A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  By the end of the sixteenth century, Dutch, English, French, and Scandinavian merchant manners were also beginning to use the sea route to Asia. From time to time they landed on the Cape peninsula to take in fresh water and barter sheep and cattle from the local Khoikhoi pastoralists in return for iron and copper goods. In 1620, the English government ignored a suggestion of an English ship’s captain that it should annex the Cape. In 1649, however, Dutchmen who had wintered in Table Bay after losing their ship proposed that the Dutch East India Company should occupy the place. Three years later, Jan van Riebeeck arrived there as the commander of an expedition of eighty company employees. The directors had instructed him to build a fort and supply the Dutch fleets with fruit, vegetables, and meat.

  The Dutch Cape Colony, 1652–1795:

  Cape Town and the Arable Southwest

  The seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic (map 2).3 Its merchants were the most successful businessmen in Europe; their Dutch East India Company was the world’s greatest trading corporation. Founded in 1602, the company was a state outside the state. Operating under a charter from the States-General (the Dutch government), it had sovereign rights in and east of the Cape of Good Hope, and by midcentury it was the dominant European maritime power in southeast Asia. Its fleet, numbering some six thousand ships totaling at least 600,000 tons, was manned by perhaps 48,000 sailors.

  Modern South Africa began as a by-product of the enterprise of these Dutch merchants. In sending Jan van Riebeeck to occupy Table Bay, the directors of the company intended the colony to serve a specific and limited role as a link between the Netherlands and their eastern empire, centered on BataVia, Java. They had no intention of creating anything more than a small fortified base, where the annual fleets bound to and from Batavia could rendezvous, take in fresh water, fruit, vegetables, and grain, and land their sick for recuperation. They did not expect the Cape station to make a profit on its own—indeed, it never did so—but they always tried to keep the costs of its administration to a minimum. Within its first decade, however, the Cape Colony began to develop a degree of autonomy and an unforeseen dynamic. By the time van Riebeeck handed over the command to his successor in 1662, the colony had become a complex, racially stratified society.4

  Three processes contributed to this development. First, the company released some of its employees from their contracts and gave them land with the status of “free burghers.” Second, the company landed slaves at the Cape and set them to work under Dutch supervision on creating the basic infrastructure for the colony—a fort, a jetty, roads, orchards, vegetable gardens, and arable fields. Third, as the Dutch settlement expanded slowly but surely from the shore of Table Bay and engrossed and enclosed land for cultivation, it did so at the expense of the local pastoralists, who had the option of withdrawing from the fresh water resources and the rich pastures of the northern part of the Cape peninsula or remaining there as servants or clients of the Dutch. All three of these processes were launched in van Riebeeck’s time; all three accelerated throughout the eighteenth century. We shall discuss them separately.

  2. The Cape Colony under the Dutch East India Company. 1652–1795

  In 1657, the company released nine of its employees from their contracts and placed them on twenty-acre landholdings at Rondebosch in the Cape peninsula”six miles south of Table Bay. The directors’ reasoning was strictly businesslike. These free burghers were to produce grain and vegetables and sell them to the company at fixed prices. The directors calculated that this would be more economical than continuing to have food produced exclusively by company slaves and men on the company payroll.5

  In the years that followed, the company discharged more men at the Cape on similar conditions. It also transported a number of people from the Netherlands to the Cape as settlers, including a few orphan girls and 156 men, women, and children of French origin—Huguenots who had fled to the Netherlands after 1685, when the French government reversed its policy of tolerating Protestantism by revoking the Edict of Nantes. Until 1679, the settlement was confined to the Cape peninsula. In that year, the company began to make grants of land in the fertile valleys beyond the sandy Cape flats and below the mountains, starting at what became known as Stellenbosch, some thirty miles east of Table Bay. The company ceased to provide free transportation to settlers in 1707, by which time the colonial population included about 700 company servants and a settler community of about 2,000 men, women, and children, besides the slaves and the local pastoralists. After that, the burgher population grew partly by natural increase, partly through company servants taking their discharge in the colony, and to a small extent, as we shall see, by the manumission of slaves. In 1793, according to company records, there were 13,830 burghers (4,032 men, 2,730 women, and 7,068 children). These were miniscule numbers compared with the scale of European settlement in the Americas by that time.

