Gauteng is now widely thought to be the actual
cradle of humankind and possibly one of the places where human kind
first started walking upright. One of its most remarkable yields
was the 2.5-million-year-old female skull discovered by Dr Broom
in 1947, which he dubbed Mrs Ples. The "Little Foot" skull
was also found here.
Before the colonial period, the province was home
to many different cultures as far back as 1100 AD, and even before.
The Khoi-San people have inhabited the southern African region consistently
for hundreds of thousands of years, but their cave paintings (Klerksdorp
area) date back to between 20 000 and 30 000 years.
There are many Iron Age sites in and around the province, including
in the Melville Koppies, showing mining and smelting activities.
So mining has been part of the history of the province as far back
as a thousand years ago, suggesting highly evolved and sophisticated
cultures, contrary to the idea of "primitive" Africans.
The Voortrekkers moving away from the British Empire
in the Cape in the early nineteenth century and the discovery of
gold a few decades after that, however changed the nature of the
province totally. With the coming of whites came also dispossession
of the land and poverty for blacks for the next hundred and sixty
years, culminating in "apartheid".
The province was known as the Transvaal after the
end of the Anglo-Boer War that ended in 1902. Before that was known
as the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (the South African Republic,
or ZAR) and was an independent from the British Empire. The Union
of South Africa was formed in 1910 by which the former Boer republics
(the Orange Free State, the ZAR and Natal), defeated by the British
Empire, were united under British rule.
The country became independent from Britain in 1961 but remained
in the British Commonwealth, although not for long. The National
Party who won the elections of 1948 started implementing apartheid
laws from the early 1950s into the 1960s.
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