South Africa
The rainbow nation at the continent's southern tip
South Africa is the economic powerhouse of the continent's southern end, a country of extraordinary diversity that wraps from the Atlantic around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean. It has three capital cities, twelve official languages, and a landscape that ranges from Cape vineyards and Table Mountain to the high veld of Johannesburg and the wildlife-rich lowveld of Kruger National Park. The world's largest producer of platinum and a major source of gold and diamonds, it carries both the scars of apartheid and the hope embodied in its democratic transition under Nelson Mandela - the original rainbow nation.
The country is dominated by a vast interior plateau, the highveld, ringed by the Great Escarpment that drops steeply to the coastal lowlands. The escarpment reaches its grandest in the Drakensberg, where Mafadi tops out at around 3,450 meters on the Lesotho border. The Cape in the southwest enjoys a Mediterranean climate that nurtures a unique fynbos floral kingdom found nowhere else, while the Kalahari fringes the arid northwest and subtropical conditions prevail along the eastern coast. The Orange and Limpopo are the major rivers. Rich mineral seams underlie the Witwatersrand and Bushveld complex.
Home to some of the oldest human fossils, the region saw the rise of Bantu kingdoms, Dutch and British colonization, and the discovery of gold and diamonds that drew the world. The twentieth century was defined by the apartheid system of racial segregation and the long struggle against it, culminating in the 1994 election that brought Mandela and the African National Congress to power. Eleven of the twelve official languages are spoken alongside South African Sign Language, recently added. Today the country grapples with deep inequality, unemployment, and power shortages even as it remains Africa's most industrialized economy and a global voice from the Global South.