Spes bona | |||||||
| Capital (and largest city) |
Cape Town | ||||||
| Other cities | Worcester, Paarl, Stellenbosch | ||||||
| Language official |
Afrikaans, English | ||||||
| others | Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Portuguese, Spanish | ||||||
| Population | ~4,000,000 | ||||||
| Established | 16 December 2013 | ||||||
| Currency | Cape Rand (R) | ||||||
| Organizations | League of Nations, African Economic Community | ||||||
The Republic of Good Hope (Afrikaans: Republiek van Goeie Hoop) is the successor to the provisional RZA government that had been installed in Cape Town by ANZC and South American forces. The country is also called the RGH, the Cape, and quite often simply Cape Town.
It is essentially a city-state: its economy and politics are thoroughly centered in Cape Town's city and port. It has a diverse population. The Cape Coloured ethnicity constitutes a majority, but prominent minority groups include Cape Khoi, Cape Malay, Afrikaner, Indian, English, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, and Tswana people. Migration from other parts of South Africa has been steadily increasing since the fall of the Republic of the Cape in 2006, encouraged by stability in the region and the jobs that come from the growing global transoceanic trade.
Cape Town has become one of the world's busiest ports. It is the major stopover on the route from South America to South and Southeast Asia, and between Australia and West Africa. Some ships stop there on the Australia-Europe, Australia-South America, and Caribbean-Asia routes. This interconnectivity has made it important to the international community. ANZ and South America continue to fund its defense and security, including sending advisors to train its military and inviting officers to study abroad. The city has become synonymous with the League of Nations, hosting from the start a regional high commission, and since 2015, the global headquarters.
History[]
Background[]
The name of the Cape of Good Hope is credited to King João II of Portugal, who was filled with expectations at the possibilities of the route to India. The town itself was founded by Jan van Riebeeck for the Dutch East India Company, and it became the nucleus of the Dutch South African colony. Britain took it at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, making it the seat of the Cape Colony. When Britain created the Union of South Africa in 1910, Cape Town became its legislative capital, a status it kept under the apartheid-era Republic.
When South Africa was imploding in the mid-1980s, the national government fled to Cape Town when it could no longer hold down the center of the country. To avoid total collapse, the government was forced to share power with the Volkskongres movement of Peter Marais; once in power, Marais successfully pushed the final dissolution of South Africa and the start of a new regime, the Republic of the Cape.
In 2003, the Cape exploded into civil war between the Coloured-led government and White-led army. The assassination of Marais precluded any chance of restoring the regime that he had built. To restore order and (perhaps more importantly) revive trade through Cape Town, ANZ and South America cooperated to send peacekeepers to the city in 2006. They set up a provisional state simply called the RZA.
The Occupation[]
In general it was a benign occupation, certainly an improvement after three years of war, two of which had seen anarchy in most of the city. The people of Cape Town gave the invaders a wary welcome. Australians and New Zealanders breathed new life into the Cape's Anglophone culture, long dormant under the Afrikaans-promoting regime of the Republic of the Cape. Argentinians, Brazilians and Chileans brought a new element not seen in the city's life before.
As soon as the area was militarily secure, the occupiers set to work assembling a provisional council of local leaders. The outsiders had no knowledge of the Cape's complex social and political dynamics and would need to rely on those who did. They sought people from a cross-section of racial and economic groups, from the city and the outlying areas. Officially, anyone who had actively taken part in the Cape Civil War was excluded from the government; this proved to be unenforcable. The council sat down with the foreign military officers, and with bureaucrats sent by the SAC and ANZC, to confront the problems facing the region. These were both large and numerous.
The city was badly damaged, its population scattered and dispersed, most of its civic institutions no longer functioning. This in fact presented a great opportunity to confront the city's long legacy of racial segregation, a legacy that reached back before apartheid to its colonial roots. Black townships were demolished, their residents invited to come into abandoned parts of the city proper. Reactions were mixed. After generations of racial stratification, some Capetonians resented this sudden opening up of their neighborhoods to those who had been excluded. Many of those relocated found that they were moving into housing that had been badly damaged or neglected, with unreliable access to electricity and clean water.
