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South African History
The Landing
at the Cape
European settlement in South Africa started in Cape Town, which is why it is still called the Mother City to this day.
After the British had decided against establishment of a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, it was the Dutch who realized the strategic and economic importance of the Cape. On a commission for the Dutch-East India Trading company the merchant Jan van Riebeeck anchored in the picturesque bay at the foot of the Table Mountain on April 6, 1652
He was accompanied by 82 men and 8 women, his own wife amongst them. They had been instructed to establish a strong base to provide the Company's ships with fresh groceries, mainly meat and vegetables on the long journey from Europe to Asia.
First of all, van Riebeeck's men erected the "Fort de Goede Hoop" for their own protection, and they laid out a large garden and started to grow fruit and vegetables.
They tried to obtain the meat provisions through trade with the natives.
Despite many set-backs - during the first winter 20 of RiebeeckÕs men died - the settlement started to flourish. The number of sailors who anchored at the Cape to stock up on milk, meat and vegetables grew steadily. The construction of a pier rendered the bay safer and even more attractive. Soon there were workshops to repair ships and a hospital for the ill.
With the rapid development of the port the need for labour increased dramatically. Firstly slaves and politically banned people were imported from Indonesia (Java and Sumatra), but soon Dutch settlers arrived and immigrants from all over Europe followed. In 1688, a large group of French Huguenots who were fleeing religious persecution at home, settled at the Cape.
Because the demand for agricultural land, especially pastures, grew continuously, the settlement steadily spread from Table Bay towards the north and north-east.
The Khoikhoi, also called Hottentots, were forced to recede, although they strongly resisted the expansion of the Cape settlers. In 1659, a Khoikhoi uprising resulted in complete defeat, and they had to retreat to the north.
The Expansion of the Trek Boers
From the beginning of the 18th century the Cape settlers expanded their territory towards the north and the east.
These settling movements were led by the Trek Boers, white farmers who penetrated the hinterland looking for grazing land for their cattle.
The Trek Boers preferred the free and unrestricted life on their ox wagons and in tents to the more protected existence within the realms of town administration.
The price they had to pay for their lifestyle was constant armed conflict with native peoples. First the Khoikhoi successfully resisted the conquest of their residential and grazing land.
And from the turn of the century it was the people of the Xhosa, living to the east, who stood up against the Trek Boers.
Frequent skirmishes occurred, particularly in the Zuurveld in the east of the colony, to the boundary of the Great Fish River. In 1779, the first of the ferocious Xhosa wars broke out.
In the town communities the danger of a confrontation was also growing. Here the opposing parties were on one hand the citizens, aspiring to political autonomy, and on the other hand a weak, corrupt and almost bankrupt colonial administration.
The townspeople demanded their independence from the colonial administration. In Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet, the first Republics were proclaimed, although they only existed for a short time.
The power struggle between citizens and administration ended with the landing of British ships at the Cape and the annexing of the colony to the United Kingdom in 1795.
The Great Trek
The historical events in 19th century South Africa are marked by the "Groot Trek". Starting in 1835, more than 10,000 Boers, the Voortrekkers, left the Cape Colony with their families and went north and north-east.
The reasons for this mass exodus were their economic problems, the threatening danger of conflict with the Xhosa, who settled on the other side of the Fish River, and primarily, discontent with the English colonial authorities who didn't provide sufficient protection and had forbidden the slave trade and postulated the equality of whites and non-whites.
In the border area at the Fish River constant conflicts with the Xhosa occurred and the central government in Cape Town was neither willing nor able to give the Boers efficient military protection. Absolutely incomprehensible to the conservative Boer communities was the approach of the British colonial government towards the black inhabitants of the colony, who were held as slaves on most of the white farms. From 1833 on the slave trade was declared illegal and the "Emancipation Act" demanded that white masters set their slaves free, against payment of a small compensation by the state.
The Voortrekkers felt that the British policy destroyed their traditional social order which was based on racial separation, and would undermine white predominance, which they saw as God's own will.
The Great Trek was organized in resistance to the politics of the Cape government. In 1835, the first groups set out. Under the leadership of Louis Trichardt and Hans van Rensburg, they opened up the north of today's Mpumalanga. Other groups, under the command of Andries Pretorius, Gert Maritz and Piet Retief followed. In the area around ThabaNchu in what would become the Orange Free State, a huge Boer camp of 5,000 Voortrekkers eventually gathered.
They headed for Natal to gain land for settling and grazing. To that end they had to negotiate with Dingane, the king of the Zulus. The negotiations ended with the agreement that large areas in central and south Natal would be ceased to the Boers. However, when the delegates under Piet Retief prepared to leave, they were lured by the Zulus into an ambush and killed. Then the Zulu warriors fell upon the Voortrekkers who had made camp at the foot of the Drakensberg to wait for the return of their leaders.
The Zulus killed 500 of them and stole almost all their cattle. Read the report of an eyewitness.
