South Africa

South Africa, officially the republic, is the southernmost country of Africa, bounded by 2,798 kilometres of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, enclosing Lesotho and bordering Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Eswatini. Pretoria, founded on the Apies River, is the administrative capital, Cape Town the seat of Parliament and legislative capital, and Bloemfontein the judicial capital, while Johannesburg is the largest city, followed by Cape Town and Durban. The Union of South Africa was formed on 31 May 1910 from the British colonies of the Cape and Natal with the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and the country grew from dominion to republic in 1961. Its history since has been the long struggle over apartheid and its end in the 1990s, and the state now holds nine provinces with more than sixty-three million people, the sixth most populous of Africa and the twenty-fourth in the world.