South African culture: a country that named no national language

Why Afrikaans was first written in Arabic letters

Sheikh Abadin Tadia Tjoessoep, known as Sheikh Yusuf, was received at the Cape on 2 April 1694 by the governor Simon van der Stel, together with 49 followers including two wives, two concubines and twelve children. He was an Indonesian noble of royal descent, a nephew of the Sultan Alauddin of Gowa in what is now Makassar. The Dutch East India Company housed the party on a farm called Zandvliet, far outside Cape Town, to keep his influence away from the Company's slaves. The plan failed. The settlement took the name Macassar, became a sanctuary for slaves, and the first cohesive Islamic community in South Africa formed around it.

What that community did with the Dutch spoken around them is the fact this article turns on. Cape Muslims pioneered the first literature written in Afrikaans, and they wrote it in Arabic Afrikaans, an adaptation of the Jawi script that used Arabic letters to set down a language derived from Dutch. It served religious and everyday purposes alike. The Malay element in Afrikaans comes from the same source: political exiles from the Company's colony of Batavia, brought to the Cape and formative in how the language took shape.

Afrikaans went on to become the language of the state that governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The word apartheid is Afrikaans, it means separateness, and its first recorded use was in 1929. The Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974 required high schools outside the homelands to teach in Afrikaans and English on an equal basis. On 16 June 1976 secondary students in Soweto marched against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction and police opened fire on the protest. Official reports counted 23 dead. The figure usually given is 176, with estimates running to 700. Hundreds of students fled afterwards to neighbouring countries, especially Botswana, and became a recruiting ground for the armed wings of the movements described in South Africa: history.

What the constitution does with official languages

Section 6 of the constitution Nelson Mandela signed on 10 December 1996 made eleven languages official: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu. The section goes further than a list. Recognising what it calls the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages, it directs the state to take practical and positive measures to raise the standing of those languages and advance their use, requires national and provincial government to regulate and monitor their own use of official languages, and holds that all official languages must enjoy parity of esteem and be treated equitably. A Pan South African Language Board is established by national legislation.

The Bill of Rights adds two individual guarantees. Section 30 protects the right to use the language of one's choice and to participate in the cultural life of one's choice. Section 31 protects the right of cultural, religious and linguistic communities to enjoy their culture, practise their religion and use their language. Chapter 9 then creates a standing body to watch over both, the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, sitting alongside the Public Protector and the South African Human Rights Commission. The wider constitutional machinery is set out in South Africa: politics.

Two details show what parity costs to operate. The constitution is published in all eleven official languages, and where the texts conflict the English one is authoritative. And the twelfth language took twenty-seven years to arrive: the National Assembly recognised South African Sign Language on 3 May 2023, the Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Act was signed on 19 July 2023, and it came into force on 26 June 2026 when the proclamation appeared in the Government Gazette.

The languages themselves fall into groups a reader can place on a map. Nguni languages, which include Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi and Ndebele, predominate in the south-eastern third of the country along the Indian Ocean coast. Sotho-Tswana languages, which include Southern Sotho, Northern Sotho and Tswana, predominate in the northern third further inland and carry on into Botswana and Lesotho. Within each group the languages are for the most part intelligible to a speaker of any other in it. Zulu and Xhosa also carry click consonants absorbed from Khoisan languages, the audible trace of contact between Bantu-speaking farmers and the hunter-gatherers and herders already there.

English was the home language of 8.7% of South Africans in the 2022 census, and it is the working language of government, commerce, science and most of the media. Estimates based on the 1991 census suggested just under half of South Africans could speak it. Gauteng is the province where the groups meet in roughly equal numbers, and it produced Tsotsitaal, also called S'Camtho or Ringas, a township argot that has since spread nationwide; its earlier form, Flaaitaal, was built on Afrikaans. The mining industry uses a separate pidgin, Fanakalo. Khoekhoegowab, N|uuki, !Xunthali and Khwedam sit outside the official list and are in danger of disappearing with their last speakers.