  Most of the settlers came from the lower and least successful classes in hierarchical Dutch or German society, since service in the company was dangerous and poorly paid. Such differences as were rooted in their European backgrounds diminished in the colonial situation, where individual initiative and practical abilities were more significant than social origins. This was also the experience of the Huguenots. The company dispersed them among the other settlers, and within a generation they were speaking Dutch rather than French.

  Van Riebeeck and his successors intended that the free burghers should practice intensive agriculture on the Dutch model, but they were disappointed. Lacking adequate capital and skilled labor, the free burghers were not able to make a success of intensive agriculture, except as market gardeners in and near the village on Table Bay, which became known as Cape Town. Many soon gave up farming altogether and became artisans and traders in Cape Town, where they catered to the needs of visiting French, English, and Scandinavian ships, as well as to the outward bound and homeward bound Dutch fleets that paused at the Cape each year. The most successful of those who remained on the land acquired large holdings and became mixed farmers, producing grain and wine but also pasturing sheep and cattle far beyond the limits of their land grants.

  Initially, the company did not envisage the use of slave labor in their Cape settlement. However, van Riebeeck was soon requesting permission to follow the example of the company’s settlements at Batavia and elsewhere in Asia. The die was cast in 1658, when the company imported one shipload of slaves from Dahomey and another shipload of Angolan slaves, whom it had captured from the Portuguese. After that, there was no looking back. The company-government, the senior officials, and the free burgher community all became dependent on slave labor. The Cape had become a slaveholding society.6

  By the early eighteenth century, slavery at the Cape had acquired distinctive characteristics. First, the Cape slaves came from more diverse linguistic, religious, and social backgrounds than those in the Americas. Indeed, most of the Cape slaves were not even from Africa, which was the source of all the American slaves. A few came from Mozambique, but more from Madagascar, and more again from Indonesia, India, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), including a large minority of Muslims. Second, from 1711 onward there were rather more slaves than free burghers in the colony. In 1793, there were 14,747 slaves (9,046 men, 3,590 women, and 2,111 children), compared with the 13,830 free burghers. Third, the augmentation of the slave population was a result of continual imports rather than natural increase. The Cape slaves never became a self-reproducing population. Until 1765, there were always more than four times as many male as female slaves, and in 1793 there were still two-and-a-half times as many men as women. Moreover, although the overall mortality rate is not known, it was usually high, especially among the company slaves. It was very high indeed during intermittent epidemics of smallpox and other diseases.

  Fourth, there was nothing like the plantation system that prevailed in parts of North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil. At the Cape, privately owned slaves were distributed among numerous owners in smal
l groups. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, over 50 percent of the free burghers owned slaves, but few other than the most senior officials and a few successful farmers owned large numbers. The largest holding was probably that of Governor Adriaan van der Stel, who owned 169 slaves in 1706. The largest holding of a burgher was probably that of Martin Melck, who had 101 slaves in 1774. In 1750, there were 681 slave owners in the colony. Only 7 of them owned more than 50 slaves and another 25 owned between 26 and 50, whereas 385 owned fewer than 6 slaves. Finally, few Cape slaves were manumitted, and the rate of manumission declined over time, so that there was never a large community of “free blacks.” The free blacks initially had the same rights as the white settlers, but the law began to discriminate against them in the 1760s, and by the 1790s they were obliged to carry passes if they wished to leave town. Though few in numbers, however, the free blacks were a significant influence in the colonial society. They moderated the congruence between race and enslavement.

