The paper presents an overview of the history of aquatic parasitology of freshwater fish in southern Africa. Aquatic parasitology has become a very popular field of specialisation in South Africa and is currently practised by a number of individual research groups at different universities. So far most research deals with parasites of wild fish rather than pathogens of aquaculture. It is written as a narrative and summarises the aquatic parasitology research mostly on fish parasites carried out at the universities of Cape Town, Free State, Johannesburg, Limpopo, Pretoria, North West and Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences. It is not intended to be a review in the classical way because it deals with parasites ranging from Protozoa to Arthropoda.