Like most migratory flows into Britain from beyond Europe, colonial emigration from continental Europe and Britain sowed the seeds of the South African presence in London. The Cape of Good Hope, located on the Southern most tip of Africa, was a key trade route for the competing European powers. The Cape and its hinterland was settled by Portuguese explorers, Dutch colonialists, Germans and French Huguenots during the age of mercantile colonialism, before being seized by the British in 1795.

South African London Today

At the last count, (the 2001 census) there were 45,507 South Africans living in Greater London. The character of this population is in some ways comparable to other affluent populations from former white settler colonies such as Australia, composed as it is of groups ranging from back-packing students working in the service industries to highly skilled professionals. But the South African population in London has a special historical importance due to the global struggle against the apartheid system (dismantled in 1994) that defines so much of the country’s troubled modern history. For many years after the implementation of the notorious apartheid regime by the ruling National Party in 1948, London became a focal site of organised resistance against apartheid, and was home to exiled activists, from political organisations such as the African National Congress, who exploited their knowledge of the English language and law to successfully create an effective resistance movement in exile.

Widely dispersed around the capital, South African Londoners have their own sports bars, ex-pat associations and newspapers, all of which create a sense of community born of South Africa’s status as a former British white-settler dominion with close cultural ties to the colonial motherland. The main centres of settlement were established predominantly by ‘Saffers’ of British ancestry in Earls Court, Fulham, Putney and other nearby areas of South West London. Unaffected by the controls that kept out Afrikaners under the apartheid years, South Africans of British heritage migrated continuously in the postwar period, settling and establishing social networks and communities that thrive to this day, as is manifested in the existence of shops selling South African produce such as Mrs Ball’s Chutney, Biltong (dried meat) and Castle beer, along with restaurants such as Chakalaka, which serve up South African specialities including Boerewors (farmer’s spicy sausage) and chakalaka itself, a spicy onion and tomato salsa that is said to have originated in the townships of Johannesburg.

A significant and well-established South African Jewish community has also evolved in North London – a small group of prosperous, left-liberal émigrés, including doctors, academics and artists who, alienated by the right-wing and anti-Semitic tendencies of apartheid South African governments, made Hampstead their home from the1950s. This group included many anti-apartheid political activists too, notably Joe Slovo and Ruth First, whose daughter, Gillian Slovo wrote Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (1997) - a moving account of her 1950s childhood in South Africa and her relationship with her parents. More information about South African Jewish people can be found here.

The established community in South West London is also distinct from more recent, post-apartheid arrivals, which include more Indian, Afrikaner Black South African migrants (doctors, nurses, students etc), whose presence is in some ways less visible than their white counterparts. Find out more about the presence of South African Indians in London. The groups are less bound by traditional patterns of settlement to London’s South West. At the same time, these diverse groups can also be viewed through the lens of generation, with new arrivals of all backgrounds taking a keener interest in events that occur within the home country, as is testified to by the existence of diasporic newspapers such the South African.

The Colonial Period

The territory known today as South Africa had been inhabited for millennia, and been home to the Khoisan and various Bantu-speaking African people for centuries before the ‘discovery’ by mercantile explorers from Europe in the mid-17th century. The richness of indigenous South African culture and heritage, as is well known, was largely lost on early explorers and subsequently, white settlers - the Afrikaners, who both regarded Black Africa and its people as inferior to themselves. This did not prevent miscegenation between Afrikaans-speaking Europeans and African women, as well slaves and indentured labourers imported from elsewhere before and after the abolition of slavery in 1833. The resulting mixed ‘race’ population, which came to be classified as ‘Cape Coloureds’, was subjected – along with imported Indian labourers and indigenous African people, to institutionalised oppression (denial of the voting rights, land ownership restrictions etc) in those territories ruled by the Afrikaners, whose rigidly racist ideology portrayed them as a white racial elite in an uncivilised Black continent.