Another challenge in the postwar years was healing the social fabric that had been torn by successive waves of trauma: apartheid, global economic collapse, the divisive policies of the RotC era, and civil war. Here too, success was mixed. The diversity of the Provisional Council certainly provided a model of relative racial harmony. When the RZA behan to hold elections, the first in the Cape region in which all could vote without reference to race, this also met with success. But the provisional government largely ignored calls to investegate and prosecute crimes committed under past regimes. Individuals, parties and companies that had perpetrated violations of human rights, especially of Blacks, for the most part continued to go about with impunity.
Rapid economic growth helped to smooth over some of these difficulties, or at least help people ignore them. During the mid-2000s, world trade was coming back to life with a roar, and Cape Town was placed exactly right to reap the rewards of it. The revived port was good not just for the city, but for the countryside as well. Cape wine could finally go to market, and products from abroad could reach local markets again for the first time in over twenty years. The growing prosperity allowed the provisional government to build more and do more. It also gave it access to foreign aid. Both Australia-New Zealand and the South American nations were interested in Cape Town primarily for its trade, and they were willing to invest in its security and infrastructure if that kept the goods and cash flowing.
Responsible elected government came in stages, first the municipalities, then a parliament, and finally a president. The RZA's political landscape was marked by a wide array of small parties representing many different political, ethnic and religious viewpoints, and this remains a feature today.
Preparation for the Cape's independence began already in 2009 but was delayed by rising tension in the region between the Dominion of South Africa and KwaXhosa, culminating in a war in 2013. However, by that time the people of the Cape were pressing hard for independence, and the occupying governments agreed to transition to full independence on 16 December of that year, a day that was already significant on the South African national calendar, and which now became the nation's Independence Day.
The independent RGH[]
Because so much of the groundwork for independence was laid under the RZA, the Cape's independent existence was continuous with it; independence was not a very sharp change. The same spectrum of political parties competed to address the same issues as before. The nation even kept the same flag, a tricolor with three rings and an anchor, old historic symbols of the Cape of Good Hope.
As the population grew, water became a major concern. The changed climate had left the Cape region with reduced average rainfall compared to the early 1980s, and droughts affected both city and countryside. The changed climate has hindered the recovery of Good Hope's wine industry, such a source of regional pride. The first independent administration worked to steer water infrastructure development in the direction of sustainability, but this was not enough, and at several points water had to be rationed.
In 2014, South Africa's demonstrably greater stability led the League of Nations to finally choose a new headquarters, four years after moving to New Caledonia on a temporary basis. The advantages that Cape Town offered as a headquarters site were the same as those that had drawn the ANZC and SAC to intervene there in the first place: it is located between the world's contemporary great powers; it is a major trade hub and an emerging global city; it is accessible to a large portion of the world's nations. The League moved to Good Hope in 2015, using a number of facilities around the city until a permanent site could be built. The Hall of Peace was inaugurated in 2017, and construction continued on the rest of the complex for several more years.
Government and politics[]
Good Hope is a semi-presidential republic with competitive multiparty elections.
The republic's political landscape is marked by a large number of small parties, some quite ephemeral and others more durable. A number of parties have connections to groups in other parts of South Africa. The People's Front (Volksfront), associated with the ruling party of the Volkstaat, is one of the largest Afrikaner parties. The African National Congress has support among Black voters, and the Progressive Cape Party, based in the English-speaking White and Indian communities, is a linked to the Progressive Party in the DSA, descended from the Progressive Federal Party that founded the Dominion.
