Latin american-like South Africa?

It has been discussed that with the right pod South Africa could become similar in demographics to Canada or Australia (mostly white) what would it take for South Africa to instead be more like say Mexico with a coloured majority and large white, and native minorities?
 
Being a colonized by the Iberians probably would help. :rolleyes:
Apart that, I think that the dynamic of colonization in South Africa is, from the very start, markedly different from, well, pretty much anywhere else.
The first White settlement was in a area were there was relatively little in the way of natives, and racist objection to mixing with the Natives and/or importing other non-Europeans (Cape Malays) wasn't so dominating. So, you, in the Cape you have the premise for a culturally European-dominated, largely Afrikaans-speaking, and possibly, over time, majority or plurality "coloured" (as in, descendants of Dutch settlers and local Khoi-San peoples) colony in much of what used to be Cape Colony west of more or less Port Elizabeth.
However, then you have the Bantu. They weren't conquered in the way the Aztecs or the Inca were, and I'd argue that, even if interested, the Dutch or the early British could not do that earlier (that just could sort-of have integrated them in the SA polity "better", at least as far as mixed marriages are concerned). As it was, the main Bantu nation in the eastern half of South Africa were conquered by the whites in a painstaking, difficult process where the defeated groups kept some coherence as organized ethnicities if not polities, and the white colonists tended to be quite OK with that. The Spanish in Latin America weren't that OK with the indios clinging to their customs, especially in religion and politics (I know it was more complicated, I'm really oversimplifying here).
When the Bantu polities were brought into the fold, Europe, especially Protestant Europe, was quite big about racism, mixed marriages were largely frowned upon, and, moreover, the Protestant Churches cared relatively little about converting black people. Not that they didn't, but the great role as social unifier across class, race and caste barriers that the Catholic Church had in Latin America pretty much from the start never really operated on a great scale in South Africa, at least not until much later. The Calvinist Christianity of the Afrikaner of Dutch descent especially morphed into something quite unhelpful to this.
So, I'm not sure. Keeping the place Dutch could probably avoid/delay the Treks, and this would in turn leave the Cape society somewhat more racially "pacified" (in _very_ relative terms) so developing much more like a "normal" Creole society; which of course still means a considerable degree of conflict and general nastiness, but probably less than IOTL.
OTOH, in this way you are keeping out much of what is now SA, more or less all of what used to be Transvaal and Natal, most of Free State, and the former Transkei. Maybe these areas would develop as almost purely "Black" countries similar to the rest of Subsaharan Africa, though I expect that Kenyan or Rhodesian levels of settlers (with ensuing nastiness, and probably little intermixing) can be in the cards.
That's quite hypotetical though.
 
I think Falecius has a point about Protestant Christianity. Compare the situation that existed in Louisiana in the colonial era and early American period to what existed in the rest of the American South. Our black codes were rather lenient (Louisiana slaves had to be granted the Sabbath, for example), manumission was fairly easy and quite common, the free status of the father made the child free, free people of colour had full property rights, and black and white worshipped in the same churches (though not on the same pews of course) and were buried in the same cemeteries. This was anathema to Southerners, and as their power increased relative to the Creoles from the early 1830s on, the rights of the free black population were whittled away slowly but surely in the 30 years before the ACW.

Butterfly away the Reformation in the Low Countries, and you might just get a kinder, more inclusive South Africa...
 
This was anathema to Southerners, and as their power increased relative to the Creoles from the early 1830s on, the rights of the free black population were whittled away slowly but surely in the 30 years before the ACW.

But not to Puritan New Englanders.
 
I think Falecius has a point about Protestant Christianity. Compare the situation that existed in Louisiana in the colonial era and early American period to what existed in the rest of the American South. Our black codes were rather lenient (Louisiana slaves had to be granted the Sabbath, for example), manumission was fairly easy and quite common, the free status of the father made the child free, free people of colour had full property rights, and black and white worshipped in the same churches (though not on the same pews of course) and were buried in the same cemeteries. This was anathema to Southerners, and as their power increased relative to the Creoles from the early 1830s on, the rights of the free black population were whittled away slowly but surely in the 30 years before the ACW.