  The occupations of the Cape slaves varied greatly, depending on who owned them and where they lived. The company housed its slaves in a building in Cape Town, where they provided the basic labor force for public works. Company officials and burghers who lived in Cape Town employed their slaves as domestic servants, artisans, fishermen, market gardeners, and fetchers of water and wood. Rural slaves were farm laborers and domestic servants. They formed the backbone of the arable economy.

  Meanwhile, the indigenous transhumant pastoralists of southwestern Africa, who called themselves Khoikhoi and whom white settlers called Hottentots, were bearing the brunt of the Dutch invasion.7 During the century and a half following Vasco da Gama’s first great voyage to India, those living in the Cape peninsula, who probably numbered between four and eight thousand, had grown accustomed to occasional visits by European seafarers. They had developed a taste for European trade goods—iron, copper, brass, and body ornaments—and become experienced and skilled in bartering them for sheep and cattle.

  For the first few years after the arrival of the van Riebeeck expedition, relations were fairly cordial. Conscious of their dearth of available labor, the Dutch were concerned to consolidate their bridgehead and secure their needs peacefully. Like their predecessors, they acquired sheep and cattle in exchange for Western goods. They also cultivated friendships with three cooperative Khoikhoi, whom they called Doman, Eva, and Harry, using them as interpreters for communication with the leaders of the local communities. Tensions soon developed, however. As they witnessed the building of the fort and the planting of fruit trees, vegetables, and crops, and, more particularly, the engrossment of land by the first free burghers, it gradually dawned on the indigenous people that they were facing an unprecedented challenge. In 1659, quarrels over cattle escalated into warfare. The Khoikhoi first destroyed five settler farms and captured numerous sheep and cattle, but during 1660, using superior weaponry and tactics and exploiting the divisions among the indigenous people, the colonial government established control. It then sought to secure and limit its territorial commitment by planting a thick hedge around the settlement and building watch houses along the perimeter.

  During the following generation, the settlement expanded at the expense of the pastoral communities to the north and the east of the Cape peninsula. Gaining confidence from their defeat of the peninsular people, the settlers became increasingly brutal. They branded, thrashed, and chained Khoikhoi whom they suspected of theft and placed them on Rob-ben Island, seven miles northwest of Cape Town—an island destined to be used as a prison by successive regimes down to the present. Khoikhoi to the north of the peninsula put up the most effective resistance. War began in 1673 and continued intermittently until 1677, but once again—as would repeatedly happen throughout their conquest of South Africa—the European invaders established control with superior arms by exploiting internal divisions among the local people.

  By 1713, the indigenous pastoral society of the southwestern corner of Africa was disintegrating. Whites were in control of the fertile territory below the mountain escarpment extending fifty miles north and forty miles east from Cape Town. The Khoikhoi had been unable to withstand the invasion of the Dutch East India Company and its settlers. They had lost most of their livestock—their most valued possessions: the records of the company show that between 1662 and 1713 it received 14,363 cattle and 32,808 sheep from the Khoikhoi. Their fragile political system had collapsed, and the chiefs had become pathetic clients of the company. In the 1680s, individuals and families had begun to detach themselves from their society and serve burghers as shepherds and cattleherds. The southwestern Khoikhoi were becoming a subordinate caste in the colonial society, set apart by appearance and culture from both the Whites and the slaves; technically free, but treated no better than the slaves.

  Richard Elphick sums up the colonial system: “The Company and the settlers in combination . . . assaulted all five components of independence together: [they] absorbed livestock and labor from the Khoikhoi economy, subjugated Khoikhoi chiefs to Dutch overrule and their followers to Dutch law, encroached on Khoikhoi pastures, and endangered the integrity of Khoikhoi culture.”8 Then came smallpox. Brought in by a homeward bound Dutch ship in 1713, it ravaged the Khoikhoi. Not having previously experienced the disease, they had no immunity and suffered more grievously than the other inhabitants. Khoikhoi society, “already in precipitous decline, had been virtually destroyed; and the people who had lived in it had barely escaped annihilation.”9

  By that time, the settlement at the Cape was fulfilling its prescribed goal: the company’s fleets were being efficiently revictualed with fresh water, wine, beef, mutton, bread, fruit, and vegetables. But the colony had also become a far more complex society than the mere refreshment station that the directors of the Dutch East India Company had envisaged in 1652, and it had developed a wholly unforeseen dynamic.

