The first known armorial display in South Africa took the form of stone beacons bearing the
Portuguese Royal Arms, which were erected along the coast by navigators who explored the sea route in the 1480s. Some of these beacons still survive.
17th–18th centuries Heraldry was introduced into the region by the Dutch, when they founded the first European colony, at the
Cape of Good Hope, in 1652. The official arms of the Netherlands, and those of the
Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie, which ran the colony, were also used. Civic arms were introduced in 1804.
19th century British military forces occupied the colony during the
Napoleonic Wars, and the Netherlands handed it over permanently to Great Britain in 1814. This brought the colony within the jurisdiction of the English
College of Arms, the Scottish
Lord Lyon and the Irish
Ulster Office. British law regards arms as an honour which must be granted or recognised by one or other of these authorities, but as Roman-Dutch law was retained in the colony, it remained legal to simply assume arms at will. Those who wanted formal grants of arms could apply to one of the three British authorities. As with language, music, and other cultural aspects, then, British and Cape Dutch (
Afrikaner) heraldry existed separately side by side. This is still the case, though there has been some cross-pollination during the past half-century. Amongst the native peoples of the region, hereditary signifiers were generally oral as opposed to pictorial in nature. Praise poetry traditions such as
Isiduko and
Isibongo provided peoples such as the
Zulus and the
Xhosas with symbolic capital in much the same way as heraldry did the British and the Cape Dutch. European settlement spread to other parts of the region in the 1830s, as a result of Afrikaner dissatisfaction with British rule. Eventually, the region crystallised into four White-ruled territories: two British colonies and two Afrikaner republics. Their governments adopted official arms.
20th–21st centuries The UK conquered the two Afrikaner republics in the
Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), and the four territories united in 1910 to form the
Union of South Africa. As self-government developed during the first half of the 20th century, some official attention began to be paid to heraldry. In 1935, the Union government introduced a system of voluntary registration of "badges" by the Department of the Interior. The Department of Education, Arts & Sciences took over as registrar in 1959. The rise of
Afrikaner nationalism during the 1930s and 1940s drew heavily on culture and tradition, and several books and articles on Afrikaner family history and heraldry were published during that period. As later research showed, the heraldic sources were generally not very reliable. In 1955, an inter-departmental conference recommended the formation of an official heraldic authority, and a committee appointed in 1956 recommended adopting the Swedish model, of a nominated council and an executive bureau, under the auspices of the state archives service. to municipalities, corporate bodies, the Anglican dioceses, and a few individuals. With a republic in the offing, there may have been a feeling that it was "now or never". South Africa became a republic and left the
Commonwealth in 1961. A Heraldry Act was passed in 1962, and the
Bureau of Heraldry and
Heraldry Council were established in 1963. Matriculation, i.e. re-registration of personal arms for armigers' descendants, was authorised in 1969. Thousands of arms have been registered and matriculated over the years. ==Usage of arms==