Cape Colony

The Cape Colony was a European colony at the southern tip of Africa, founded by the Dutch in 1652 and ruled by Britain from 1806 until it became part of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Its history of settlement, slavery and frontier war shaped modern South Africa.

Before Europeans arrived, the south-western Cape was home to the Khoikhoi, herders of cattle and sheep, and the San, hunter-gatherers whose rock paintings are found across southern Africa. Further east lived Bantu-speaking farmers, such as the Xhosa. Portuguese sailors rounded the Cape in 1488 and stopped there for water, but did not settle.

In 1652 the Dutch East India Company sent Jan van Riebeeck to set up a fort and garden at Table Bay, to supply ships sailing to Asia with fresh food. In 1657 some Company employees were released to farm as free burghers. Settlers took land and cattle from the Khoikhoi, leading to wars in 1659 and 1673. A smallpox epidemic in 1713 devastated the Khoikhoi, many of whom became servants on settler farms. French Huguenot refugees arrived in 1688 and established vineyards around Franschhoek.

The colony relied on enslaved people, imported from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Ceylon and the Indonesian archipelago. By the late eighteenth century, enslaved people outnumbered free settlers in the western Cape. Many enslaved people from Asia were Muslims, and the Cape Malay community, with its own traditions, grew from them. Mixing between Europeans, Khoikhoi and enslaved people gave rise to the people later called Cape Coloured. The language spoken in the colony developed into Afrikaans.

Settlers moved inland with their herds, as trekboers, seeking land, and clashed with the San and Khoikhoi. In the east, from 1779 they met the Xhosa along the Fish river, beginning a hundred years of frontier wars. These conflicts, often over cattle and land, were brutal on both sides.

Britain occupied the Cape in 1795, returned it to the Dutch in 1803, and took it again in 1806 to secure the route to India. About 4,000 British settlers arrived in 1820 in the eastern Cape. The British made English the official language, ended the Dutch East India Company's restrictions, and in 1828 gave free people of colour legal equality. Slavery was abolished in 1834, with a four-year apprenticeship period, angering many Dutch-speaking farmers who lost property and labour.

From 1835, thousands of Boers, or Afrikaners, left the Cape in the Great Trek, seeking independence from British rule. They founded the republics of Natalia, later annexed by Britain, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, the Transvaal.

In 1856–1857, a young Xhosa woman, Nongqawuse, prophesied that if the Xhosa killed their cattle and destroyed their crops, the dead would rise and the British would be driven into the sea. Tens of thousands died of starvation, and the British took much Xhosa land.

The Cape gained a parliament in 1853 with a franchise based on property, not race, though few Black people qualified, and responsible government in 1872. Diamonds were discovered near Kimberley in 1867, transforming the economy. Cecil Rhodes, who built the De Beers diamond company, became prime minister in 1890 and promoted British expansion north. He was forced out after the failed Jameson Raid against the Transvaal in 1895–1896. After the South African War of 1899–1902, the Cape joined Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in the Union of South Africa in 1910.

Our maps show the Cape Colony from 1715 to 1900. Its largest outline, about 560,000 square kilometres on the 1878 map, lies almost entirely in today's South Africa. Cape Town lies inside it throughout. On the 1914 map the region is part of South Africa.