South Africans

South Africans are the people of South Africa. They encompass about 57.7 million people of diverse origins, cultures, languages, and religions.

Quotes

American society as a whole seemed committed to the idea of the races living together on an equal basis. This was something few South Africans, white or black, had actually seen. Nconganwe had trouble accepting that it actually existed. In African culture, the family and extended family were everything. Loyalty to one's clan was far more important than any feeling of nationhood. America had forged her own borders. South Africa’s had been drawn by European colonists, with no thought to the peoples already living there. ... South Africans had little experience with the idea of political dialogue. Any difference of opinion in this bloody land was cause for violence... [W]hat nation should the Xhosas or Zulus feel allegiance to? The government was the enemy and the South African nation was a collection of peoples kept deliberately apart. There was no concept of the “melting pot” or a pluralistic society. That much of apartheid had taken root.
- Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin, Vortex (1991)

By 1901 racial segregation was the norm in most of the British Empire. It was most explicit in South Africa, however, where Dutch settlers had from an early stage banned marriage between burghers and blacks. Their descendants were the driving force behind subsequent legislation. In 1897 the Boer republic of the Transvaal prohibited white women from having extramarital intercourse with black men, and this became the template for legislation in the Cape Colony (1902), Natal and the Orange Free State (1903), as well as in neighbouring Rhodesia.
- Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 20-21

I`m a Christian. I`m a South African. I`m an Afrikaner. I`m a lawyer. I love my country.
- F. W. de Klerk, as quoted in "New S. African Leader`s Reforms Irk Left, Right" (1 January 1990), by Tom Masland, Chicago Tribune

I've met the King of China and a working Yorkshire miner, but I've never met a nice South African.
- John Lloyd and Peter Brewis, "I've Never Met a Nice South African" (1986), Spitting Image

South Africans are very backward in terms of historical development. I hate South Africans. That's not a fair thing to say because I like a lot of South Africans but they really think they're the bees' knees and actually they've been the cause of so much trouble in this part of the world... I have a suspicion the blacks model themselves on the whites now that they're in power. "Don't you know who we are, man?" ... They think in BRICS that the "S" actually stands for South Africa whereas it stands for Africa.
- Guy Scott, interview with David Smith (2013)

At home in South Africa I have sometimes said in big meetings where you have black and white together: 'Raise your hands!' Then I have said: 'Move your hands,' and I've said 'Look at your hands - different colors representing different people. You are the Rainbow People of God.'
- Desmond Tutu, Sermon in Tromsø, Norway (5 December 1991)