Modern humans (people) have lived on the land of South Africa for at least 170,000 years.
Europeans arrived little more than 500 years ago, and colonised the land shortly after.
Dutch, German, Flemish, and French settlers (who became the ‘Voortrekkers’ or ‘Boers’), and later the British sought to take the land away from the indigenous peoples; the two major indigenous groups of black Africans are the Xhosa and the Zulu.