At the far southern end of the Old World, the land that is now known as South Africa has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years. Modern day South Africa has had contact with Europeans for centuries, and the first group to settle there were the Dutch. Nowadays, in the West, South Africa is remembered as the land of Apartheid with continued racial tensions between the black majority and white minority, the legacy of the country’s complicated colonial past. European-descended South Africans are relatively new arrivals to the region, but just how long they have been present in the country may not be evident.
Permanent European settlements were first founded by the Dutch in 1652, unintentionally leading to the creation of a new ethnic group in South Africa with its own language, history, and ideology, and, perhaps most notably from a modern perspective, its own unique sins.
The Dutch East India Company and the Founding of Cape Colony
Beginning in the early 1400s, the Age of Discovery saw ships from several European nations set out with the explicit purpose of finding new lands and trade routes. As a small country with maritime prowess, the Portuguese were among the most prolific explorers during this period. A Portuguese expedition led by Bartolomeu Dias was the first to locate the Cape of Good Hope at the southwestern tip of South Africa. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama would follow the same route and push further on to be the first to sail from Europe to India. During this voyage, da Gama briefly landed north of the Cape and made contact with the Khoikhoi natives for the first time. For over one hundred years, no other European nations would spend any considerable amount of time or effort in the region.
The arrival of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama at Calicut, India, in 1498 opened a gateway of free access to Asia from Western Europe around the Cape of Good Hope. It is to the ambitions of Prince Henry the Navigator that historians attribute the discovery of the Cape as a settling ground for Europeans. In 1424 Henry and Fernando de Castro besieged the Canary Islands, under the impression that they might be of use to further Portuguese expeditions around Africa's coast. Although this attempt was unsuccessful, Portugal's continued interest in the continent made possible the later voyages of Bartholomew Dias in 1487 and Vasco de Gama ten years later. Dias made known to the world a "Cape of Storms", rechristened "Good Hope" by John II. As it was desirable to take formal possession of this territory the Portuguese erected a stone cross in Algoa Bay.
Like Portugal, the Netherlands was a small country dependent on sea trade. The Dutch wanted to gain a foothold in the immensely lucrative spice trade and sent its fleets to India and the Far East. The Dutch government decided that a chartered company would be useful to profitably govern the growing colonies in India and Indonesia. Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) or Dutch East Indies Company was founded in 1602 and was given almost total political and economic authority over the Dutch possessions in the East. It soon became official protocol for outgoing and returning VOC ships to anchor at the natural harbor of Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope as a convenient place to rest the crews on the long voyages.
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After the British East India Company was founded in 1599, London merchants began to take advantage of the route to India by the Cape. Due to the value of the spice trade between Europe and their outposts in the East Indies, Dutch ships began to call sporadically at the Cape in search of provisions after 1598. In 1601 a Captain Paul van Corniden came ashore at St. Helena Bay and traded sheep with the natives. In 1648, Dutch sailors Leendert Jansz and Nicholas Proot had been shipwrecked in Table Bay and marooned for five months until picked up by a returning ship. During this period they established friendly relations with the locals, who sold them sheep, cattle, and vegetables.
In 1651, the Council made the decision to send a small fleet to the Cape to establish a permanent supply base. Jan van Riebeeck, who had been a competent and loyal employee of the VOC since 1639, was chosen to command the expedition and directly oversee the development of the colony. His orders were simple. He was to find ways to provide food and clean water to the visiting ships and to construct a fort to defend the settlement. Of course, these objectives proved rather difficult to achieve. The expedition, made up of Dutch (and some German) VOC employees and their families and soldiers, departed the Netherlands on December 24, 1651 and arrived in Table Bay on April 6, 1652. Van Riebeeck could not have known it at the time, but the arrival of his fleet would define South African history for the next three and a half centuries.
Jan van Riebeeck
Early Development of the Colony
The first priorities were to find food sources, make contact with the native population, and begin construction of the fort. All these efforts progressed simultaneously. Some settlers were put to work experimenting with growing various kinds of European crops, while others were sent to explore the coast and further inland for meat and fish. Prior to the expedition’s arrival, the region had been sparsely populated by the Khoikhoi (or Khoi) and San tribes. The Dutch made initial contact with the Khoi and began trading European goods for local cattle. This relationship benefitted both parties and continued for several decades. There were periods of conflict between the Khoi and the settlers, of course, but the Dutch tried to stay on good terms with them when possible. The San group, however, were not interested in dealing with the Dutch. With food sources established and a fort under construction, Cape Town, the first settlement, was established.
