Founding of the Cape Colony (1652): Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape

The founding of the Cape Colony began on 6 April 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck arrived in Table Bay with three ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). His orders were simple: build a fort and grow fresh food for passing ships. Within a few decades, however, the small station had become a settler colony worked by enslaved people and expanding onto the land of the Khoikhoi, setting patterns that shaped the later history of South Africa.

Background: a halfway house to Asia

Ships of the Dutch East India Company took many months to sail between the Netherlands and Batavia on Java. On the way many sailors fell ill or died of scurvy, a disease caused by lack of vitamin C. European ships had called at Table Bay since the late 16th century to collect water and trade for cattle with the local Khoikhoi, but there was no permanent base.

The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to round the Cape, with Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and Vasco da Gama in 1497, but they never settled there. Their early contacts with the Khoikhoi were sometimes violent: in 1510 the former viceroy of India, Francisco de Almeida, and dozens of his men were killed in a clash with Khoikhoi near Table Bay. Afterwards Portuguese ships tended to avoid the bay, while English and Dutch crews used it as an informal stopping place, leaving letters under marked “post office stones” for ships that followed.

In 1647 the VOC ship Haarlem was wrecked in Table Bay. Its crew camped ashore for about a year, grew vegetables and traded with the Khoikhoi before being picked up. Two of its officers, Leendert Janszen and Matthys Proot, then wrote a report for the company directors recommending a fort and garden at the Cape. The directors, the Heeren XVII (Seventeen Gentlemen), agreed and chose Jan van Riebeeck to lead the expedition.

The people of the Cape

The Cape was not empty. Khoikhoi pastoralists, who herded cattle and fat-tailed sheep, moved seasonally across the south-western Cape in groups such as the Goringhaiqua, Gorachouqua and the larger Cochoqua further north. San hunter-gatherers lived in the mountains and interior. Europeans of the time called the Khoikhoi “Hottentots”, a name now considered offensive.

A small group of Khoikhoi without cattle, the Goringhaicona or “Strandlopers”, lived by the shore near Table Bay. Their leader, Autshumao (known to the Dutch as Harry), had already travelled to Java on an English ship and spoke some English, so he became an early interpreter and go-between.

The landing of 1652

Van Riebeeck’s three ships, the Drommedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop, left the Netherlands in December 1651 and reached Table Bay on 6 April 1652. They carried about 90 people, almost all VOC employees, together with van Riebeeck’s wife, Maria de la Quellerie, and a few other women. Two more ships followed soon after.

The newcomers built a square earth-and-timber stronghold, the Fort de Goede Hoop, and laid out the Company’s Garden below Table Mountain, part of which survives as a park in central Cape Town. The first winter was hard: shelters leaked, food ran short and many men fell ill. Trading for Khoikhoi cattle was essential but often difficult, because the herders did not want to give up large numbers of animals.

Van Riebeeck’s instructions told him to treat the Khoikhoi fairly and to avoid conflict that could damage the trade in livestock. In practice he was frustrated by how few animals he could buy, and his journal shows that he considered seizing Khoikhoi cattle by force, an idea the company directors rejected. Communication depended on a handful of interpreters, first Autshumao and later Krotoa and Doman, each of whom also pursued the interests of their own people.

The station’s main task was to supply ships, and it gradually succeeded. Within a few years the Company’s Garden produced vegetables and fruit for passing fleets, and a hospital cared for sick sailors landed from the ships. By the late 1650s a steady stream of VOC ships called at Table Bay on their way to and from Asia.

From station to colony

The VOC had intended a cheap outpost staffed by company servants. But farming by company employees was inefficient, so in 1657 van Riebeeck released nine men from service as “free burghers” and granted them land along the Liesbeek River. They were expected to sell their grain and meat to the company at fixed prices. This decision turned the station into a colony of settlers.

Labour was the next problem. The company refused to let the burghers enslave the Khoikhoi, but it allowed the import of slaves. A few arrived in the first years, and in 1658 two ships brought the first large groups: captives taken from a Portuguese slave ship off Angola, and people bought on the coast of West Africa. Many of them were distributed among the burghers and company officials.

