This module focuses on the interactions of Africans and Europeans in pre-industrial South Africa. We consider (i) the forces that promoted both settler expansion and the consolidation of powerful African states, especially the Zulu kingdom, and (ii) the conflicts that ensued. Topics include the role of missionaries; the implications of land alienation and labour mobilisation; the cultural and social resources of African resistance; and assimilation and segregation as competing European approaches to incorporating Africans within colonial politics. The module concludes with the changes wrought by the discovery of diamonds and gold in the 1870s and 1880s.