Ships began arriving at Cape Town within a year of its founding, bringing supplies to help the colony grow and consolidate. Van Riebeeck and his settlers were diligent, and the viability of the colony soon became evident. The climate at the Cape proved well suited to growing European crops and trees as well as plants from India and the Far East. Sufficient numbers of cattle were purchased from the Khoikhoi that there were eventually enough for Dutch farmers to raise their own herds. Additionally, the first wine grapes were planted, which began the long tradition of South African wine. Establishing law and order was a priority as well. Early on, Robben Island in Table Bay, where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner for 18 years, was used as a prison and place of exile. Criminal settlers, slaves that attempted to run away, and Khoikhoi and San people that tried to steal from or cheat the Dutch farmers were sent there to live in isolation from the main colony. However, similar to the contemporary European colonies in North America, disease killed many early settlers before adequate housing had been built to protect them from the elements. Population growth in the colony was slow in the early years due to these factors as well as the low numbers of new colonists that arrived from Europe. Over time, however, the colony would become more robust and fresh settlers would steadily arrive for centuries to come.
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From the start, the VOC shipped slaves from India, the East Indies, and West Africa to Cape Colony. Since there were only a few hundred European settlers, the colonists alone could not make the farms and ranches functional. Life for the slaves was difficult, although the settlers were prohibited from harming them, as they were considered VOC property. Initially, there were too few settlers to keep watch of the slaves, and many were able to escape into the interior, although there was no hope for them to ever return to their homelands. The natives of the region were not enslaved, however, since the Dutch needed to do business with them in order to survive. In fact, interracial marriages between Dutch men and Khoi or slave women were condoned by the VOC under the proper circumstances. The first mixed marriage occurred between a Dutchman and a freed Indian slave girl in 1658, and the first official Protestant wedding between a European and Khoi woman in 1664. The descendants from these relationships and the colony’s slaves would, in time, create a separate ethnic community known as the ‘Cape Coloureds’ that number in the millions in modern South Africa.
The Dutch Cape Colony (Dutch: Nederlandse Kaapkolonie), officially known as the Cape of Good Hope Waystation (Dutch: Tussenstation Kaap de Goede Hoop), was a colony of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Batavian Republic in Southern Africa. As the only permanent settlement of the VOC which served as a trading post, it proved an ideal retirement place for employees of the company.
The legal classifications imposed upon every individual in the Company possessions determined their position in society and conferred restraints upon their actions. VOC ordinances made a clear distinction between the "bonded" period of service, and the period of "freedom" that began once an employment contract ended. European employees were repatriated to the Netherlands upon the termination of their contract, unless they successfully applied for a vrijbrief, in which they were charged a small fee and registered as vrijburgers in a Company record known collectively as the vrijboeken. Fairly strict conditions were levied on those who aspired to become vrijburgers at the Cape of Good Hope.
Consolidation of Cape Colony
Legally and practically, the VOC had a monopoly on all the economic activity of Cape Colony. This did not mean, however, that every settler was a company employee per se. Independent citizens, or free burghers, were allowed to own their own farms, ranches, mills, and other businesses, provided, of course, that they sell most of their goods to the company for fixed prices. This arrangement allowed for the VOC to make Cape Colony profitable while, ideally, giving enough freedom to its residents to live how they wanted. Most of the burghers were former VOC employees that had already served the company abroad. The free burghers gradually developed a distinct identity as a community, one that valued individualism and distrusted formal authority. Some burghers would become “trekboers”, or semi-nomadic ranchers. The trekboer lifestyle was an early manifestation of the individualism that would become a prominent feature of Afrikaner culture in later centuries.
The VOC favoured the idea of freemen at the Cape and many settlers requested to be discharged in order to become free burghers; as a result, Jan van Riebeeck approved the notion on favorable conditions and earmarked two areas near the Liesbeek River for farming purposes in 1657. The two areas which were allocated to the freemen, for agricultural purposes, were named Groeneveld and Dutch Garden. These areas were separated by the Amstel River (Liesbeek River). Nine of the best applicants were selected to use the land for agricultural purposes. After the first settlers spread out around the Company station, nomadic European livestock farmers, or Trekboeren, moved more widely afield, leaving the richer, but limited, farming lands of the coast for the drier interior tableland. The Cape society in this period was thus a diverse one.
