South Africa- Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

South Africa has a turbulent history. Beginning as a colony for the Dutch East India company in the Seventeenth century, its population consisted of Boers, or Afrikaners. Only about 15,000 of these settlers controlled a huge black population. The Boer war was, to some extent, an outgrowth of having found huge supplies of diamonds The Boers were defeated and the land became The Union of South Africa, controlled by a white minority which made "apartheid"- a total separation of the races, a national dogma. 1961 was a key year for South Africa because it was then that it declared itself a republic and severed all ties with the British Commonwealth. South Africa may have called itself a republic, and even had a constitution to back it up, but it was a land bitterly racially divided.