Carte du Transvaal Montrant l’enplacement des Fermes appartenant a la Transvaal Consolidated Land et exploration Company Limitet.

Title

Carte du Transvaal Montrant l’enplacement des Fermes appartenant a la Transvaal Consolidated Land et exploration Company Limitet.

Description

Decorative and very rare map of Pretoria, former Transvaal. The map depicts all mines where it has been found coal, copper, iron, nickel, silver and gold. The Province of the Transvaal was a province of South Africa from 1910 until the end of apartheid in 1994, when a new constitution subdivided it. The name Transvaal refers to the province's geographical location to the north of the Vaal River. Its capital was Pretoria, which was also the country's administrative capital, while its largest city was Johannesburg.In 1910, four British colonies united to form the Union of South Africa. The Transvaal Colony, which had been formed out of the bulk of the old South African Republic after the Second Boer War, became the Transvaal Province in the new union. Half a century later, in 1961, the union ceased to be part of the Commonwealth of Nations and became the Republic of South Africa. The PWV (Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging) conurbation in the Transvaal, centered around Pretoria and Johannesburg, became South Africa's economic powerhouse, a position it still holds today as Gauteng province.

ca. 1870

Artist

Chabaire

Historical Description

Some of the world's oldest paleoanthropological fossils have been unearthed in South Africa. After these pre-humans, various species of the Homo genus such as Homo habilis, Homo naledi, Homo erectus and finally modern man, Homo sapiens, lived here. The beginning of modern historiography in South Africa is set on April 6, 1652, when the Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck built a supply station on the Cape of Good Hope on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC). Due to its strategically favorable location, it was supposed to be a rest stop for merchant ships traveling between Europe and Southeast Asia. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the settlement, which slowly but steadily expanded, was owned by the Netherlands. The settlers initially spread to the western Cape region, which at that time was a retreat for the Khoisan. Several hundred French Huguenots, after being persecuted in France from 1686, came into the country via the Netherlands from 1688 and brought the viticulture culture with them. The French-speaking names of wineries and fruit-growing farms in the western Cape can be traced back to them. After reaching the Bantu settlement border eastwards in 1770, they waged a series of wars - the border wars - against the Xhosa people. The Cape Dutch brought numerous slaves into the country from Indonesia, Madagascar and India.