Colonial South Africa
European Expeditions
In 1647 a Dutch vessel was shipwrecked in what is now called Table Bay in modern Cape Town, South Africa. The marooned crew, the first Europeans to attempt settlement in the area, built a fort and stayed for a year until they were rescued. Shortly thereafter, the Dutch East India Company decided to establish a permanent settlement. The Dutch East India Company, one of the major European trading companies sailing the spice route to the East, had no intention of colonizing and settling in the area. They wanted to establish a secure base camp where passing ships could find shelter and hungry sailors could stock up on fresh supplies of meat, fruit, and vegetables. To that end, a small Dutch East India Company expedition under the command of Jan van Riebeeck reached Table Bay on April 6, 1652 and began to establish a permanent base.
The Dutch Settle In
While the new settlement traded out of necessity with the neighboring Khoisan Tribe, the relationship was definitely not friendly. Dutch political authorities made deliberate attempts to restrict contact between their settlers and the Khoisan; unable to use the local tribe as workers, the Dutch East India Company employees found themselves faced with a labor shortage on the company owned farms. To remedy this, the company released a small number of Dutch employees from their contracts and permitted them to establish farms. The Dutch East India Company then purchased the food from those farms for use in the settlement. This arrangement proved highly successful almost immediately. The farms produced abundant supplies of fruit, vegetables, wheat, and wine; later, they began to raise livestock, mostly cattle. The initial group of burghers, as these non-contracted free farmers were known, steadily increased in population and began to expand their farms further north and east further into the territory of the Khoisan.
The majority of burghers (people living in these settlements, or Aboroughs@) had Dutch ancestry and belonged to the Calvinist Reformed Church of the Netherlands. Over time, however, Germans and other Europeans began to move into the colonial area as well. The Dutch and German settlers believed that God had delivered them to the area to establish a new society free from the religious persecution they had experienced at the hands of Catholics in mainland Europe. This, they argued, gave them a right to be there and claim the land for themselves.
In addition to establishing the free burgher system, the Dutch East India Company also began to import large numbers of slaves, primarily from Madagascar and Indonesia. These slaves often married Dutch settlers, and their descendants became known as the Cape Coloureds and the Cape Malays. With this additional labor, the areas occupied by the Dutch East India Company expanded further to the north and east. As the settlement expanded, clashes with the Khoisan began increasingly frequent. The newcomers drove the Khoisan from their traditional lands, decimated them with introduced diseases, and destroyed them with superior weapons when they fought back. There were a number of major wars during this period in which the Khoisan used traditional and guerrilla tactics. These conflicts continued in to the 19th century. The Khoisan who survived the wars were left with few options for survival. Their land had been taken and their attempts to reclaim it failed. Most of the Khoisan ended up working for the Europeans in an exploitative labor arrangement that differed little from slavery.
The Free Burghers Meet The Bush
As the burghers continued to expand into the north and east many began to take up a semi‑nomadic lifestyle. Rather than simply raise livestock on farms, they began to graze their herds all across the region. This was actually very similar to what the Khoisan had been doing before they were displaced. In addition to its herds, a family might have a wagon, a tent, a Bible, and a few guns. Those families that became more settled built a mud‑walled cottage, frequently located, by choice, days of travel from the nearest other Europeans. These were the first of the Trekboers (Wandering Farmers, later shortened to Boers), completely independent of official controls, extraordinarily self‑sufficient, and isolated. Their harsh lifestyle produced courageous individualists, who knew the territory and nature intimately, and based their life on their main source of guidance, the Bible. These people moved further and further inland looking for a Afree life@.
The British At The Cape
As the 18th century drew to a close, Dutch trading power began to fade, and the British moved in to South Africa. They seized the Cape in 1795 to prevent it from falling into rival French hands, then briefly relinquished it back to the Dutch (1803), before finally taking control of the area around 1806. At the tip of the continent the British found an established colony with 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan, and 1,000 freed blacks who had previously been slaves. Power was held by a group of elite whites in Cape Town and the entire colony was strictly segregated.
Like the Dutch before them, the British initially had little interest in the Cape Colony other than as a strategically located port. In order to secure their port, one of the first things the British did was attempt to resolve a troublesome border dispute between the Boers. At this point the Boers were also being called Afrikaners (a word which means people of German or Dutch descent living in Africa and speaking the Dutch dialect Afrikaans) and the Xhosa (another tribal group) on the colony's eastern frontier. In 1820 the British authorities persuaded about 5,000 middle‑class British immigrants to leave England behind and settle on tracts of land between the feuding groups. They hoped this would create a buffer zone between the warring factions. The plan was completely unsuccessful. By 1823, almost half of the settlers had left their new land and retreated to the local towns, notably Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth, to pursue the jobs they had held in Britain.
