In the fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners under the command of
Bartholomeu Dias became the first Europeans to set foot in South Africa. Marking their progress, they left an unpleasant set of calling cards all along the coast - African men and women they had captured in West Africa and had cast ashore to trumpet the power and glory of Portugal to the locals. Little wonder that their first encounter with the Khoi along the Garden Route coast was not a happy one. It began with a group of Khoi stoning the Portuguese for taking water from a spring without asking permission and ended with a Khoi man lying dead with a crossbow bolt through his chest.
It was another 170 years before any European settlement was established in South Africa. In 1652, a group of white employees of the Dutch East India Company , which was engaged in trade between the Netherlands and the East Indies, pulled into Table Bay to set up a refreshment station to revictual company ships trading between Europe and the East. There was no thought at the time of setting up a colony; on the contrary, the Cape was a rather bum posting, given to the station commander Jan van Riebeeck because he had been caught with his hand in the till by the company bosses. Van Riebeeck dreamed up a number of schemes to isolate the Cape Peninsula from the rest of Africa, including a plan to build a canal that would cut it adrift. In the end, he had to satisfy himself with planting a bitter almond hedge (still growing in Cape Town's Kirstenbosch Gardens) to keep the natives at bay, symbolically representing an ambivalence about being European in Africa, which still haunts many white South Africans.
Despite van Riebeeck's view that the Khoi , who were already living at the Cape, were "a savage set, living without conscience", from the start the Dutch were dependent on them to provide livestock, which were traded for trinkets. As the settlement developed, van Riebeeck needed more labour to keep the show going, and bemoaned the fact that he was unsuccessful in persuading the Khoi to discard the freedom of their herding life for the toil of ploughing furrows for him. Much to his annoyance, the bosses back in Holland had forbidden van Riebeeck from enslaving the locals, and refused his request for slaves from elsewhere in the company's empire.
This led to the inexorable process of colonization of the lands around the fort, when a number of Dutch men were released in 1657 from their contracts to farm as free burghers on land granted by the company. The idea was that they would have to sell their produce to the company at a fixed price, thereby overcoming the labour shortage. The only snag with this was the land didn't belong to the company in the first place and the move sparked the first of a series of Khoikhoi-Dutch wars . Although the first campaign ended in stalemate, the Khoikhoi were ultimately no match for the Dutch, who had the tactical mobility of horses and the superior killing power of firearms. Campaigns continued through the 1660s and 1670s and proved rather profitable for Dutch raiders, who on one outing in 1674 rounded up eight hundred Khoi cattle and four thousand sheep.
Meanwhile, in 1658, van Riebeeck had managed to successfully purloin a shipload of slaves from West Africa, whetting an insatiable appetite for this form of labour. The Dutch East India Company itself became the biggest slave owner at the Cape and continued importing slaves, mostly from the East Indies, at such a pace that by 1711 there were more slaves than burghers in the colony. By the end of the eighteenth century there were almost 15,000 slaves and just under 14,000 burghers at the Cape. With the help of this ready workforce, the embryonic Cape Colony expanded outwards and trampled the Peninsula Khoikhoi, who by 1713 had lost everything. Most of their livestock (nearly 50,000 animals) and most of their land west of the Hottentots Holland Mountains had been gobbled up by the Dutch East India Company. Dispossession and diseases like smallpox, previously unknown in South Africa, decimated their numbers and shattered their social system. By the middle of the eighteenth century, those who remained had been reduced to a condition of miserable servitude to the colonists.
Impoverished whites living at the fringes of colonial society also had few options, but these included the real possibility of dropping out of its grindingly class-conscious constraints. Many just packed up their waggons and rolled out into the interior, where they lived by the gun, either hunting game or taking cattle from the Khoi by force. Beyond the control of the Dutch East India Company, these nomadic trekboers began to assume a pastoral niche previously occupied by the Khoi. By the turn of the nineteenth century, trekboers had penetrated well into the Eastern Cape, pushing back the Khoi and San in the process. Not that the indigenous people gave up without a fight. As their lives became disrupted and living by traditional means became impossible, the Khoisan began to prey on the cattle and sheep of the trekboers. The trekboers responded ruthlessly by hunting down the San as vermin, killing the men and often taking women and children as slaves, bringing them to virtual extinction in South Africa.
After the British occupation of the Cape in 1795, the trekboer migration from the Cape accelerated. Britain was now undisputed as the world's dominant naval power. In the ferment that followed the French Revolution, Britain feared for the security of the Cape sea route to the East and therefore sent a few war sloops into Table Bay and informed the Dutch officials there that they were no longer in charge.