Culture[]
Good Hope's culture comes out of a dynamic interplay between its long history going back to colonization and the wild variety of its present population. The city's Malay heritage is a key part of its foundation. This population began to settle the neighborhood of Bo-Kaap, today the city's oldest, while still enslaved in the late eighteenth century. Despite not sharing a religion with the bulk of the Cape's population, the Malays made an extraordinary impact on the region's language and food. French Huguenot heritage is also celebrated; to the Huguenots is attributed, among other things, the Cape's wine industry, centered in the hills east of the city.
The city's near-destruction in the Cape Civil War of the early 2000s severely threatened much of this heritage. Maintaining and rebuilding historic buildings and neighborhoods is a process still not complete. At the same time, this process has opened the door to new cultural elements and new possibilities. Many of the outlying Black townships were demolished in the late 2000s, no longer needed for homes due to the sharp decrease in the urban and suburban population. The Black residents then moved into the city proper. Something of the vitality of township culture was lost, but this urban migration brought to the city African ways of life from the eastern parts of the former South Africa.
The period of ANZ-South American occupation brought still more foreign influences. The Australians and Kiwis helped revive English-speaking culture in the region after a generation of severe decline. Some people from Australia and New Zealand settled in Cape Town, joining English South Africans who were slowly returning after being driven into the Dominion by years of persecution and civil war. English is not anywhere near where it was before 1983, but it is again prominent enough that it became a co-official language upon independence. South Americans have settled in the city in greater numbers. Brazilians joined an existing small Portuguese-speaking minority, largely people who had moved from Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s. Together they have had an impact that can especially be noted in Good Hope's Catholic churches, many of which offer services in Portuguese. The impact of Spanish-speaking South Americans can be seen in the Argentinian restaurants around the city.
The destruction also made it somewhat easier to set aside land for the League of Nations complex, nicknamed World Town or Wêreldstad, in the Foreshore region just northeast of the central business district. The Hall of Peace, the general assembly's meeting place, was completed in 2017. The LoN's presence has brought in leaders and workers from all over the world, and the city's recreational and cultural offerings have expanded accordingly.
International relations[]
Beginning just after the ANZ-SAC intervention, the international community began to view Cape Town as a secure and open entry point into the turbulent region of Southern Africa. For this reason many organizations have established regional offices there. The League of Nations commission was the first and of course the most prominent. Not long after, Cape Town became the African headquarters of the International Radiological and Chemical Agency, where it supervises the ongoing decontamination of the continent's only former nuclear power plant. The 2015 relocation of the LoN headquarters has of course further added to the sense of Cape Town as an international city.
The RZA government was first directly run, then supervised by the world's two major international blocs, the South American Confederation and the Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand. Both powers continue to exert a strong influence on Good Hope. They provide aid in numerous categories: infrastructure, ecology, defense. A good deal of the funding and training for the Good Hope Defense Forces is provided by the two foreign blocs. ANZ has provided the bulk of the training, its military structure and traditions having much more in common with those of South Africa, but some officers have gone to South America for specialized training.
The Cape also joined the African Economic Community even before it had attained full independence, and it remains a member today. The growth of Cape Town has made it the largest economy within the AEC's free trade zone, which includes parts of South Africa, South West Africa, and Botswana. The government had been in talks to join the New Union of South Africa before that organization dissolved in 2014.
Between 2003 and 2007, the bulk of the inland territory of the collapsing Republic of the Cape came under the control of its neighbors - especially the Dominion, but also Volkstaat, the Orange Free State and Waterboersland. The RGH has on occasion raised the issue of recovering some of this land, especially the agriculturally valuable Garden Route along the southern coast, which became part of the Dominion. South America and ANZ do mot support these efforts, as the Dominion took that land with the peacekeepers' consent and even cooperation.
National symbols[]
The RGH incorporates many historic symbols of the Cape and its predecessor states. The central motif on the flag combines features from the city arms: the three rings of Jan van Riebeeck, and the anchor, a symbol of hope. The blue and green represent the Cape's position between the sea and land, and the four-color palette more generally represents the nation's diversity.
The motto, simply the name of the country in Latin, goes back to the colonial era.
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