Cape Colony Founded by the VOC
Jan van Riebeeck landed at Table Bay in April 1652 with about ninety people to establish a refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company. It was not intended to be a colony. Ships on the Batavia run took six months to reach the Cape, and their crews arrived with scurvy; the station was to grow vegetables, supply water and meat, and treat the sick, and van Riebeeck's instructions were explicit that no territory was to be taken. That lasted nine years. The company found that salaried employees would not produce enough, and in 1657 released nine of them as free burghers with land grants along the Liesbeek river — land the Khoikhoi used for grazing, and which they had not sold. The first Dutch-Khoikhoi war followed in 1659, and van Riebeeck planted a hedge of bitter almond to mark the boundary, part of which is still growing. Slaves were imported from 1658, from Angola, Madagascar, Bengal, Indonesia and Mozambique, because the company would not enslave the Khoikhoi and the burghers wanted labour. By the eighteenth century the enslaved outnumbered the free population. Huguenot refugees arrived in 1688 and brought viticulture. The settlement spread inland with trekboers grazing cattle over enormous distances, and smallpox in 1713 destroyed Khoikhoi society. Britain took the colony in 1795 and again in 1806, abolished slavery in 1834, and the Great Trek followed. Everything about South Africa's subsequent history begins with a vegetable garden. Van Riebeeck's face was on the South African currency until 1994. The Cape's population today is descended from every group the station drew in, which is the one thing the company never planned.
- Year: 1652 CE
- Category: Political
