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This is episode 18 and we\u2019re focusing on the 1670s through to the 1680s where a whole lot was going on in the south of Africa.
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\nLet me first start with race relations. South Africans probably have no idea that the man who launched the most aggressive drive to expand into Africa was not born in Europe \u2013 he was born in Mauritius of Dutch and Indian stock. Had he been born after apartheid\u2019s firm grasp fixed South African in a race-based laws after 1948 he would have been classified coloured.
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\nThe man who ran the first version of our country would have been denied the right to vote and forced to take second-class trains. And yet he introduced colonialism in South Africa in its full stark reality.
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\nHistory. Got to love it in all its irony.
\nHe arrived with his six children, but not his wife. She refused to make the trip so he was not only a coloured governor, he was also single parent. Van der Stel was to found a South African dynasty, casting off his links to the motherland.
\nMore than a thousand miles away to the north another process which had started hundreds of years before was also to prove significant and we need to return to this part of Southern Africa for an update.
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\nFrom the fourteenth century, Shona and Sotho speakers were in close proximity in the Soutpansburg close to the Limpopo River.
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\nThe Venda people were emerging from the Singo \u2013 an offshoot of the Shona. There\u2019s a lot of debate between archaeologists and traditionalists around this story where Venda oral history speaks of the Singo Capital Dzata.