The Africanders

by Le Roy Hooker

In 1650 the Dutch East India Company, acting upon the reports and suggestions of influential men who had visited Table Bay and resided in Table Valley several months, determined to establish at Table Bay such a victualing station as had been recommended. In accordance therewith the ships Reiger and Dromedaris and the yacht Goede Hoop—all then lying in the harbor of Amsterdam—were put in commission to carry the party of occupation to Table Bay, under the general command of Jan Van Riebeek.

On Sunday, 24th of December, 1651, the expedition sailed, accompanied by a large fleet of merchant vessels. On the morning of Sunday, the 7th of April, 1652, after a voyage of one [[13]]hundred and four days, the site of their future home greeted the eyes of the sea-worn emigrants,—Table Mountain, 3,816 feet high, being the central and impressive feature of the landscape. In due time preparations were made to land and begin the necessary operations in establishing themselves in the new and entirely uncivilized country.

The organization of the Dutch East India Company was on a thoroughly military system. It graduated downward from the home Assembly of Seventeen—who were supreme—to a governor-general of India and his council resident in Batavia, and, ranking next below him in their order, to a vast number of admirals, governors and commanders—each having his own council, and acting under the strict rule that whenever these came in contact the lower in rank must give place and render obedience to the higher. It is important to bear this in mind, as it gives a clear insight into the mode of government under which the occupation took place, and which prevailed with little variation for more than a hundred years. The ranking officer of the expedition was Jan Van Riebeek, and next to him in authority were the three commanders as his council in founding the settlement. [[14]]

Van Riebeek and the three skippers, having inspected Table Valley, selected a site for the fort a little in rear of the ground on which the general postoffice of Cape Town now stands. On that spot a great stronghold was built in the form of a square strengthened by bastions at its angles. Each face of the fort measured 252 Rhynland feet—about 260 feet English measure. The walls were built of earth, twelve feet high, twenty feet in thickness at the base, tapering to sixteen feet at the top, and were surmounted by a parapet. Surrounding the whole structure was a moat, into which the water of Fresh River could be turned. Within the walls were dwellings, barracks, storehouses and other conveniences that might be required in a state of siege. Around the fort were clustered a walled kraal for cattle, a separate inclosure for workshops, and the tents in which the settlers began their life in Africa.

On the 28th of January, 1653, the last of the ships, the Dromedaris, sailed away and left the colonists to their own resources.

The history in detail of this first European settlement in South Africa is of surpassing interest; but, here, it must be sketched in the briefest outline possible, up to the first contact of Boer with Briton. [[15]]

For the first twenty-five years the aim of the colonists was to keep within easy reach of the fort at the Cape. Up to 1680 the most distant agricultural settlement was at Stellenbosch, about twenty-five miles from the Cape. Not till the end of the century did they push pioneering enterprises beyond the first range of mountains.

There was a steady though not very rapid increase of population. As early as 1658 the disastrous step was taken of introducing slave labor, performed at first by West African negroes—a step which encouraged in the whites an indisposition to work, and doomed that part of Africa to be dependent on the toil of slaves. To their African slaves the Dutch East India Company added numbers of Malay convicts from Java and other parts of its East Indian territories. These Malays took wives from the female convicts of their own race, and to some extent intermarried with the native African slave-women. From such marriages there arose a mongrel, dark people of the servile order, which became a considerable element in the population of Cape Town and its neighboring regions.

In 1689 some three hundred French Huguenots came from Holland in a body and joined the colonists at the Cape. These were a valuable [[16]]acquisition as an offset to the rapidly increasing servile element. They were mostly persons of refinement, and brought with them habits of industry, strong attachment to the Protestant faith, and a supreme love of liberty. Many of the more respectable colonial families are descended from that stock.

The somewhat intolerant government of the Company hastened the blending of the various classes of the population in one. The Huguenots loved their language and their peculiar faith, and greatly desired to found a separate religious community. But the Company forbade the use of French in official documents and in religious services. As a result of this narrow but far-seeing policy, by the middle of the eighteenth century the Huguenots had amalgamated with their Dutch fellow-colonists in language, religion and politics. It was not until 1780 that the Company’s government permitted the opening of a Lutheran church, although many Germans of that persuasion had emigrated to the Cape.