South African Standard Time, or SAST, is a time zone used by all of South Africa, as well as Swaziland and Lesotho. The zone is two hours ahead of UTC (UTC+2) and is the same as Central Africa Time, with Daylight saving time not being observed in either time zone. Solar noon in this time zone occurs at 30° E in SAST, effectively making Pietermaritzburg at the correct solar noon point, with Johannesburg and Pretoria slightly west at 28° E and Durban slightly east at 31° E. This means the majority of South Africa's population experience true solar noon at approximately 12:00 daily.
The western Northern Cape and Western Cape differ however. Everywhere west of 22°30' E effectively experiences year-round daylight saving time due to its location in true UTC+1 but still being in SAST, thus sunrise and sunset are relatively late in Cape Town compared to the rest of the country. Cape Town's solar noon ranges from 12:30 (after equinoxes) to 13:00 (after solstices).
To illustrate, daylight hours for South Africa's western and eastern-most major cities:
| 1 January | 1 July | |
|---|---|---|
| Cape Town | 05:38–20:01 | 07:52–17:48 |
| Durban | 04:58–19:00 | 06:52–17:07 |
Prior to the 8th of February 1892 there was no uniformity of time in South Africa and local time was in use at the various towns. In 1892 a railway conference was held in Bloemfontein, and amongst the subjects discussed was the difficulty of working a railway system in the absence of a uniform time system. As an outcome the then governments of the Orange Free State, Transvaal and the Cape Colony officially adopted a uniform standard time of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)+01:30 which was defined as mean time of the 22.5º East of Greenwich.[1] On 1 March 1903 GMT+02:00 was adopted, which became the current UTC+02:00 when UTC replaced GMT for most purposes.[2][3]
Prior to the 1st of March 1903 the Colony of Natal was already using a uniform time supplied by the Natal Observatory. The observatory's local mean time being GMT+1:57.
South Africa observed a daylight saving time of GMT+3:00 from the 19th of September 1942 until 21st of March 1943.
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