Capital

Pretoria

Continent

Africa

Flag adopted

1994

Designer

Frederick Brownell

South Africa

Colors and meaning

• Black[1] #000000

  Black South Africans

• Gold[1] #FFB612

  Mineral wealth

• Green[1] #007A4D

  The land's fertility

• White[1] #FFFFFF

  White South Africans, together with the other colors symbolizing unity

• Red[1] #DE3831

  Sacrifices made during the struggle against apartheid

• Blue[1] #002395

  The open skies

What the law specifies[1]

Section 5 of the Constitution names six colours — black, gold, green, white, red and blue — and refers the design itself out to Schedule 1. It assigns the colours no meaning.

Symbolism and history

A horizontal Y shape converges the colors of the old Boer republics and the African National Congress into one flag, deliberately designed to represent convergence and unity as the country moved from apartheid to democracy in 1994.

Most similar flags

The 6 closest of the 194 other national flags, ranked by a similarity index computed from the flag images themselves. The number is that index, 0–100 — not a claim that the two flags are “X% identical”.

• 
  Gambia82

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

• 
  Mauritius78

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

• 
  Vanuatu77

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

• 
  Suriname76

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

• 
  Kenya75

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

• 
  State of Palestine75

  the same horizontal band layout; the same colours in similar amounts.

Computed at build time: each flag is rasterised to 64x48, and the score is 0.55 × colour overlap + 0.45 × structure. A different weighting would rank these differently. How the index works.

Further reading: Flag of South Africa on Wikipedia