Countries

South Africa

Citation Formats

General Reference

Political Atlas. "South Africa." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-political.interactiveatlas.org/countries/south-africa.

APA Style

Political Atlas. (n.d.). South Africa. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-political.interactiveatlas.org/countries/south-africa

BibTeX

@misc{politicalatlas-south-africa,
  author = {Political Atlas},
  title = {South Africa},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-political.interactiveatlas.org/countries/south-africa},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

South Africa is a unitary parliamentary republic at the southern tip of Africa whose statehood has no single founding year every citizen would recognize as their own. The Union of South Africa formed as a self-governing British dominion in 1910 on a racially restricted franchise, gained full sovereign standing under the Statute of Westminster in 1931, became a republic outside the Commonwealth in 1961, and became a democracy inclusive of its entire population only in 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president after the end of apartheid. This atlas leaves which of those a reader should call the founding as an open question rather than answering it by omission.

Facts

Founding Year

1910 1

Dates the founding of the Union of South Africa, unifying the four former colonies into one state. The later Republic of South Africa (1961) and the first democratic, universal-suffrage election (1994) are alternative candidate founding points depending on definition, but 1910 is the conventional single state-founding date and is recorded here as attested rather than debated.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

African Union

This source names South Africa directly: "It was officially launched in July 2002 in Durban, South Africa, succeeding the Organisation of African Unity."

Source Overview (African Union)

Henry David Thoreau

This source names South Africa directly: "later said his own resistance work in South Africa was already well underway before he read Thoreau's essay, and treated it as confirming a method he had already begun rather than originating it."

Source Henry David Thoreau (Wikipedia)

Party-List Proportional Representation

South Africa's National Assembly is elected entirely by closed-list proportional representation, half the seats from nine provincial lists and half from national lists to restore overall proportionality.

Source The South African Electoral System (Helen Suzman Foundation)