South Africa Standard Time

Before 8 February 1892, there was no uniformity of time in South Africa and local mean time was in use at the various towns. In 1892, a railway conference was held in Bloemfontein and discussed difficulty of working a railway system, in the absence of a uniform time system. The governments of the Orange Free State, Transvaal and the Cape Colony officially adopted a uniform standard time of UTC+01:30 which was defined as mean time 22.5° east of Greenwich. On 1 March 1903 GMT+02:00 was adopted, which became the current UTC+02:00 when UTC replaced GMT for most purposes. Prior to 1 March 1903, the Colony of Natal was already using a uniform time supplied by the Natal Observatory. The observatory's local mean time was (UTC+01:52). South Africa observed a daylight saving time of GMT+03:00 (UTC+03:00) between 20 September 1942 to 21 March 1943 and 19 September 1943 to 19 March 1944. South African Standard Time is defined as "Coordinated Universal Time plus two hours" (UTC+02:00) as defined in South African National Government Gazette No. 40125 of 8 July 2016. ==Date and time notation==

South Africa signed up to use ISO 8601 for date and time representation through national standard ARP 010:1989 in 1998 A.D. The most recent South African Bureau of Standards standard SANS 8601:2009 "... is the identical implementation of ISO 8601:2004, and is adopted with the permission of the International Organization for Standardization" and was reviewed in 2016. No distinction is made by the SANS 8601 standard between any of the 11 official languages. The week is from Monday until Sunday. The first week of the year contains January 1, when there a new year begins. Major cities observing South Africa Standard Time include Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria, and Port Elizabeth, all following the same UTC+02:00 time zone year-round. The 24-hour notation in hour-minute(s) order used a colon as a separator (). ==See also==