Jan van Riebeeck, Commander of the Cape…

1648 CE to 1659 CE

Jan van Riebeeck, Commander of the Cape from 1652 to 1662 is charged with building a fort, with improving the natural anchorage at Table Bay, planting cereals, fruit and vegetables and obtaining livestock from the indigenous Khoi people.

He had concluded within two months of the establishment of the Cape settlement that slave labor will be needed for the hardest and dirtiest work.

Some thought is given to enslaving Khoikhoi men, but the idea is rejected on the grounds that such a policy would be both costly and dangerous.

With a European population that does not exceed two hundred during the settlement's first five years, war against neighbors numbering more than twenty thousand would have been foolhardy.

Moreover, the Dutch fear that Khoikhoi people, if enslaved, could always escape into the local community, whereas foreigners would find it much more difficult to elude their "masters."

The VOC's directors intend that the settlement at Table Bay should amount to no more than a small supply station able largely to pay for itself.

European settlement is to be limited to VOC employees only, and their numbers are to be kept as small as possible.

Company ships can stop to take on water, to get supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables grown by VOC employees, and to trade for fresh meat and milk from the local Khoikhoi.

The Khoikhoi are also expected to supply the labor needs of the settlement—building wharves and warehouses, putting up offices, and laying out roads.

Within its first half decade, however, the Cape Colony is growing in ways unforeseen at its establishment.

Most Khoikhoi choose not to labor for the Dutch because of low wages and harsh conditions; and, although ready initially to trade with the Dutch, they become increasingly unwilling to sell their farm products at the prices offered by the VOC.

As a result, three processes are set in motion in the 1650s that will produce a rapidly expanding, racially stratified society.

First, the VOC decides to import slaves to meet local labor needs, and it will maintain this policy for more than one hundred years.

Second, the VOC decides to free some of its employees from their contracts and to allow them to establish farms of their own to supply the Dutch fleets, thereby giving rise to a local settler population.

Third, to supply the needs of the fleets as well as of the growing local population, the Dutch expand ever farther into the lands of the Khoikhoi, engaging in a series of wars that, together with the effects of imported diseases, decimate the indigenous population.