as the founding of the unified state, but the honest history of South African independence is really the history of all four dates together.