The Dutch at the Cape and the slave colony
The Dutch East India Company sets up a refreshment station at the Cape, which grows into a slave-holding settler colony and the cradle of Afrikaans.
- The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 — Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), Wesleyan University Press (1989)
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
On 6 April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed at Table Bay for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to set up a station supplying fresh food to ships sailing to Asia. Within a few years the Company released some employees as “free burghers” to farm, and conflict with the Khoikhoi over grazing land began almost immediately, with wars in 1659 and 1673–77.
- The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 — Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), Wesleyan University Press (1989)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Because the Company would not enslave the local Khoikhoi, it imported slaves, the first arriving in 1658. Over the next century and a half tens of thousands of enslaved people were brought from Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and Mozambique; for much of the eighteenth century the enslaved outnumbered free settlers in the colony. They built Cape Town, worked the wine farms and brought Islam to the Cape, while political exiles such as Sheikh Yusuf of Makassar founded its Muslim community.
- The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 — Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), Wesleyan University Press (1989)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Settlers of Dutch, German and French Huguenot origin, along with enslaved and Khoikhoi people, created a new language out of Dutch, which became Afrikaans. The trekboere, stock farmers, moved ever further inland, clashing with San and, from the 1770s, with the Xhosa on the eastern frontier, the start of a century of frontier wars. Britain seized the Cape in 1795, briefly returned it, and took it for good in 1806.
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Jan van Riebeeck's landing was long celebrated as the founding of white civilisation in Africa, and Van Riebeeck Day was a public holiday until 1994. Many Afrikaners still see their ancestors as hardy pioneers who became a people of Africa, with no other homeland.
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
1652 began the dispossession of the Khoikhoi and the importation of enslaved people, the founding injustices of everything that followed; it is remembered as the beginning of conquest, not civilisation.
- The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 — Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), Wesleyan University Press (1989)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Why it matters today
1652 is the date many South Africans use as shorthand for the start of colonial dispossession; it is invoked in debates on land and on "settler" identity. The colony's slaves, from Indonesia, India, Madagascar and East Africa, are ancestors of many Coloured and Cape Muslim South Africans, and their Creole Dutch became Afrikaans, a language now spoken by more Coloured than white South Africans.