Terminology and orthography are the bugbears of South African historians, as they are often highly contested signs. I have done my best to render personal names in the orthography used by the individual concerned or his or her descendants. The prefixes of words in the Bantu languages have been added for ordinary nouns, and for ethnonyms and their derivatives. Thus Sesotho is the language of the Basotho (singular Mosotho), who live in Lesotho, isiZulu that of the amaZulu in KwaZulu, and so forth. (The apparently eccentric capitalisation is that of current orthographies.) Where I have used these as adjectives, I have not provided prefixes, which would, of course, depend on the class of the noun so modified. Thus I write of the Tswana people, but of the Batswana. Place names are generally the modern ones, thus Maputo for Lorenço Marques. I have used the names of the post-1994 provinces where appropriate to designate geographical areas, but where the area I wish to describe is included in several modern provinces, I have not hesitated to use older appellations. Thus I write of Mpumalanga rather than the Eastern Transvaal, but of the Southern Transvaal to refer to an area now included in the provinces of Gauteng, part of Mpumalanga and part of the North-West Province. I have also written of the Transkei and the Ciskei to describe the regions in question, although the Bantustans with these names have, thankfully, disappeared. The names were, of course, older than the Bantustans. The titles of certain acts of legislation have been retrospectively changed to accord with modern sensibilities. Thus the Natives Land Act of 1913 is now generally known as the Black Land Act. I have tended to maintain the original description, out of a dislike for anachronism. I appreciate that the names were somewhat insulting (though there were many worse), but so were the acts.

The various African languages all have their own orthographies, which are not consistent with each other, nor even between the Sesotho of Lesotho and that of the republic.