South Africa: Republic of South Africa

Abstract

The Dutch first established a trading post at the Cape in 1652. The hinterland was then inhabited by the Khoisan peoples and, further east and north, by Bantu-speaking peoples. There was some white settlement over the next century. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain took possession of the Cape and later many Boer (Dutch) settlers migrated north-east in the Great Trek. In the mid- 19th century Britain ruled the Cape Colony and Natal along the coast of southern Africa, while in the interior the Afrikaners or Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers, established their own independent republics in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Some Bantu African peoples remained unconquered, notably the Xhosas east of the Cape Colony and, north of Natal, the Zulus, whose leader Shaka (died 1828) had formed a powerful kingdom in a great political and demographic upheaval called the Mfecane. The Sothos, who formed another new state under Moshoeshoe, resisted the Boers’ encroachment on their land, until in 1868 Britain granted Moshoeshoe’s request for a protectorate over Basutoland. Meanwhile, British settlers emigrated to Cape Colony and Natal in the 19th century, and from the 1860s many Indians were brought to Natal as indentured labourers on the sugar plantations. The population of the Cape Colony included many Afrikaners as well as the ‘Coloured’ community, descendants of Dutch settlers and indigenous Khoisan women and of Malay slaves. Most coloureds spoke Afrikaans, the offshoot of Dutch spoken by the Boers.