Coree the Saldanian

The British too, however, were involved in this process of black disenfranchisement. Mercantile colonialism shaped the earliest encounters between South African travellers and London. Peter Fryer’s history of Black people in Britain illustrates this through the experiences of a man known as Coree the Saldanian, an early Khoisan visitor to the UK: Coree meant ‘man of the Kora’, or Guachokora clan; Saldanian was the region in the Cape in which his people, the Khoinkhoin dwelt. Coree, according to Fryer, had ventured on board an East India Company ship, only to be kidnapped with another Khoikhoin companion by unscrupulous merchants in search of information that would help with the company’s trading ventures and brought to London in 1613 (his friend died ‘from sullenness’, according to his captors, soon after the ship set sail). Though treated reasonably well in London, he begged to be returned home as soon as he learned a little English. He later acted as a middle-man between English traders and local people with cattle for sale, an occupation that cost him his life when he was publicly put to death by the Dutch who were equally adamant in their will to control trade in the Cape.

Saartje Baartmann

By the mid-eighteenth century, the London Magazine was publishing articles that claimed the Negroes were ‘remarkably distinct from the rest of the human species’, pointing to the external female genitalia of the ‘Hottentots’ (the last term is a derogatory Dutch epithet for Khoikhoin that refers to the clicking sound in their language). This idea of racial difference was to become something of a European obsession during the Victorian epoch, in which the positioning of the black ‘Hottentot’ at the bottom of the racial ladder was established through pseudo-scientific claims and artistic representations of the supposed sexual differences between Europeans and blacks as personified through the ‘primitive genitalia’ of ‘Hottentot’ women. The naked public exhibition in London in 1810 of a Khoikhoin woman, Saartje Bartmann (known as the ‘Hottentot Venus’), is perhaps one of the most shameful episodes in muesological history: audiences paid to see her supposedly anomalous buttocks and sexual parts whilst she was alive; after she died, her genital organs were preserved and exhibited in the musée de l’homme in Paris until 2002, when her remains were finally returned to South Africa for burial following a demand issued by the South African government.

South African culture in London Museums

Despite such episodes, however, museologists have long understood that South Africa boasts some of the richest archaeological remains known to man, and have in some respects been kinder to African culture and heritage than to flesh and blood Africans: as early as 1837, the ‘South African Association’ exhibited a large collection of Bechuana, Zulu and other Southern African objects at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. Richard Cuming bought a total of 120 objects from the subsequent sale of the exhibition, many of which still exist in the Cuming collection in Southwark. The British Museum too, boasts a fine collection of historical and contemporary arts and crafts from Africa, including objects from the Cape.

London’s museums and galleries also reflect the well established historical pathways of international movement and cultural exchange between South Africa and Britain; a constant trickle of white South African visitors and migrants have moved in the opposite direction to the agrarian settlers, administrators, entrepreneurs, entertainers and artists that Britain exported to the white settler colonies. Indeed, so fluid has been the relation between colony and metropole that the very line between being South African and British has been blurred within the course of a lifecycle by individuals such as Victor Stiebel, a celebrated British designer whose stylish feminine clothing, striped fabrics and evening wear are exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Born in South Africa in 1907, Stiebel migrated to Cambridge and then London after the First World War, opening his own couture houses in Bruton Street in 1932 and then Cavendish Square in 1958. British born artists such as the miniature painter Louise Burrell, whose works are also exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for their part, moved and worked freely in South Africa as they did across much of the empire and English-speaking world.

The postwar period: South African political exile in the United Kingdom

Once the path of migration had been established in the colonial period, it was only natural that London became a choice destination for South African political exiles and émigrés in search of refuge from the apartheid regime. Most prominently, Oliver Tambo, co-founder of the modern South African state, came to London in 1960; while Nelson Mandela was incarcerated in the homeland, his North London home in Muswell Hill functioned as the unofficial headquarters of the A.N.C. Mandela actually paid him a fleeting visit in 1962; the next time he came was after 27 years in jail; one of his first stops on each occasion was Tambo’s Haringey base.

