ABSTRACT
According to Lonely Planet, “South Africa’s history extends back to around 40,000 B.C. when the San people first settled Southern Africa. By A.D. 500, Bantu-speaking peoples had arrived from West Africa’s Niger Delta. Competing colonial European powers began settling here in small numbers from the 17th century, mostly in the Cape. “Nelson (Rolihlahla) Mandela, South Africa’s most popular anti-apartheid leader, had witnessed the rise and decline of apartheid firsthand. In the mid-1980s, after more than twenty years in prison for opposing apartheid, he assumed a central role in helping to end it. The pursuit of the figure of the earth has a long and interesting history in South Africa. The year 2001 marked the 250th anniversary since the prominent astronomer-geodesist Abbe de LaCaille who set foot on South African soil to catalogue the Southern stars by their celestial co-ordinates of right ascension and declination.
