Nuthin' but the cold, hard facts

I know very little about South Africa, which may be a problem considering that I will be there in less than two months. So my plan to remedy this situation is to post a fact a day about South Africa. Hopefully I will learn something in the whole process, maybe even retain it for when I'm over there. Who knows, stranger things have happened.
Let's start with the basic facts.

This is South Africa:

(http://www.sa-venues.com/maps/south-africa-provinces.htm)

It is divided into the 9 provinces of Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape, Free State, Kwazulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Gauteng, and North West. I will be flying into Johannesburg, which looks like it is in the Gauteng province. I will be staying near Parys, which appears to be in the Free State Province. I will also get to visit Kruger National Park, which is that big green splotch in the Limpopo province. These provinces came about it 1994, when the fist non-racial elections were held and the Interim Constitution was adopted. This Constitution dissolved the previous provinces and homelands that were based on race and replaced them with these 9 entirely new provinces.
Each of these provinces is governed by a unicameral legislature, which is a legislature that consists of one chamber or house. The size of the legislature is proportionate to the size of the population of the province. The powers of these provincial governments are limited by the national constitution.

Okay, great, I have some idea about how the government works on the provincial level. Moving on to the bigger picture. In the concise words of southafrica.info, South Africa has a "constitutional democracy with three tiers- national, provincial, and local government- each with their own executive authority". As I am not very good with government and politics, this will have to suffice for now. My attention span can only last so long on these topics. Sorry.

Oh yeah, I'm also doing a fact-a-day about cheetahs, because I don't know much about them other than the fact that they: are spotted, run pretty fast and are endangered. So let's start at the beginning. Cheetahspot.com writes that:

"The cheetah originated about 4,000,000 years ago, long before the other big cats. The oldest fossils place  it in North America in what is now Texas, Nevada and Wyoming. Cheetahs were common throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and North America until the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, when massive climatic changes caused large numbers of mammals to disappear. About that time all cheetahs in North America and Europe and most of those in Asia and Africa vanished. Some experts think our present populations were derived from inbreeding by those very few surviving and closely related animals. This inbreeding "bottleneck", as theorized, led to the present state of cheetah genetics: all cheetahs alive today appear to be as closely related as identical twins. "


I would not have guessed that the cheetah started out in Texas. Go figure.