History
The indigenous spiritual traditions of the Khoisan and Bantu speakers were succeeded in predominance by Christianity introduced by the Dutch and later British settlers. In 1930 the majority of Afrikaners were Afrikaner Calvinists.
Islam was introduced by the Cape Malay slaves of the Dutch settlers, Hinduism was introduced by the indentured labourers imported from the Indian subcontinent, and Buddhism was introduced by both Indian and Chinese immigrants.
Judaism in South Africa came about some time before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, by the participation of Jewish astronomers and cartographers in the Portuguese discovery of the sea-route to India. They assisted Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama who first sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and 1497 respectively. However, Jewish settlers only began to arrive in numbers from the 1820s.
The Bahá'í Faith was introduced in 1911 and grew after Bahá'ís from Canada, the United States and Germany settled in the country.
The socially marginalized Neopagan community became more publicly visible and organized in a democratic post-apartheid South Africa.
Read more about this topic: Religion In South Africa
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“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)