Nguni people

A series of powerful hereditary chiefs rules over the society known as the Rolong, whose
capital is Taung, by the late sixteenth century.

The capital and several other towns, centers of cultivation and livestock raising as well as major trading communities, have populations of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand.

By contrast, the Bantu-speakers termed Nguni, who settle on the coastal plains between the Highveld and the Indian Ocean, live in much smaller communities and have less hierarchical political structures.

Moving their cattle often in search of fresh pastureland, they live in small communities scattered across
the countryside.

In many cases, a community identifies itself on the basis of descent from some ancestral founder, as do the Zulu and the Xhosa.

Such communities can sometimes grow to a few thousand people, as do the Xhosa, the Mpondo, the
Mthethwa, and others, but they are usually far smaller.

English and Dutch merchants challenge the Portuguese monopoly in West Africa and Asia at the end of the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century, and see the Cape peninsula as a source of fresh water, meat, and timber for masts, all of which they can obtain through trade with the local Khoikhoi.

The English government refuses its mariners' requests that it annex land here and establish a base, but in 1652 the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie—VOC) establishes a supply station in Table Bay on the Cape peninsula, instructing its station commander, Jan van Riebeeck, and his eighty company employees to build a fort and to obtain supplies of foodstuffs for the Dutch fleets.

All of what is now South Africa had been settled by 1600 by Khoisan peoples in the west and the southwest, by Sotho-Tswana in the Highveld, and by Nguni along the coastal plains.

Portuguese travelers and sailors shipwrecked along the coast in the seventeenth century report seeing great concentrations of people living in apparent prosperity.

The nomadic pastoral Khoikhoi (Hottentot) and nomadic hunter-gatherer San (Bushmen) peoples inhabit the region of the western Cape; the Khoikhoi number between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand.

The Xhosa populate the Eastern Cape; the Zulu hold Natal and other Nguni speakers reside farther inland.

The Dutch East India Company’s Jan Van Riebeeck lands with sixty of his countrymen at Table Bay in 1652 and establishes Cape Town as a resupplying station for the worldwide Dutch trading empire.

The South African wine industry has its origins in this era.

Nine European men are released from the VOC's service in 1657 , given the status of "free burghers," and granted blocks of land.

They were exempted from taxation for twelve years, but the VOC holds a mortgage on their lands.

They are free to trade with Khoikhoi for sheep and cattle, but they are prohibited from paying higher prices for the stock than does the VOC, and they are told not to enslave the local pastoralists.

They are encouraged to grow crops, especially grains, for sale to the VOC, but they are not allowed to produce anything already grown in the company's own gardens.

By such measures, the VOC hopes not only to increase local production and thereby to pay the costs of the settlement, but also to prevent any private producers from undercutting the VOC's control over prices.

Conflict between Dutch farmers and Khoikhoi breaks out once it becomes clear to the latter that the Dutch are here to stay and that they intend to encroach on the lands of the pastoralists.

Doman, a Khoikhoi who had worked as a translator for the Dutch and had even traveled to Java, leads an armed attempt to expel the Dutch from the Cape peninsula in 1659.

The attempt is a failure, although warfare will drag on until an inconclusive peace is established a year later.

Pressure on the Khoikhoi grows during the following decade as more of the Dutch become free burghers, expand their landholdings, and seek pastureland for their growing herds.

War breaks out again in 1673 and continues until 1677, when Khoikhoi resistance is destroyed by a combination of superior European weapons and Dutch manipulation of divisions among the local people.

Hereafter, Khoikhoi society in the western Cape disintegrates.

Some people find jobs as shepherds on European farms; others reject foreign rule and
move away from the Cape.

The Xhosa and white settlers first encounter one another around Somerset East in the early eighteenth century.