South Africa has been home to a variety of languages since the fourth century C.E., when various Bantu groups migrated to the region and encountered the native Khoisan people. Centuries later, the Dutch and the English imperial powers added further conflict as they prioritized their own respective tongues over Bantu languages. The imperial countries also experienced conflict between themselves. The British drove speakers of Afrikaans (a derivative of Dutch) inland, but they could not eradicate the language, and the British-Boer wars eventually led to the formation of the state of South Africa in 1900. Forty years later, the National Party came to power and segregated black Africans partly due to their languages in an attempt to re-tribalize the country in the apartheid system. This lasted until 1996, when a new constitution changed the nation from bilingual (Afrikaans and English) to a multilingual state with eleven official languages, finally recognizing indigenous Bantu languages. The country still struggles to find a political and cultural balance with so many languages and their charged history, particularly in the education system.