Who was making art at Blombos

In 2002, at the Blombos cave, stones were found engraved with grid and cross-hatch patterns and dated to some 70,000 years ago. They have been interpreted as the earliest abstract or symbolic art yet discovered from Homo sapiens. Art objects from a South African cave dated to roughly 75,000 years ago belong to the same horizon. Two of the country's World Heritage listings rest on this material: the Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa, inscribed in 1999 and extended in 2005, and The Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour, covering the Pleistocene occupation sites, inscribed in 2024.

The record then runs forward without a break. Khoisan peoples moving into the region from around 10,000 BC left cave paintings in styles that are still legible today. Bantu and Nguni peoples arriving later brought their own vocabularies of form. From the 1850s urban white artists worked through changing European traditions while the Dutch-influenced folk art of the Afrikaner trekboers ran alongside them. In the twentieth century the mines and the townships produced an art made from whatever passed through them, plastic strips and bicycle spokes included.

Seven of South Africa's World Heritage properties are inscribed as cultural, and the set is unusual in what it counts as heritage.

Robben Island, inscribed in 1999, is a prison. The Khomani Cultural Landscape, inscribed in 2017, is the land of a San community. The Mandela legacy sites, listed in 2024 under the heading of human rights, liberation and reconciliation, are the places where a political settlement was fought over and reached. Four natural properties sit beside the seven, and those belong to South Africa: geography.

What South Africans believe and who they consult

In the 2022 census 85.3% of the population described themselves as Christian, 7.8% as following traditional African religions, 3.1% as having no religious affiliation, 1.6% as Muslim, 1.1% as Hindu and 1.1% as other. The Christian figure is broadly defined and takes in syncretic African-initiated churches. The 2001 census gave a breakdown that still describes the shape of that total: Zion Christian at 11.1%, Pentecostal and Charismatic at 8.2%, Catholic at 7.1%, Methodist at 6.8%, Dutch Reformed at 6.7% and Anglican at 3.8%.

The census categories understate the overlap. Alongside the churches counted in 2022 there are an estimated 200,000 traditional healers, and up to 60% of South Africans consult them. A sangoma is a diviner and an inyanga a herbalist. Both work with ancestral spiritual belief and with the medicinal properties of local plants, animals and fungi, known together as muti. Many households hold syncretic practices combining Christian and indigenous elements, and many of those recorded with no religious affiliation are thought to follow a traditional African religion.

Smaller communities are documented in the same counts. South African Muslims are drawn mainly from the Coloured and Indian populations and have been joined by converts and by migrants from elsewhere in Africa; the number of black Muslims grew from 12,000 in 1991 to 74,700 in 2004. The Jewish population, descended from European Jews who arrived among other settlers, peaked in the 1970s at 118,000, and about 75,000 remained after emigration, mostly to Israel.

How the braai crosses lines the law drew

The braai began as an Afrikaner variation of the barbecue and works as a cooking method and a social custom at once, shared across the communities that apartheid law had classified into four separate groups. Its staples are boerewors, a spiced sausage, along with lamb chops and steak, served with pap, a maize porridge, and chakalaka, a spicy relish. Meat sits at the centre of most regional food cultures in the country.

The rest of the kitchen records who arrived and when. Bobotie is curried minced meat under an egg-based topping, from Cape Malay cooking. Bunny chow is a hollowed-out loaf filled with curry and originates in Durban, where the British Indian indenture system settled a large Indian population. Potjiekos is a stew cooked slowly in a three-legged cast-iron pot over an open flame. Street food covers vetkoek, the gatsby sandwich, samoosas and biltong, which is air-dried cured meat. Milk tart and koeksisters are the standard sweets.

Fast food is a local industry as much as an imported one. Nando's was founded in Johannesburg in 1987 on flame-grilled peri-peri chicken and runs more than 1,250 outlets in over 23 countries. Wimpy, Steers, Debonairs Pizza and Chicken Licken are the other chains that expanded out of the country. Wine is the older export, and the vineyards at Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl and Barrydale anchor the culinary tourism described in South Africa: travel.

What South African writers wrote under censorship

South African literature began as an oral tradition, and its written record is tied to the question of who was permitted to publish. Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm appeared in 1883 and is recognised as one of the first feminist novels. Solomon Thekiso Plaatje wrote Mhudi in 1930, among the first widely known novels by a black South African author. During the 1950s Drum magazine carried political satire, fiction and essays and gave a voice to urban black culture.