While doing nothing to resolve the border dispute, this influx of settlers solidified the British presence in the area, thus destroying the relative unity of white South Africa as a place for Afrikaners. Before the British arrived in South Africa, the Afrikaners and their ideas had gone largely unchallenged. Now, European Southern Africa had two language groups (Afrikaans and English) and two cultures (Boer and British). A social pattern soon emerged. The middle-class, educated English‑speakers became highly urbanized and dominated politics, trade, finance, mining, and manufacturing. The largely uneducated Afrikaners, on the other hand, remained tied to their farms. The gap between the British settlers and the Afrikaners further widened with the abolition of slavery in 1833. The Afrikaners believed that Africans were inferior in the eyes of God. When the British freed the Africans and elevated them to what the Afrikaners believed was social equality, the Afrikaners were horrified and outraged. Yet, the British settlers' conservatism and sense of racial superiority stopped any radical social reforms. They were also unwilling to make the Africans truly equal. In 1841 political authorities passed a Masters and Servants Ordinance which ensured white control. Meanwhile, British numbers increased rapidly in Cape Town.
The Zulu Wars
While the Afrikaners and the British were struggling for control of the area around Cape Town, the native Zulu tribe began a period of expansion in the interior. Shaka, a young warrior, became chieftan in 1816. He quickly built up his tribe to be the most powerful in South Africa. During the 1820s and 30s Shaka and his successors virtually destroyed most of the other tribes in the region including the Khoisan and the Xhosa. The constant warfare left the native populations weak as a whole and, particularly following Shaka’s assassination in 1828, unprepared to defend themselves against outsiders.
The Great Trek
Around the time of the Zulu Wars the Afrikaners started to grow increasingly dissatisfied with British rule in the Cape Colony. The British proclamation of the equality of the races particularly upset them. Beginning in 1835, several groups of Afrikaners, together with a large number of Khoisan and black servants, decided to trek off into the interior in search of greater independence from the British. The Afrikaners hoped to preserve their traditional Boer (white, non-British) culture and escape the near constant conflict with the Xhosa. North and east of the Orange River (which formed the Cape Colony's frontier) the Boers found vast tracts of apparently uninhabited grazing lands in the Natal region. They had, it seemed, entered their promised land, with space enough for their cattle to graze and their culture of anti‑British, anti-urban independence to flourish. Little did they know that what they found (deserted pasture lands, disorganized bands of refugees, and tales of brutality) resulted from the Zulu Wars. The conditions did not represent the normal state of affairs in the region.
The Afrikaners encountered little resistance among the scattered peoples of the plains. The Zulu Wars had dispersed them, and the remnants lacked horses and firearms. Their weakened condition also solidified the Afrikaners' belief that European occupation meant the coming of good Christian civilization to a savage land. The mountains in the surrounding area, however, proved more problematic. Here the Boers met strong resistance from the Zulu and their arrival set off a series of skirmishes, squabbles, and flimsy treaties that would litter the next 50 years of increasing white domination.
A River Runs Red
As the Afrikaners continued to expand further into Zulu territory in the Natal region they increasingly came into conflict with the powerful Zulu. No major fighting took place until December 16th, 1838. A force of between 10,000 and 20,000 Zulus attacked a group of around 500 Boers near the Ncome River. Though several Afrikaners suffered injuries, they killed several thousand Zulus, reportedly causing the Ncome River's waters to run red with the blood of the injured and dying.
After this victory, which resulted mainly from the possession of superior weapons, the Afrikaners felt that their expansion was willed by God. Their hopes for establishing a Natal republic, however, remained short‑lived. The British annexed the area in 1843 and founded their new Natal colony near what is now Durban; most of the Boers, feeling increasingly trapped between the British on one side and the African populations on the other, headed north.
The British set about establishing large sugar plantations in Natal, but found few inhabitants of the neighboring Zulu area willing to provide labor. They turned to India to resolve this labor shortage, and in 1860 the SS Truro arrived in Durban Harbour with over 300 people on board. Over the next 50 years, 150,000 more indentured Indians arrived, as well as numerous free "passenger Indians", building the base for what would become the largest Indian community outside of India. As early as 1893, when Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Durban, Indians outnumbered whites in Natal.