HISTORICAL AND POPULATION MATERIALS ON SOUTH AFRICA
Source is mostly Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
The link between vacant land and freedom
"The Chief can do no Wrong"
"No people, no chief"
Native communities in South Africa (and Zimbabwe and Kenya) were systematically dispossessed of their land from early days of settlement by Europeans. This process took a leap forward in 1911-1913 with the Native Land Acts and accelerated with the Apartheid system after the 1948 (Afrikaner) Nationalist Party victory. Its effects are still "on the ground" in South Africa (and Zimbabwe) and it's an explosive political issue to try to give land back to earlier owners.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to encounter South Africa but they did little there. The British government ignored a sea captain's proposal in 1620 that it annex the cape. In 1649, Jan van Riebeek with 80 employees of the Dutch East India Company moved into the cape and established permanent white settlement in southern Africa. [The DEIC had 6000 ships and 48,000 sailors and needed a good re-watering and re-provisioning point between Europe and the East Indies. The physical environment and location of the Capetown area were excellent for both. Later, the British were to find the same advantages for their colonial enterprises in Asia and Australia.]
In 1685, 156 French Huguenot refugees were settled near the cape (Stellenbosch, 30 miles east)
By 1707, there were 700 company servants, 2,000 settlers plus slaves and native Africans.
Early on, slaves were imported from Dahomey(now the country of Benin); there was also one shipload of Angolans captured from the Portuguese plus others from Mozambique, Madagascar, Indonesia, India, and Ceylon; they included muslims (Capetown area is still the Moslem center of the country). The nature and stature of the original natives meant to the Dutch that they were incapable of performing some needed tasks.
By 1793, there were 13,830 whites: 4,000 men, 2,700 women, 7,000 children - most were from the lowest and least successful classes of Dutch or German society since company service was dangerous and poorly paid.
There were also 14,700 slaves: 9,000 men, 3,600 women, 2,100 children
Despite the quasi-religious motivations for much Afrikaner politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a general indifference by these early settlers to religion until the late 1700s. In other words, these settlers were not "Pilgrim Fathers." [The later near universal adherence to the Dutch Reformed Church and its racialist doctrines dates from the pressures imposed by the British, the Great Trek, and modernization - the church then served as a group symbol.]
The British occupied Capetown during the Napoleonic Wars and formally acquired possession in 1815. The wider use of the term "Boers" (in Dutch farmer or peasant) is due to them. Descendants of those early settlers prefer the term "Afrikaner" which emphasizes their distinctiveness. The critical event in raising political consciousness was the "Great Trek" away from the British at the Cape. About 6,000 (9 percent of the then white population) and about 5,000 colored servants took part in this move to the northeast over a period of several years.
Population
Until the 1850s and widespread adoption of steam, sailing from Europe to the Cape took about 3 months each way. Communication finally became near instantaneous with the installation of a submarine cable in 1870. By that time there were about 250,000 whites in southern Africa. In the Cape Colony's census of 1865 there were 180,000 Europeans, 200,000 Hottentots and others and 100,000 Kaffirs (Africans). Capetown had about 28,000 and Port Elizabeth, the second city 9,000.
The mineral discoveries from 1867 (diamonds) on led to a rapid increase in white immigrants. Results by racial group of several censuses are given below:
SOUTH AFRICAN POPULATION BY GROUP, 1911-1993 source: Leonard Thompson,
A History of South Africa. Yale, 1995 Year (elements in percent,
column totals in millions) Group 1911 1960 1980 1993 African 67 68 72 76
Colored 9 9 9 8 East Indian 3 3 3 3 White 21 19 16 13
Totals 6 16 28.7 40.3