Title: Discover South Africa
Author: Peter Joyce
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Travel & Heritage
Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9781920545949 / ISBN 978-1-92-054594-9
Softcover, 21 x 28 cm, 224 pages, over 500 colour photos
Through the 500 stunning photographs in Discovering South Africa, Peter Joyce introduces to the splendours of a wildlife and floral abundance that is unparalleled anywhere in the world. South Africa is a big country, about as large as the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France and Germany put together. It stretches from the Limpopo River in the north to blustery Cape Agulhas, nearly 2000 kilometres to the south, from Namaqualand along the barren western seaboard 1500 kilometres to subtropical KwaZulu-Natal and the humid Indian Ocean coast: a total land area of just under 1.3 million square kilometres.
Enclosed within South Africa are the separate kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland. Far up the Atlantic coastline, beyond the desolate reaches of the Orange River (also known as the Gariep), is Namibia, a vast and beautiful country of diamonds, desert and human division that the League of Nations mandated to South Africa after the First World War and which finally gained its independence in 1990. Flanking the Republic's far northern regions are, in clockwise order, the independent states of Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, a rich territorial diversity.
Indeed, diversity is probably the single word that best illustrates both South and southern Africa. The canvas is kaleidoscopic; variety, contrast and sometimes conflict are vividly evident in the bewildering mix of race and language, creed, colour and culture. The diversity is there, too, in the nature of the land; in its geological formations and regional climates; its mountains, plains and coasts; its rich farmlands, its bushveld scrub and deserts, each of the many different parts supporting its own distinctive plant and animal life. Truly, South Africa inhibits a world in one country.
THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE
THE PAST
SOUTH AFRICA TODAY
GAUTENG
NORTH WEST MPUMALANGA
LIMPOPO PROVINCE
FREE STATE
KWAZULU-NATAL
EASTERN CAPE
WESTERN CAPE
NORTHERN CAPE
INDEX