SIMON VAN DER STEL was appointed governor of the Cape Colony in 1679 by the Dutch East India Company (DEIC).
He ruled for 20 years and was succeeded by his son William Adrian in 1699.
By governor Adrian’s time, there were close to 600 white settlers comprising DEIC servants, farmers (Boers) and also whites from protestant European nations like France and Germany.
There were disputes between whites since the time of the Van der Stels.
The Boers were being taxed by the DEIC and the company servants also maintained a monopoly in tobacco and liquor trade.
Governor Adrian was successfully ousted in 1707 after a petition, filed against him by a prominent Boer meat-trader called Henning Huising, was sent to the DEIC headquarters in the Netherlands.
The DEIC also made reforms that would eventually weaken it.
They opened up trade, lowered taxes to almost nothing and stopped all monopolies. The farmers called Boers became exceedingly prominent as they took over almost all the trade in tobacco and liquor that had been given up by the DEIC.
This would also prove fatal for the indigenous blacks of the inland, because the greed of the Boers would lead them to seek out more fertile land and cattle at the black people’s expense.
There was now no authority to stop the blacks from being plundered because the DEIC had become weak and lost prestige.
Not one Boer brought with him a single cow into Africa, yet the livestock of the whites flourished through plundering.
The earlier mentioned Huising, who led to this laissez-faire situation at the Cape, was infamous for killing Hottentots and taking their livestock.
He had based his campaign against the Van der Stel family on the funds he acquired from selling meat and this gives us an idea of just how much the blacks of South Africa were plundered of their livestock.
The Hottentots plundered of their wealth were reduced to servitude and their kinsmen, the Bushmen, were killed and enslaved.
Boers took up the whole Cape and all the fertile land around it.
Expeditions heading inland to seek grazing and farming lands began and their territory expanded.
The Boers found the mixed-race Griqua community living inland and began favouring them over blacks because they had white blood.
They also met the Nguni-Xhosa people who lived close to the Griqua and made their first separation acts that would eventually result in outright apartheid.
In 1778, Govenor Van Plettenberg separated the Nguni people from the Griqua to avoid miscegenation and cultural dilution.
The divisions led to blacks suffering from displacement, limited access to water sources, destruction of free passage and so forth.
This led to wars beginning 1779 between the Nguni-Xhosa and whites.
Countless massacres of the Nguni occurred, leaving indigenous blacks traumatised.
The blacks fought with their hands, spears, shields, bows and arrows, but the whites would kill them from a distance with guns and bombs.
It is important to note the Nguni massacres were initiated by governor Van Plettenberg’s efforts to separate the blacks from the mixed-race Griqua.
The Griqua were children of miscegenation between Hottentot women and the early Boer settlers.
Thus it makes little difference whether the DEIC governors were ruling or not, because led or not led, the white settlers kept on with their barbarism and hostility towards blacks.
The only notable attempts by white settlers to improve relations between blacks and whites did not pass magisterial level.
In 1786, one magistrate Maynier gave authority for blacks who lived west of the Fish River to keep their land and made efforts to fend off Boers.
The Boers hated him and eventually rebelled against the DEIC authorities.
In 1795 the Boers unilaterally proclaimed independence for the Republics of Graaft Reinet and Swellendam.
In 1794, the DEIC had declared bankruptcy and had completely lost control of the Cape colony.
Meanwhile in Europe, the Netherlands had been invaded by the French.
As a result, the Dutch government asked Britain to protect its colonies from the French.
The French dissolved the DEIC soon after this.
In 1795, yet another white group, the British, would enter Southern Africa by way of the Cape.
The British did not recognise the unilaterally independent Boer republics and suppressed them speedily.
The British stationed a London Missionary Society at Graaff-Reinet and it was aimed at spreading the Christian gospel abroad.
They set a Netherlander reverend called Johannes van der Kemp to run the society. Kemp converted the Hottentots to Western Christianity and scored many followers. However, he was hated by Boers because he reported to Britain on how they hated and abused blacks.
The British turned Kemp’s Hottentot followers into armed police officers.
This was met with great disdain by the Boers.
In 1803, waves of whites from the Netherlands would come in through the Cape after the British signed the Treaty of Amiens with France and the Netherlands became the Batavan Republic.
The whites who came in were not under the DEIC which had been dissolved and they joined Kemp and helped populate his forces which comprised many Hottentots.
More missionary establishments were set up and Boers were reminded they had no independence, but were to remain loyal to the British — Batavan leadership by paying them tax at the Cape.
Napoleon broke the Treaty of Amiens in 1804 and from then on, the Netherlands would never again try to regain control of the Cape.
In 1806, the British came to the Cape again.
This time they had the intention of settling permanently because they had become accustomed to using the Cape as a stop-over when heading to India and other parts of Asia.
There they found the land and its resources to be good and decided to lay claim to it.
The Boers were also seeking more land and displacing blacks until they met some Nguni-Xhosa people from tribes called Ndlambi and Gunukwebe.
These tried to resist the Boers citing that once displaced, they were unlikely to be welcomed elsewhere as the rest of the land was inhabited by other blacks.
The British drove out the Ndlambi and Gunukwebe people by force and built fort lines to prevent the blacks from returning to that area.
It was essentially a buffer zone which included places like Grahamstown and such acts of division and separation were early signs of the apartheid system that the whites eventually imposed in the land.
The British also made farm reforms arguing that the Boers had too much land; amounting to about 6 000 acres a farmer.
At that time, the average European farmer owned 20 acres of land under a government lease.
The farms of the Boers had no government lease and were their permanent property.
The British decided to bring farmers from England to demonstrate the maximisation of land use with minimal land.
Unemployment was a problem in England and the British wanted to increase the white population in the Cape colony.
As they did in Australia, the British imported whites into the colony in order to strengthen their position against the indigenous blacks.
In 1820, 5 000 British settlers were brought in through the Cape and given farms that were not as sparse as those of the Boers.
The experiment failed because the dry weather of South Africa did not go along well with the crops and farming systems they were used to.
The British settlers also changed their professions to trading while others desired to acquire as much land as that of the Boers.