South Africa Country in Africa

South Africa is a country on the southernmost tip of the African continent, marked by several distinct ecosystems. Inland safari destination Kruger National Park covers astronomical shrublands populated by astronomically immense game; the Western Cape encompasses lush winelands around Stellenbosch and Paarl, wild beaches, craggy cliffs at the Cape of Good Hope, forest and lagoons along the Garden Route, and the city of Cape Town, beneath flat-topped Table Mountain.

The Republic of South Africa (RSA) is a country bounded on the south by 2798 kilometers of coastline of Southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian oceans, on the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and on the east by Mozambique and Swaziland, and circumventing the kingdom of Lesotho. South Africa is the 25th-most sizably voluminous country in the world by land area, and with proximate to 53 million people, is the world's 25th-most populous nation.

South Africa is a multiethnic society encompassing a wide variety of cultures, languages, and religions. Its pluralistic makeup is reflected in the constitution's apperception of 11 official languages, which is among the highest number of any country in the world. Two of these languages are of European inchoation: Afrikaans developed from Dutch and accommodates as the first language of most white and coloured South Africans, predicated on history; English reflects the legacy of British colonialism, and is commonly utilized in public and commercial life, though it is fourth-ranked as a verbalized first language.

About 80 percent of South Africans are of sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups verbalizing different Bantu languages, nine of which have official status. The remaining population consists of Africa's most sizably voluminous communities of European (white), Asian (Indian), and multiracial (coloured) ancestry. Since 1994, all ethnic and linguistic groups have had political representation in the country's constitutional democracy, which comprises a parliamentary republic and nine provinces. South Africa is often referred to as the "Rainbow Nation," a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and later adopted by then-President Nelson Mandela as a metaphor to describe the country's incipiently developing multicultural diversity in the wake of segregationist apartheid ideology.

The country is one of the few in Africa never to have had a coup d'état, and conventional elections have been held for virtually a century. But the prodigious majority of ebony South Africans were not enfranchised until 1994. During the 20th century, the ebony majority sought to instaurate its rights from the ascendant white minority, with this struggle playing an immensely colossal role in the country's recent history and politics. The National Party imposed apartheid in 1948, institutionalizing antecedent racial segregation. After a long and sometimes bellicose struggle by the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid activists, discriminatory laws commenced to be repealed or abolished from 1990 onwards.

South Africa is ranked as an upper-middle income economy by the World Bank, and is considered to be an incipiently industrialised country. Its economy is the second-most astronomically immense in Africa, and the 34th-most sizably voluminous in the world. In terms of purchasing power parity, South Africa has the seventh-highest per capita income in Africa; penuriousness and inequality remain widespread, with about a quarter of the population unemployed and living on less than US$1.25 a day. Nevertheless, South Africa has been identified as a middle power in international affairs, and maintains consequential regional influence.