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Van Riebeeck was relieved of his command in 1662. In 1662 van Riebeeck was succeeded by Zacharias Wagenaer as governor of the Cape. The Cape Colony commanders that followed van Riebeeck would primarily continue the policies and projects that he had begun. The fort would eventually be replaced by the much larger and more complex Castle of Good Hope, which still stands today in Cape Town. It was not until Simon van der Stel assumed the governorship in 1679 that the colony began to mature economically and expand further inland. Starting with van der Stel, the role of commander was upgraded to governor, with all the civil administrative connotations it entailed. Under his leadership, new towns were founded, agricultural production increased to surplus levels, and the colony started to transform into more than just a supply station for VOC ships.
Castle of Good Hope
During van der Stel’s tenure, the first French Huguenots arrived in Cape Colony. While most Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France went to England and the Netherlands, the VOC paid for around two hundred men, women, and children to emigrate to South Africa starting in 1688. Encouraged by the success of this experiment, the company extended free passage from 1685 to 1707 for Dutch families wishing to settle at the Cape. France had been an enemy of the Dutch many times prior, but the Huguenots were broadly welcomed at the Cape, due mostly to their Protestant faith which they shared with the Dutch and German colonists. The terms under which the Huguenots agreed to immigrate were the same as those offered to other VOC subjects, including free passage and the requisite farm equipment on credit. As the colony continued to grow, the Huguenots worked in farming and ranching and contributed greatly to the quality of South African wine. The French settlers assimilated into the Dutch culture of the region, although French surnames are still present among the modern Afrikaner population.
Simon van der Stel retired in 1699 and was succeeded by his son Willem. Unfortunately for the colonists and the VOC leadership, Willem van der Stel was deeply corrupt. For over seven years, van der Stel built a massive estate with company funds and deliberately took steps to monopolize the colony’s farms and ranches under his and his associates’ control. Company employees and free burghers viewed this with great concern and began to organize against van der Stel’s rule. With much trouble and the wrongful imprisonment of prominent burghers, a petition detailing the governor’s abuses and signed by dozens of colonists was shipped back to the Netherlands in 1706. The VOC leadership, wary of discontent in one of their most important colonies, sent orders back that called for peace to be restored at the Cape, dismissed van der Stel, and ordered him to return to Amsterdam. Willem van der Stel left the colony in 1708 and would never return. With his departure, the early period of modern South African history had ended.
The Emergence of the Afrikaner Identity
The term "Afrikaner" currently denotes the politically, culturally, and socially dominant and majority group among white South Africans, or the Afrikaans-speaking population of Dutch origin. The term "Afrikaner" originally described mixed-race nomadic people in Southern Africa similar to Basters across Namibia and South Africa. Such groups include the Oorlam people under Oude Ram Afrikaner and Jager Afrikaner in the early 1700s, with the Oorlam continuing to use Afrikaner as a surname and subgroup of their people.
The first recorded instance of a colonist identifying as an Afrikaner occurred in March 1707, during a disturbance in Stellenbosch. When the magistrate, Johannes Starrenburg, ordered an unruly crowd to desist, a young white man named Hendrik Biebouw retorted, "Ik wil niet loopen, ik ben een Afrikaander - al slaat de landdrost mij dood, of al zetten hij mij in de tronk, ik zal, nog wil niet zwijgen!" ("I will not leave, I am an African - even if the magistrate were to beat me to death or put me in jail, I shall not be, nor will I stay, silent!"). Biebouw was flogged for his insolence and later banished to Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia). By the late nineteenth century, the term was common language in both the Boer republics and the Cape Colony.
Afrikaners are descended, to varying degrees, from Dutch, German and French Huguenot immigrants, along with minor percentages of other Europeans and indigenous African peoples. The first mixed race marriage which took place in Cape Town in 1664 was that of Krotoa, a Khoi woman, and Peder Havgaard, a Danish surgeon. Krotoa and Peder's descendants are the Pelzer, Kruger, Steenkamp and other Afrikaner families.
Although the Cape Colony was administered and initially settled by VOC, a number of foreigners also boarded ships in the Netherlands to settle there. Some Europeans also arrived from elsewhere in Holland's sphere, especially German soldiers being discharged from colonial service. As a result, by 1691 over a quarter of the white population of South Africa was not ethnically Dutch. The number of permanent settlers of both sexes and all ages, according to figures available at the onset of British rule, numbered 26,720, of whom 50% were Dutch, 27% German, 17% French and 5.5% other. This demographic breakdown of the community just prior to the end of the Dutch administration has been used in many subsequent studies to represent the ethnic makeup of modern Afrikaners, a practise criticised by some academics such as Dr. Mansell Upham.
