Western Cape historical timeline

The Western Cape is where European settlement in South Africa began, and its history is inseparable from dispossession and slavery.

Before 1652

San hunter-gatherers occupied the region for tens of thousands of years, leaving rock art in the Cederberg among the oldest and finest anywhere, and Khoi herders moved through it with cattle and sheep from about two thousand years ago.

The Dutch station

Jan van Riebeeck landed in 1652 to establish a refreshment post for ships of the Dutch East India Company on the route to Asia. It was never meant to be a colony and became one within a generation, expanding at the expense of Khoi grazing land. From 1658 the Company imported enslaved people from Indonesia, India, Madagascar and Mozambique; slavery shaped the society for nearly two centuries until abolition in 1834.

French and British

Huguenot refugees arrived from 1688 and settled Franschhoek, bringing viticultural skill. Britain took the Cape in 1795 and again permanently in 1806, and the resulting friction with Dutch-descended farmers contributed to the Great Trek inland in the 1830s.

Apartheid

From 1948 the Group Areas Act reshaped the province by force. District Six, a mixed inner-city neighbourhood, was declared white in 1966 and some 60,000 people were removed to the Cape Flats; the land largely stood empty afterwards. Robben Island held political prisoners including Nelson Mandela for eighteen of his twenty-seven years.

The Cape Flats

The sandy plain east of the mountain was where the removed populations were resettled from the 1950s onward, in townships laid out by racial classification and deliberately placed far from work and transport. The arrangement outlasted apartheid because the housing did, and the resulting distances, gang violence and unemployment are the province’s central social problem. Any drive from the airport into the city passes through it.

Since 1994

Democratic government, a truth commission, and an unfinished process of land restitution.