The Voortrekkers, now worn out through the death of their second leader Gert Maritz, and through internal quarrels, were at the end of their power. Only their newly elected leader Andries Pretorius was successful in consolidating the group and preparing it for a retaliatory strike against the Zulu king. On December 16, 1838 the Zulus were completely defeated in the famous "Battle of Blood River". This enabled the founding of the first short-lived Boer Republic in Natal, with Pietermaritzburg as its capital.
By 1842, British troops occupied Port Natal, today's Durban, and annexed the hinterland as a Crown Colony.
The Voortrekkers retreated behind the Drakensberg
The Xhosa People
At the time of white settlement of the Cape, Xhosa groups were living far inland, into the area between Bushman's River and the Kei River. Since around 1770, they had been confronted with the Trek Boers who approached from the west. Both the Boers and the Xhosa were stock-farmers. The competition for grazing land led first to quarrels between the two groups, and eventually it came to a number of wars.
The politics of the colonial government attempted to enforce the separation of white and black settlement areas with the Fish River as the border.
But the more the colony developed into a modern state with a strong military organization, the more the whites tended towards a policy of land annexing and the subjugation of the black population. In the middle of the 19th century, all the land formerly inhabited by Xhosa was in the hands of white settlers.
With the founding of the South African Union in 1910, the British colony and the independent Boer Republics were united.
A modern "democratic" state was formed. in which only the white population could execute the right to vote.
The black people were subjected to a policy of concealed expatriation.
Through the Native-Land Law of 1913, first 7.5 per cent, and later 13 per cent of the land in South Africa was declared reservations for blacks. No white person was allowed to purchase land there and, vice versa, no black was allowed to buy land in the remaining 87 per cent of the territory of the Union. So the foundation of the disastrous policy of Apartheid was laid. In the sixties, the black settlement areas were declared autonomous Homelands.
For the Xhosa people these were the Homelands of Ciskei and Transkei. Only after the first really free elections in South Africa in 1994 was the Homeland policy abolished, after which the areas were integrated into the new provinces.
The Zulu Kingdom
Towards the end of the 18th century, all over southern Africa small tribal groups were amalgamating into larger communities.
This was by no means a peaceful process, but the result of protracted wars. The rise of the Zulu Kingdom falls into this period. Through incredible atrocities and cruelties the infamous Zulu warrior Shaka gained control over a number of Zulu clans. He expanded his territory systematically. Shaka's warriors raided Zulu villages and burnt them down. Women and children were gored to death; young men were called up and chiefs tortured and forced into allegiance.
Shaka was the illegitimate son of the Zulu chief Senzangakhona and the young girl Nandi, a member of the Langeni clan.
As a young man, Shaka joined the army of Dingiswayo and soon became its highest commander. With the support of Dingiswayo he gained supremacy over the Zulu clan, enforcing his claimagainst his opponents with the most ferocious brutality. Under Shaka the Zulu territory expanded phenomenally. All the clans had to subject themselves to the one leader. At the beginning of the 19th century, Shaka had created the most powerful kingdom in the whole of southern Africa
Towards the end of his reign, Shaka used his power even more destructively.
He chased his army from one battle to the next, and the cruelties against his enemies became more outrageous. Eventually Shaka was assassinated by his half-brother Dingane in 1828.
For southern Africa an irreversible process of restructuring came to an end with Shaka's death. Thousands of people had become refugees, fights between settlers and refugees broke out everywhere, and all these disturbances led to regroupings. At the end of this period, the small and widespread chief-led clans had disappeared and were replaced by bigger communities which had come together merely for reasons of safety and self-defence
The Battle
of Blood River
After the Voortrekkers had failed to negotiate with the Zulus the secession of land for settling and grazing, and had endured a number of catastrophic assaults, they assembled at the Ncome River for a decisive battle. On December 16, 1838, 464 Boers under the command of Andries Pretorius defeated more than 10,000 Zulu warriors.
The deeply religious Boers did not ascribe the military victory to their technically superior armaments, but interpreted it primarily as a sign of God. Before the battle, they had prayed and made a vow that if God would grant them victory over the Zulus, they would commemorate the event annually. With that battle behind them, they believed even more strongly that white predominance over blacks is God's own will.
The monument at the Blood River, a fort of cast-bronze wagons, brings to life the terrible events of 1838, which meant the beginning of the end of the Zulu Kingdom. This monument stood alone for many years as a reminder exclusively of the heroism of the white settlers, who suffered no fatalities at Blood River on that day.
History of the
Colony of Natal
The Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama reached the bay of today’s Durban on Christmas Day 1497. He named it "Rio de Natal", Christmas River. From that time on, the bay was a frequent port-of-call for sailors and merchants, but not until 1823 did a real settlement start to develop. In 1835, Port Natal was renamed Durban after the then Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Benjamin Durban. Life in the small harbour town was very precarious. The Zulus regarded Natal as their own territory and merely tolerated the white settlers, because the port was useful to them as a trading post.
When the Voortrekkers came to Natal in 1936, and fierce battles with the Zulus were on the daily agenda, Durban was also frequently threatened by attacks. After the defeat of the Zulus in the Battle of Blood River, there was peace for a while, but soon the British and the Voortrekkers started to fight for supremacy over Natal.
