|Republic of South Africa| |Flag||Coat of Arms|
|Capital||Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein| |Language||[[Zulu,
Xhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, English, Setswana, Sesotho, Xitsonga,
Swati, Venda, isiNdebele]] (official)| |Area||471 443 sq mi|
|GDP per capita||$13,000 (2007)| South Africa is located on the
southern tip of Africa and is the wealthiest, and one of the
largest countries on the continent. It has a very advantageous
location for trade routes by sea from Western Europe to India
and the Far East. As a result, there was far more immigration by
Europeans to South Africa than any other region of Africa, and
whites of European ancestry (English and Dutch) ruled South
Africa until the late twentieth century. Since then, democracy
has brought representative government to the African ethnic
groups. South Africa hosted the 2010 Football World Cup. Until
1991, South African law divided the population into four major
racial categories: Africans (black), whites, coloreds, and
Asians. Although this law has been abolis