Nelson Mandela underground in 1960s London

In 1962 Mandela was a marked man. As a leader of the struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa, he had already been arrested, harassed and banned from leaving the country. In January 1962 the young lawyer slipped out of South Africa in secret, to rally international support for the anti-apartheid cause. On 7 June he flew to London. The 10 days Nelson Mandela spent in London were among his last days of freedom for nearly 30 years. Six weeks later, in August 1962, he would be rearrested by the South African police. Life imprisonment was to follow. You can find out more about his time by visting the small foyer display on from June 20th at Museum of London.

Oliver Tambo

Like many asylum seekers today, Tambo arrived penniless and unknown in London at a time when newspaper adverts for accommodation famously stipulated 'no coloureds, no Irish, no dogs, no children'. But with the support of political sympathisers he purchased a three-storey house on Alexandra Park Road, from where he set about campaigning to bring down the apartheid system; by the mid 1980s, he was meeting with governments across Europe. It is perhaps ironic that although London was the base from which the A.N.C operated, it was not until 1986 that UK representatives held meetings with Tambo due to Margaret Thatcher's view of the ANC as a terrorist organisation.

Last year, a bust of Tambo was unveiled in Albert Road recreation ground - the park in which his children used to play. He only barely lived to see the apartheid system come down, dying in 1991 - last year would have been his 90th birthday. The bust, sculpted by the late Ian Walters, who also sculpted the statue of Mandela in Parliament Square, rightly acknowledges the heroic achievements of a great leader to a noble cause. Like other prominent South African anti-apartheid campaigners who operated in London in exile, he risked his life: Oliver Tambo and Peter Hain (later to become a Labour politician), born in South Africa, were targeted by South African intelligence agents’ assassination attempts in London in 1982 and 1972 respectively.

Ruth First

The contribution of many lesser-known South Africans to the diasporic political mobilisation against apartheid includes the campaigning of Ruth First, a courageous journalist, academic and activist whose staunchly anti-racist activities, writings and ideas are documented in an archive that can be accessed at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. Born of Jewish emigrants who founded the South African Communist Party, her oppositional career disturbed the reactionary forces of pro-apartheid South Africa enough to have her hounded out of the country in 1964 and then eventually killed in Manchester by a letter bomb in 1982.

After Apartheid

It is thought that several thousand political exiles returned to South Africa from London in the immediate aftermath of apartheid’s eventual demise, as a wave of optimism swept the country at the prospect of a new beginning (many had British passports, so the exact numbers are difficult to calculate) – an era in which blacks too would at last be given an opportunity to prosper in their own country, where they formed the majority but had been stripped of citizenship and marginalised for most of its history. This ‘feel-good’ factor has since been displaced by a more sanguine attitude to the country’s prospects, as the new leadership has struggled to cope with social and economic problems, including, of course, the devastating spread of AIDS, unemployment and (somewhat ironically given South Africa’s recent history), concerns about xenophobia linked to mass immigration from neighbouring countries. London’s increasingly magnetic attraction for South African born nurses, doctors and teachers, of which there are now several thousand London’s inner-city boroughs, has been a source of genuine concern for the South African government which has complained to the Department for International Development (DFID) of a brain drain affecting the country’s human development.

When seen within the wider context and over the longue durée of history, the current economic concerns that face South Africans at home are a mark of the political successes of the previous generation of South African political exiles in London. Once a country that invoked images of a retrograde, bitter and divided society, post-apartheid South Africa is in many ways finally embracing its potential as a leading African nation. Indeed, in recent times it has earned the reputation of a being a particularly liberal and progressive society – one of the precious few in the world in which gay marriage is legal. An unassuming toy helicopter, recently donated by Nelson Mandela to the Museum of Childhood, is symbolic of this new liberal ethos: made from recycled materials by children from humble backgrounds, it hints at a new, progressive, quietly confident politics that pioneers the advancement of issues that are of global concern, adding a more upbeat and positive dimension to South African cultural and museological heritage in London for future generations.