Western Cape (Afrikaans & Cape Coloured)

Where the colonial history of South Africa begins, and where its demography is unlike the rest of the country. The Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station at Table Bay in 1652 to supply ships on the Asia route, not to found a colony, but the free burghers released from company service began farming and the settlement spread inland. Its labour came from slaves imported from Madagascar, India, Ceylon and the Indonesian archipelago, and from the Khoikhoi whose pastoral economy the expansion destroyed. Out of that came two things specific to the region: Afrikaans, a language that developed in the contact between Dutch, slaves and Khoi and was first written in Arabic script by Cape Muslims, and the communities classified as Coloured under apartheid, who remain a plurality of the province's population. The British took the Cape in 1795 and again in 1806, abolished slavery in 1834, and established a colour-blind qualified franchise in 1853 that survived until the Union whittled it away. That tradition made the Western Cape politically distinct, and it still votes differently from every other province. Apartheid hit it particularly visibly: District Six in central Cape Town was declared white and its sixty thousand residents removed, and the Coloured Labour Preference Policy restricted African settlement until 1984. The region is Mediterranean in climate, produces the country's wine and most of its deciduous fruit, and depends on winter rain that failed nearly completely in 2017. Robben Island lies in the bay. Cape Town is the legislative capital. Stellenbosch and Franschhoek were settled by Huguenots after 1688. The fynbos of the Cape floral kingdom is the smallest and most diverse of the world's six. Table Mountain is the city's boundary as much as its landmark.

• Existed: 1652 CE – present
• Type: Entity