Based on Heese's genealogical research of the period from 1657 to 1867, his study Die Herkoms van die Afrikaners ("The Origins of the Afrikaners") estimated an average ethnic admixture for Afrikaners of 35.5% Dutch, 34.4% German, 13.9% French, 7.2% non-European, 2.6% English, 2.8% other European and 3.6% unknown. Heese reached this conclusion by recording all the wedding dates and number of children of each immigrant.
History Summarized: South Africa
Expansion and Conflict
As the only permanent settlement of the VOC which served as a trading post, it proved an ideal retirement place for employees of the company. After several years of service in the company, an employee could lease a piece of land in the Cape Colony as a Free Burgher, on which he had to cultivate crops that he had to sell to the VOC for a fixed price. Due to the authoritarian rule of the company (telling farmers what to grow for what price, controlling immigration, and monopolising trade), some farmers tried to escape the rule of the company by moving further inland.
The company, in an effort to control these migrants, established a magistracy at Swellendam in 1745 and another at Graaff Reinet in 1786, and declared the Gamtoos River as the eastern frontier of the Cape, only to see the Trekboers cross it soon afterwards.
The discovery of goldfields awakened British interest in the Boer republics, and the two Boer Wars resulted: The First Boer War (1880-1881) and the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The Boers won the first war and retained their independence. The second ended with British victory and annexation of the Boer areas into the British colonies.
The British employed scorched earth tactics and held many Boers in concentration camps as a means to separate commandos from their source of shelter, food and supply. In the 1890s, some Boers trekked into Mashonaland, where they were concentrated at the town of Enkeldoorn, now Chivhu.
After the second Boer War, more Boers left South Africa.
Distribution of Afrikaans versus English as home language of white South Africans. Afrikaners make up approximately 58% of South Africa's white population, based on language used in the home.
Historical population
| Year | Population | ±% p.a. |
|---|---|---|
| 1657 | 137 | - |
| 1754 | 6,000 | +3.97% |
| 1806 | 26,720 | +2.91% |
| 1936 | 1,120,770 | +2.92% |
| 1960 | 1,600,000 | +1.49% |
| 1985 | 2,581,080 | +1.93% |
| 1996 | 2,558,956 | −0.08% |
| 2001 | 2,576,184 | +0.13% |
| 2011 | 2,710,461 | +0.51% |
| 2022 | 2,512,096 | −0.69% |
Note: For the years 1985-2022, the census statistics show the number of Afrikaans-speaking whites.
Afrikaner Diaspora
Afrikaner diaspora in Africa and the world.
A relatively large group of Boers settled in Kenya. The first wave of migrants consisted of individual families, followed by larger multiple-family treks. Some had arrived by 1904, as documented by the caption of a newspaper photograph noting a tent town for "some of the early settlers from South Africa" on what became the campus of the University of Nairobi. Probably the first to arrive was W.J. van Breda (1903), followed by John de Waal and Frans Arnoldi at Nakuru (1906).
The second wave of migrants is exemplified by Jan Janse van Rensburg's trek. Janse van Rensburg left the Transvaal on an exploratory trip to British East Africa in 1906 from Lourenço Marques (then Portuguese), Mozambique. Van Rensburg was inspired by an earlier Boer migrant, Abraham Joubert, who had moved to Nairobi from Arusha in 1906, along with others. On his return to the Transvaal, van Rensburg recruited about 280 Afrikaners (comprising either 47 or 60 families) to accompany him to British East Africa. On 9 July 1908 his party sailed in the chartered ship SS Windhuk from Lourenço Marques to Mombasa, from where they boarded a train for Nairobi.
In 1911, the last of the large trek groups departed for Kenya, when some 60 families from the Orange Free State boarded the SS Skramstad in Durban under leadership of C.J. Cloete. But migration dwindled, partly due to the British secretary of state's (then Lord Crewe) cash requirements for immigrants. When the British granted self-government to the former Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in 1906 and 1907, respectively, the pressure for emigration decreased.
A combination of factors spurred on Boer migration. Some, like van Rensburg and Cloete, had collaborated with the British, or had surrendered during the Boer War. These joiners and hensoppers ("hands-uppers") subsequently experienced hostility from other Afrikaners. One of the best known Boer settlements in the British East Africa Protectorate became established at Eldoret, in the south west of what became known as Kenya in 1920.
Brazil is the country in Latin America with the largest community of Afrikaners, they mostly live in Southeastern Brazil, the most populous area of the country.
After the second Boer War, more Boers left South Africa. Another group emigrated to British-ruled Kenya, from where most returned to South Africa during the 1930s as a result of warfare there amongst indigenous people. A third group, under the leadership of General Ben Viljoen, emigrated to Chihuahua in northern Mexico and to the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas in the south-western US.
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