Some would say that the very roots of the human race can be traced back to South Africa. There certainly is evidence to suggest that as long ago as three million years a form of human being walked the land which we now call South Africa.

The indigenous peoples had free reign of the land until only very recently in relative terms. The earliest Europeans to land on South African shores were the Portuguese in the late 15th century. However they decided against colonizing the area for they were more interested in using it as a stopover en route to the highly profitable trading centers of Asia at that time.

The Dutch East India Company arrived in South Africa in the mid-seventeenth century. These colonizers were mainly Dutch and German and became known as the Afrikaners. The British colonial force arrived in the late eighteenth century and they forced the Afrikaners north.