The farms on the Liesbeek cut Khoikhoi herders off from pasture and water they had used for generations. In 1659 the Peninsula Khoikhoi, led by Doman, a former interpreter, attacked the settlers and drove off their livestock, beginning the First Khoikhoi-Dutch War. When peace was made in 1660 the Dutch kept the land, and van Riebeeck planted a hedge of wild almond as a boundary that the Khoikhoi were not to cross.

Key people

• Jan van Riebeeck (1619–1677): first commander of the Cape, 1652–1662.
• Maria de la Quellerie: his wife, who ran the commander’s household.
• Autshumao: Goringhaicona leader and interpreter.
• Krotoa (Eva, c. 1643–1674): a Khoikhoi girl raised in van Riebeeck’s household who became a key interpreter, later married the Danish surgeon Pieter van Meerhof and, after his death, was banished to Robben Island; she is now remembered as a symbol of the colony’s early encounters.
• Doman: Khoikhoi interpreter who led resistance in 1659.
• Simon van der Stel (1639–1712): commander and later governor from 1679, who expanded settlement inland.

Growth after van Riebeeck

Van Riebeeck left for Malacca in 1662. His successors replaced the old fort with the stone Castle of Good Hope, built between 1666 and 1679. Under Simon van der Stel the settlement spread into the interior, with the founding of Stellenbosch in 1679. In 1688 about 200 French Huguenot refugees arrived and settled in the valleys of Drakenstein and Franschhoek, where they helped develop wine farming.

The Khoikhoi suffered greatly. Their herds were reduced by trade, war and raiding, their grazing lands were taken, and a smallpox epidemic in 1713 killed a large part of the population near Cape Town. Many survivors became labourers on settler farms. Further inland, cattle farmers called trekboers pushed the frontier hundreds of kilometres east during the 18th century, leading to wars with the San and, from 1779, with the Xhosa.

Slavery became central to the colony’s economy. Enslaved people came mainly from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Sri Lanka and the Indonesian archipelago. For much of the 18th century the enslaved population was roughly as large as, or larger than, the free settler population. Their languages, skills and religion, including Islam brought by exiles and slaves from the East Indies, left a lasting mark on Cape culture and on the development of Afrikaans.

The company itself was the largest slave owner at the Cape. It housed hundreds of its own slaves in the Slave Lodge in Cape Town, which still stands near the Company’s Garden and is now a museum. Enslaved people built the castle, worked the harbour, gardens and farms, and served in households. Laws restricted their movement and punished resistance harshly, and freedom through manumission was possible but rare.

By the numbers

Consequences and legacy

The Cape remained a VOC possession until 1795, when British forces occupied it during the French Revolutionary Wars. It was handed back to the Dutch Batavian Republic in 1803, retaken by Britain in 1806 and formally ceded in 1814. Under British rule, tensions over slavery, land and government led many Dutch-speaking farmers to leave on the Great Trek in the 1830s.

For much of the 20th century, white South African governments celebrated 6 April as the birth of the nation. Van Riebeeck’s portrait appeared on banknotes, and the 300th anniversary was marked by a large festival in Cape Town in 1952. Since the end of apartheid, historians and the public have placed more emphasis on what 1652 meant for the Khoikhoi, the San and the enslaved, and the date is now remembered as the start of colonial dispossession as well as of Cape Town.

Timeline

• 1647: The VOC ship Haarlem is wrecked in Table Bay; its crew lives ashore for a year.
• 1651, December: Van Riebeeck’s ships sail from the Netherlands.
• 1652, 6 April: The fleet arrives in Table Bay; work on the fort begins.
• 1657: The first free burghers receive land on the Liesbeek River.
• 1658: The first large groups of enslaved people arrive.
• 1659–1660: The First Khoikhoi-Dutch War.
• 1662: Van Riebeeck leaves the Cape.
• 1666–1679: The Castle of Good Hope is built.
• 1688: French Huguenot refugees arrive.
• 1795: British forces occupy the Cape.

Why it matters

The station founded in 1652 was meant only to grow vegetables, but it became the first lasting European settlement in southern Africa. The choices made in its first years, to create settler farms, to depend on slave labour and to take Khoikhoi land, set the course for centuries of colonial rule and racial division in South Africa.