page_title: Sub-Saharan Africa
section_title: Southern Africa
hierarchical_section_title: Sub-Saharan Africa / History / Southern Africa
caption_attribution_description: English: Inside of the Great Enclosure which is part of the Great Zimbabwe ruins.
context_page_description: Sub-Saharan Africa is, geographically and ethnoculturally, the area of the continent of Africa that lies south of the Sahara. According to the United Nations, it consists of all African countries and territories that are fully or partially located south of the Sahara. While the United Nations geoscheme for Africa excludes Sudan from its definition of sub-Saharan Africa, the African Union's definition includes Sudan but instead excludes Mauritania.
  It contrasts with North Africa, whose countries are part of the League of Arab states within the Arab world. The states of Somalia, Djibouti, Comoros and the Arabic-speaking Mauritania and Sudan are, however, geographically in sub-Saharan Africa, although they are members of the Arab League as well. The UN Development Program lists 46 of Africa's 54 countries as "sub-Saharan", excluding Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia.
  The term has been criticized by late Professor Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, on Pambazuka as being a racist word because it refers to the area south of the Sahara by geographical conventions.
context_section_description: Settlements of Bantu-speaking peoples, who were iron-using agriculturists and herdsmen, were already present south of the Limpopo River by the 4th or 5th century displacing and absorbing the original Khoisan speakers. They slowly moved south, and the earliest ironworks in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal Province are believed to date from around 1050. The southernmost group was the Xhosa people, whose language incorporates certain linguistic traits from the earlier Khoisan inhabitants. They reached the Fish River in today's Eastern Cape Province.
  Monomotapa was a medieval kingdom (c. 1250–1629), which existed between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers of Southern Africa in the territory of modern-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Its old capital was located at Great Zimbabwe.
  In 1487, Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to reach the southernmost tip of Africa. In 1652, a victualling station was established at the Cape of Good Hope by Jan van Riebeeck on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. For most of the 17th and 18th centuries, the slowly expanding settlement was a Dutch possession.
  Great Britain seized the Cape of Good Hope area in 1795, ostensibly to prevent it from falling into the hands of the French, but also to use Cape Town in particular as a stop on the route to Australia and India. It was later returned to the Dutch in 1803, but soon afterward the Dutch East India Company declared bankruptcy, and the British annexed the Cape Colony in 1806.
  The Zulu Kingdom was a Southern African tribal state in what is now KwaZulu-Natal in southeastern South Africa. The small kingdom gained world fame during and after the Anglo-Zulu War.
  During the 1950s and early 1960s, most sub-Saharan African nations achieved independence from colonial rule.
caption: Great Zimbabwe: Tower in the Great Enclosure
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