Jan van Riebeeck
Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, the origin of modern South Africa. Born in Culemborg in 1619, the son of a surgeon, he joined the Dutch East India Company as an assistant surgeon in 1639 and served in Batavia, Japan and Tonkin. He was recalled from Vietnam in 1645 and dismissed from his post for trading on his own account, which was against Company rules. The Company nonetheless sent him in 1651 to command a refreshment station at the Cape. The purpose was narrow and commercial: ships on the eight-month voyage between the Netherlands and the East Indies were losing large numbers of crew to scurvy, and the Company wanted a garden, fresh water and meat halfway. He landed in April 1652 with about ninety people, built a fort, planted vegetables and vines, and established a hospital. The station did not stay a station. The Company could not grow enough, so from 1657 it released employees as free burghers to farm on their own land — the beginning of a settler population. Riebeeck imported enslaved people from Angola, Madagascar, Bengal and Indonesia from 1658, since the Khoikhoi would not work for him. He fought the first Khoikhoi-Dutch war in 1659 over land and cattle, and planted a bitter almond hedge, part of which survives, to fence the settlement off from the people whose grazing it occupied. He left in 1662 for Malacca and then Batavia, and died there in 1677. His face was on South African currency for decades.
- Lived: 1619 CE – 1677 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: colonial_administrator, navigator
