Who ruled Cape Town?

Cape Town lies on Table Bay, beneath the flat-topped wall of Table Mountain, near the south-western tip of Africa. It was founded in 1652 as a supply station where ships sailing between Europe and Asia could take on fresh water, meat and vegetables, and for its first two centuries it looked out to sea rather than inland. It is the oldest city in South Africa, and its history is marked by the dispossession of its first inhabitants, by slavery, and in the twentieth century by the forced removals of apartheid.

The Cape had long been home to San hunter-gatherers and to Khoekhoe herders, who grazed cattle and sheep across the coastal plains. Portuguese navigators rounded the Cape from 1488, and by the early 1600s English and Dutch ships often stopped in Table Bay to trade with Khoekhoe groups for cattle. On 6 April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed with a party from the Dutch East India Company, an enterprise of the Dutch Republic, to build a fort and lay out gardens. The stone Castle of Good Hope replaced the first fort between 1666 and 1679.

The settlement spread inland as company servants were released to farm, and the Khoekhoe lost their grazing lands in a series of wars and to smallpox epidemics, the worst in 1713. The colony depended on the labour of enslaved people brought from the Indonesian islands, India, Madagascar and East Africa. Their descendants, together with Khoekhoe and European ancestors, formed much of the city's population, and exiles and enslaved Muslims from the East Indies founded the community of the Cape Malays and brought Islam to the town.

During the wars of the French Revolution Britain seized the Cape in 1795 to keep it from France. It was handed back to Dutch rule in 1803, retaken after a battle at Blaauwberg in January 1806, and formally ceded to Britain in 1814, becoming the capital of the Cape Colony within the British Empire. Slavery was abolished in 1834. The colony gained its own parliament in 1854 and responsible government in 1872, and the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior from the late 1860s made Cape Town's harbour busier than ever.

When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, Cape Town became its legislative capital, while Pretoria held the government offices and Bloemfontein the highest court. A version of that division of capitals survives today.

Segregation began early: an outbreak of plague in 1901 was used to move Black residents to a separate location at Ndabeni. After the National Party came to power in 1948, apartheid laws assigned each district to a single racial group. District Six, a mixed neighbourhood close to the centre, was declared a white area in 1966, and some 60,000 people were removed to new townships on the Cape Flats before its houses were bulldozed. On Robben Island, in Table Bay, the government held political prisoners including Nelson Mandela, who spent 18 years there. On 11 February 1990, the day of his release, Mandela gave his first public speech from the balcony of Cape Town's City Hall.

Since the first democratic elections of 1994 the city has grown rapidly through migration from the Eastern Cape and beyond. Metropolitan Cape Town now has nearly five million people, and it remains the seat of South Africa's parliament and one of the country's two largest cities.