The apartheid decades produced a literature the state read closely. Alan Paton published Cry, the Beloved Country in 1948. André Brink became the first Afrikaner writer banned by the government, after he released the novel A Dry White Season. Breyten Breytenbach was jailed for his involvement with the guerrilla movement against apartheid. Athol Fugard's plays premiered in fringe theatres in South Africa, at the Royal Court in London and in New York. Elsa Joubert's Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, published in 1979, followed a black South African woman's endurance under the system and was translated into many languages.

Two Nobel Prizes in Literature have gone to South African writers: Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and J.M. Coetzee in 2003, whose work the Swedish Academy described as portraying the surprising involvement of the outsider in innumerable guises. Antjie Krog reported on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and published Country of My Skull in 1998.

Why television arrived late and split by language

South Africa had no television at all until 1976, because the government treated English-language programming as a threat to Afrikaans. When it did arrive it was built on apartheid lines: TV1 broadcast in Afrikaans and English for a white audience, TV2 in Zulu and Xhosa, TV3 in Sotho, Tswana and Pedi, and TV4 carried programmes for an urban black audience. The schedule was the population register turned into a broadcast grid.

The present sector is large. The public broadcaster SABC sits alongside the private free-to-air channel E.tv and the satellite operator MultiChoice, which runs DStv across sub-Saharan Africa. Digital terrestrial television has been partially rolled out and the migration away from analogue has been delayed. Most of the media works in English, and the other official languages are represented to some extent.

Music moved across the lines that broadcasting kept. Kwaito and amapiano were developed by black South African musicians. Brenda Fassie reached fame with "Weekend Special", sung in English. Ladysmith Black Mambazo works the choral tradition, and the Soweto String Quartet plays classical music with an African inflection. The jazz list is long: Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba, Jonathan Butler, Chris McGregor and Sathima Bea Benjamin. Afrikaans music runs from Steve Hofmeyr to the punk band Fokofpolisiekar and the singer-songwriter Jeremy Loops. Johnny Clegg, Die Antwoord, Tyla and Seether found audiences abroad, and the rappers AKA, Nasty C and Cassper Nyovest were recognised at the BET Awards.

Film production has been smaller and more concentrated. Tsotsi won the Academy Award for Foreign Language Film in 2006, U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005, and Oliver Hermanus's The Endless River was selected for the Venice Film Festival in 2015. District 9 and Chappie are among the higher-profile films portraying the country.

Which sports the country actually plays

Soccer, rugby union and cricket carry most of the country's sporting attention, and each carries it differently.

Soccer has the participation. South Africa hosted the African Cup of Nations in 1996 and the national men's team, Bafana Bafana, won it; the country then hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2010. The women's team won the Women's Africa Cup of Nations in 2022, beating Morocco 2-1 in the final, and reached the last sixteen at the Women's World Cup in 2023 after beating Italy and drawing with Argentina. The men's under-20 side won the U-20 Africa Cup of Nations in 2025.

Rugby union has the tournament record. South Africa has won the Rugby World Cup four times: in 1995, when it hosted the tournament, and again in 2007, 2019 and 2023.

Cricket is the third. The men's team, the Proteas, won the inaugural ICC KnockOut Trophy in 1998 by beating the West Indies in the final, and won the ICC World Test Championship of 2023 to 2025 by beating Australia. The men took silver at the ICC T20 World Cup in 2024 and the women took silver at the ICC Women's T20 World Cup that South Africa hosted in 2023. The blind cricket team won the inaugural Blind Cricket World Cup in 1998. The country also hosted the Cricket World Cup in 2003 and the World Twenty20 in 2007.

Beyond those, the record is individual. The relay of Roland Schoeman, Lyndon Ferns, Darian Townsend and Ryk Neethling won the 4 by 100 metres freestyle at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004 and broke the world record doing it. Penny Heyns won Olympic gold at Atlanta in 1996. Wayde van Niekerk has held the world record over 400 metres since 2016. Jody Scheckter won the Formula One world championship in 1979, and Gary Player completed the career grand slam in golf.