Ultimately, the bitter conflicts were decided in favour of the British. In 1844, Natal became a Crown Colony and the Voortrekkers retreated.
In 1879, the British laid claims on the whole of Zululand and gave Zulu King Cetshwayo a practically unacceptable ultimatum. In the resulting Anglo-Zulu War, the British initially suffered a high number of casualties. The battle at the Isandlwana Mountain on 22 January, 1879 was particularly disastrous.
About 20,000 Zulu soldiers overran the British army camp. Despite their superior armament, the British could not cope with the power of the attack. Many just covered their faces with their hands waiting to be stabbed through, others crept into their tents or tried to run away. Within a few hours, almost 2,000 soldiers were savagely killed. At first this victory for the Zulu King shocked and petrified the British. However, England decided to send more troops and the Anglo-Zulu War continued with heavy loss of lives, until it ended in victory for the British in 1887.
KwaZulu was annexed by Natal. The northern border is the Tugela River.
The Anglo-Boer War in South Africa
After the Voortrekkers were defeated by the British in Natal in 1842, the Great Trek moved on further north-east and eventually the trekkers settled north and south of the Vaal river. First, they formed the independent Transvaal to the north, which would later become the South African Republic.
In the meantime, the Cape Colony had spread further and all the land between the Vaal and Orange rivers was declared British territory in 1848. The English, however, had not taken into account the strong resistance of the Boers who had already settled there. Because the area was economically of little interest to them, they soon gave it up again. On the 23rd of February 1854, the contract of Bloemfontein was signed, which led to the foundation of the Orange Free State.The "Oranje Vrystaat" developed into a politically and economically successful republic. But this positive process was overshadowed by various negative events in the second Boer state, the South African Republic in Transvaal (today Mpumalanga). By now British sentiment was in favoured of amalgamating their own colonies and the Boer republics into one union, with the primary purpose of gaining possession of the Transvaal gold mines.
The Premier of the Cape Colony, Sir Cecil Rhodes, first tried to achieve this union through a putsch that failed due to wariness on the part of Paul Kruger, President of the Boer Republic. Soon the new Governor of the Cape, Lord Alfred Milner, succeeded with the use of armed force. The Orange Free State, which had formed an alliance with the South African Republic, became involved in the conflict. On February 11, 1899 a war broke out between these two Boer Republics and the two British colonies of Cape and Natal
The Apartheid Era
The policy of consistent racial separation was introduced in 1910 through a group of laws that further curtailed the rights of the black majority. The "Mines and Works Act" of 1911, for example, limited black workers exclusively to menial work and so guaranteed the availability of cheap labour and secured the better positions for white workers. The "Native Land Act" of 1913 set aside 7.3 per cent of South African territory as reservations for black people and barred them from buying land outside these areas.
Deprived of the right to vote or to strike, the black population had no means of political influence, and so the ANC, African National Congress, and other resistance and liberation movements formed. They were all initially badly organized and minimally effective.
The white governments pursued their politics virtually without obstruction. After the Second World War, the conflicts intensified and black workers went on a number of wild strikes. The whites became nervous and helped the right-wing National Party to an overwhelming election victory in the elections of 1948.
The NP was led by D.F. Malan, who stood for drastic measures against the "black menace," coined the concept of "apartheid" and consistently enforced this devious policy. From then on, it was not "only" about the separation of the races in the economic sector, but increasingly the private domain of all non-white people was regulated and controlled as well. Marriage or any love realationship between members of different racial groups were forbidden, and in all public institutions and offices, in public transport and on public toilets, racial segregation was introduced.
More detrimental because of long-term consequences was the education system, the so-called Bantu education, which tried to keep the black children at a very low standard. Subjects were even dish washing and the weeding of flower beds
In 1954 J. G. Strijdom succeeded D. F. Malan in office. He drove apartheid legislation even further. His successor in 1958 was H. F. Verwoerd, a brilliant intellectual, who refined and theoretically substantiated the apartheid ideology. Limited self-administration was instituted in the black reservations and they were declared semi-autonomous homelands: the Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and KwaZulu. By this measure the South African government rid itself of responsibility for the economic and social problems in the reservations. The white government could call its elections free and general, because the majority of the blacks were no longer citizens of South Africa.
In the meantime, black resistance under the leadership of the ANC had consolidated. Mass protests resulted in the government banning all opposition groups and organizations. This interdict was to no avail. The resistance organizations became militant and kept on working underground.
After the Soweto uprising of 1976, when thousands of pupils, demonstrating against Afrikaans as a compulsory school subject, were brutally shot, the unrest spread over the whole country. The ANC struggle became militant and South Africa developed fully into a police state.
This situation lasted a few years, until in 1989 the last president of the old South African government, F. W. de Klerk, openly admitted the failure of apartheid policies. An important reason for the collapse of the old regime was- after many years of economic and trade embargo - the desolate state of the economy. Eventually negotiations opened the door to the first general elections in South Africa.
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