Butterfly away the Reformation in the Low Countries, and you might just get a kinder, more inclusive South Africa...

Without Reformation, you could end up with no recognizable Netherlands to begin with, not to mention Netherlands who colonize the Cape in the OTLs way.
However, to clarify my point, it's not like I'm saying that Catholic colonialism wasn't racist. It clearly was. And not all Protestant Churches had the same views on race and slavery, nor these views were uniform through space and time. Boers in South Africe took a rather extreme stance, that their form of Calvinism supported. Anglicans were rarely that exclusive for example.
As general rule of thumb, Catholic racism tended to be greyscale, Protestant was black-and-white. Think of Haitian multi-layered racial hierarchy as opposed to Southern US "one-drop" rule. Reality, however, was far more nuanced. Dutch settlers had mixed unions with Khoi women at the Cape. I gather that Boers had far less mixing with Bantus in Transvaal, for instance, a century later. As another example, the Dutch had little objection to mixed unions in Indonesia, but more than the Portuguese, and less, I think, than the British.
Religion and national habits have arguably something to do with it (probably Portugal was generally less prone to racial discrimination throughout its history than other European colonizing powers), but I think that time was the key: "White" societies as a whole were clearly less racist in the heyday of Iberian or Dutch colonialism than at the time of British global domination, which was probably the age where racism was clearly theorized and largely dominated European (and North American) thinking.
The problem with scenarios with a more inclusive South Africa is that in my opinion they'd easily involve less than half of present-day South Africa, namely the Western and maybe Northern Cape and adjoining areas; well, approximately what is now the majority Afrikaans-speaking part of the country (except Gauteng of course).
Factoring the Bantus in seems tricky.
 
In Mexico most intermixing ocurred during the early years of colonialism and as the spanish went further north they started mixing less which is why in say Chihuahua the tarahumara never became "Mexican" while the mainstream society is composed of European settlers and some Meztiso that migrated with expansion. Perhaps we could get a coloured majority in the cape while further north you would see a bantu majority with a handful of white and coloured settlers?
 
In Mexico most intermixing ocurred during the early years of colonialism and as the spanish went further north they started mixing less which is why in say Chihuahua the tarahumara never became "Mexican" while the mainstream society is composed of European settlers and some Meztiso that migrated with expansion. Perhaps we could get a coloured majority in the cape while further north you would see a bantu majority with a handful of white and coloured settlers?

Isn't this pretty like OTL? The problem is that the Bantus parts are very likely to be the most populated areas of the country, like I gather they are IOTL.
 
I tend to agree with what has been said so far.

It's important to remember that a lot of intermarriage did take place between the 'Dutch' and the Khoi and San people. Today, the majority of the former Cape Province is coloured and Afrikaans-speaking (I think. I'll have to check this. But if it isn't the majority, it's certainly a high percentage.) The same is not true of the rest of S. Africa, or indeed Africa as a whole.

Part of this is due to cultural differences between those peoples and the Bantu peoples. Population density also plays a part since Cape was relatively unpopulated, as was much of Latin America (for different reasons of course). However, I think another key difference is when the Europeans began to interact with other peoples. Intermarriage between Europeans and the native people of their colonies was more common in the 16th and 17th century than the 18th and 19th. Probably due to societal changes, but also the greater ease of travel that resulted in more European women immigrating.

EDIT: Okay, to answer the actual question. I would push for more European immigration before 1800 or so. Even better if you can make this mostly men.

Another, possibly easier option, is to halt the Bantu migration into South Africa. I don't know nearly enough about it to suggest a POD, but the Bantu peoples are relative newcomers to Southern Africa. If you could keep the region sparsely populated by Khoi, San, and related groups it is likely they will mix more with the Europeans as they did in the Cape. The Dutch will also probably spread further faster.
 
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