1488-1652 History of Southern Africa 1806-1880









The Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1806



The Settlement In order to provide their sailors with a supply of fresh vitamins halfway on their route to and from the East Indies, the V.O.C. (Dutch East India Company) decided to settle farmers (the Dutch word for farmer is Boer) at the Cape. V.O.C. employee Jan van Riebeeck in 1652 landed with the first group of settlers and founded Kaapstad (Cape Town) as the first permanent Dutch settlement.
During the period of Dutch rule, settlement continued, on a small scale; in 1806 the European population was ca. 27,000. Notably a group of French Huguenots added to the colony's population (1689). A V.O.C. statute of 1701 stated that schooling exclusively was to be conducted in Dutch; in the course of the 18th century the Huguenots integrated into Boer society. Also, African slaves were brought into the colony - note that the Western Cape region previously had no black population.
Administatively, the Cape was just one of many outposts of the V.O.C., administrated by a governor responsible to the Governor-General in Batavia, and to the board of administration of the V.O.C. called De Heren Seventien (the 17 men) in the Netherlands.
The V.O.C. discouraged the territorial growth of the colony; however in the 18th century the Boers took matters into their own hands, and in 1778 the Cape Colony, by the way of annexation, was greatly expanded.

The Colonial Economy The colonists were to supply the V.O.C. with wheat, at prices fixed by the company; V.O.C. gardens produced a variety of vegetables and fruits, all intended to supply bypassing V.O.C. ships. The settler economy soon diversified, Boers breeding cattle and sheep (thus competing with the Khoikhoi) and establishing vineyards; here the Huguenots brought the knowhow. The economy of the Cape Colony was regulated by the V.O.C., to her own advantage; the V.O.C. prevented the emergence of a manufacturing industry to preserve a market for goods imported from the Dutch Republic.

Boer Society In the first number of years, the V.O.C. station at the Cape produced the desired food supplies for bypassing ships, but for feeding her own personnel, did depend on trade with the Khoikhoi. In an attempt to establish self-sufficiency, in 1657 a number of Company officials were released, granted farmland, equipped with necessary tools and permitted to farm, as long as they did not compete with the V.O.C. From the 1680es on the company no longer depended on trading with the Khoikhoi; the population of burghers (Boer settlers) continuously expanded. The Dutch settlers were very religious, most of them belonging to the Dutch Reformed Church (Calvinists). The Dutch introduced Roman-Dutch law, a tradition still influencing modern South African law.
The Boer society emerged and thrived under company rule. The burghers, amongst each other and with the Khoikhoi, traded on a barter basis; money was used primarily in dealings with the company. The farmers looked for farmhands, but were instructed not to enslave the local Khoikhoi population; some purchased African slaves from bypassing ships.
The extent by which the company could enforce her authority over the Boer population depended on the distance the respective Boer lived from Cape Town. Frontier Boer society developed the characteristics of a largely independent society; they regarded the grazing land as theirs for the taking, the Khoikhoi and Xhosa a nuisance (a potential workforce). Because of marriage at a young age and a large number of children, Boer society expanded rapidly, and in the 18th century the frontier was repeatedly pushed forward.

Relations with the Indigenous Population The Boers developed a frontier mentality, despised the Khoikhoi or Khoisan ('Hottentots'), the negroes ('Kaffirs') and those of mixed descent ('Coloureds'). The V.O.C. discouraged trade between the Boers and the Khoikhoi. From the beginning, the Boers claimed Khoikhoi land; the Khoikhoi were pressured into working for the Boers, paid little and treated badly. In 1659-1660 the first V.O.C.-Khoikhoi War was fought. The V.O.C., in order to avoid conflict, established a limit beyond which the settlement was not to extend. While this measure did not prevent Boers from moving beyond, for most of the 18th century the colony remained restricted to the nucleus in the Cape Town area. In 1745, Swellendam, in 1760 Graaff-Reinet was founded; in 1778 was the Great Fish River declared the border of the colony.
While the Cape Colony expanded, the Khoikhoi lost their grazing lands. They resisted; yet their military actions consisted of cattle raids. A smallpox epidemic in 1713 drastically reduced their numbers. Some of the Khoikhoi accepted a life as farmhands on Boer farms, where they intermarried with slaves; thus the'coloureds' emerged, who spoke Afrikaans; other Khoikhoi assimilated into Xhosa culture. The Khoikhoi seized to exist as a separate ethnic entity. In the late 18th century a large group of coloureds, Afrikaans-speaking, was expelled from the colony, moving inland and forming the Griqua nation. In 1779 the first conflict between the Boers and the Xhosa occurred. In 1795 a conflict with the Xhosa resulted in the Boers of Graaff-Reinet expelling the V.O.C. official, Maynier, and proclaiming a separate republic, which lasted until 1803.

End of V.O.C. Rule The British occupied the Cape Colony in 1795. The V.O.C. had transferred her territories and claims to the Batavian Republic in 1798 and ceased to exist in 1799. In 1803 Britain handed over the Cape Colony to the Batavian Republic. The latter enjoyed only short control over the Cape Colony, which again was occupied by the British in 1806.






EXTERNAL
FILES 		History of the Cape Colony, from Wikipedia
Article Khoikhoi, from Wikipedia
Cape Province, History of, from Infoplease
Huguenot Society of South Africa Website
A Brief History of Cape Town, from Cape Town 2004
Sieketroosters aan die Kaap 1652-1866 (Nurses at the Cape), summary of J.P. Claasen's doctoral thesis, summarized by by Johan Erasmus, in Afrikaans
Entry Graaf-Reinet, from Footnotes to History, by James L. Erwin
German Immigrants to the Dutch Cape Colony 1652-1806, from German South Africa Resource Page
Andrew B. Smith, Where have all the Hottentots gone ?, posted by Science in Africa
DOCUMENTS A collection of VOC Cape of Good Hope land grants, slave grants, debentures, etc., from Paulus Swaen, a commercial site
REFERENCE J.S. Marais, Maynier and the First Boer Republic, Cape Town : Maskew Miller (1944) 1961 [G]
M.S. Geen, The Making of the Union of South Africa, a brief history 1487-1939, London : Longmans 1946 [G]
Charles H. Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa, Cambridge : UP 2005
The Fatal Impact, 1652-1800, pp.38-41; Sold - for a Load of Iron, pp.42-47, Cheaper than Servants pp.48-53, They lost everthing they had pp.54-59, The Tavern of the Seas pp.60-61, Ferment on the Frontier pp.68-75, in : Readers Digest Illustrated History of South Africa, Pleasantville NY : Readers Digest 1988 [G]



This page is part of World History at KMLA
First posted in 2001, last revised on April 22nd 2006

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