Mid-17th Century–1834: (Cape Colony — The Dutch East India Company’s Provisioning Station Becomes a Settler Society, Boer Identity Forged on the Frontier, Kh…

Mid-17th Century–1834: (Cape Colony — The Dutch East India Company’s Provisioning Station Becomes a Settler Society, Boer Identity Forged on the Frontier, Khoisan Dispossession Through Right of Conquest, Racial Hierarchy Hardened by the Eighteenth Century, Slavery Defined Increasingly by Race, British Seizure in 1795/1806, and the Abolition of Slavery in 1834 as the Final Blow to Boer Sensibilities): White settlement in southern Africa dated to the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch East India Company established a small provisioning station in Table Bay. Over the ensuing century and a half, the Boers — or Afrikaners — developed a distinctive identity, language, and culture. The frontier Boers were tough, independent-minded, Calvinist, and later developed a trenchant anti-Britishness, regarding the Cape as theirs by right of conquest underpinned by a distinctive racial and religious ideology. Initially trading with the Khoisan, they soon came into conflict over grazing land, and by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries ever greater numbers of trekboers moved into the interior. The Khoisan, confronted with Boer military superiority and introduced diseases — especially smallpox — responded either by becoming hunter-raiders, withdrawing northward, or accepting servile status within European society. Racial attitudes hardened during the eighteenth century — slave status was increasingly influenced by color, with the worst unskilled positions filled by Africans or those imported from Indonesia. Slavery underpinned Cape Colony society and economy, and was increasingly defined by race. Cape Colony remained under Dutch control until 1795, when Britain seized it during the French revolutionary wars, permanently holding it from 1806. Tensions mounted as the British replaced Boer officials, introduced English into education and law, granted basic rights to African workers, and imposed private land ownership replacing the loan-farm system. Missionaries championed Khoisan causes and influenced government. The biggest blow came in 1834 when slavery was abolished — particularly disastrous for poor white farmers who could not afford to pay competitive wages.