  The growing town on Table Bay was a miniature Batavia—”a seaward-looking community, a caravanserai on the periphery of the global spice trade,”10 where diverse religions, languages, and peoples jostled, and life focused on the outside world. The greatest events were the arrivals of the fleets, bringing news from Europe or Asia and a period of brisk trade. Abraham Bogaert, a Danish visitor, described the town in 1702. The castle, with its “bastions built of heavy stone and armed with large cannon” was the home of the governor and other senior officials.

  The town, lying a good musket shot to the west of the Castle, stretches from the sea to Table Mountain, and at the back touches the outermost slopes of the Lion Hill. It has wonderfully increased the number of its houses since the Company chose this place for a settlement. ... All are built of stone. . . . They look very well from far off because of the snow-white lime with which they are plastered outside, and many shine with Dutch neatness. ... It now boasts of a Church, built in the Dutch fashion and adorned with a fair-sized tower, in which on Sundays the Word of Truth is preached.11

  Bogaert also described the company’s garden, “the new hospital, which is tolerably extensive,” and the lodge, “where the slaves of the Company live, of whom the number at times runs well into five hundred.”12

  The countryside, too, was dependent on external trade, but it was remote from the bustle of the port and dominated by its most successful landowners. The visitor of 1702 was impressed by the Stellenbosch settlement: “It is incredible how by the zeal of the Dutch this place has grown with fine dwellings, and how great a treasure of wine and grain is grown here every year.”13

  Gradations of status and wealth in the white population were infinite. The company paid meticulous regard to rank. The governors, with numerous perquisites plus a salary of two hundred guilders a month, lived in a style modeled on the patricians in the Netherlands; the common sailors and soldiers, with nine guilders a month, led spartan lives. Among the burghers, there was a small class of relatively wealthy traders and farmers, some of whose daughters married senior officials. At the other extreme was a growing class
of poor Whites: landless people who were unwilling or unable to do manual labor because of the presence of slaves. They included a few army and navy deserters. In between were small traders and innkeepers in the town, farmers hard put to make ends meet, and farm overseers known as knechts.

  As the population increased during the eighteenth century, the burghers became increasingly stratified. At the end of the century, the town had about 1,100 houses and there were a number of large burgher estates. In 1803, a German employed by the Batavian (Dutch) Republic described the home of Jacob Laubscher, who lived in the area of mixed arable and pastoral farming about eighty miles north of the peninsula:

  He maintained a sort of patriarchal household, of which some idea may be formed by stating that the stock of the farm consisted of eighty horses, six hundred and ninety head of horned cattle, two thousand four hundred and seventy sheep, and an immense quantity of poultry of all kinds. The family itself, including masters, servants, hottentots [Khoikhoi], and slaves, consisted of a hundred and five persons. . . . The quantity of corn sown upon his estate this year, including every description, amounted to sixty-one bushels. . . . [I]t will be seen that an African farm may almost be called a State in miniature. . . . From the produce of the lands and flocks must the whole tribe be fed, so that the surplus is not so great as might be supposed at first sight.

  The visitor listed items that could not be produced on the spot: “First, articles of manufacture, as cloth, linen, hats, arms; secondly of luxury, as tea, coffee, sugar, spices, &c:—thirdly of raw materials, as iron, pitch, and rosin. ‘Tis only through the medium of these wants that a colonist is connected with the rest of the world; . . . excepting articles of the above description, there is scarcely anything necessary for the supply of his household which is not drawn from his own premises.”14 He should have added guns, which were essential possessions of all farmers.