A History of Cape Town
*A note about the information on this page
The History Of Cape Town
It is hard to imagine a time when Cape Town didn’t exist at all. It is interesting however to note that prior to the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Dias mention of Cape Town in the year 1488, there was no written history at all! Any understanding of earlier inhabitants come from fossil and rock-art evidence.
The European Arrival
The Cape was initially and somewhat controversially “discovered” by the Portuguese when Bartholomew Dias arrived in 1488. Next came Vasco da Gama in 1497 on his search to locate a route that would lead from Europe to Asia. In 1652 Jan Van Riebeek landed in Cape Town together with various other employees of the Dutch East India Company who were being sent to the Cape to provide a supply of produce for passing ships on their way to Asia.
In 1666 Jan Van Riebeek and his men built the Castle of Good Hope. It was a wooden fort at that time. Jan Van Riebeek was replaced as governor by Simon van der Stel in the year 1679.
Did you know…Simon Van Der Stel was the founder of the Cape wine industry and Stellenbosch was named after him in his honour!
Next, the Huguenots, religious refugees from France arrived in the Cape in 1688. They were the first non-Dutch immigrants to land here.
The 1700’s
Did you know…The settlement of the Cape by the year 1754 had reached just over 5,510 Europeans and 6,729 slaves.
In 1780 a small group of French troops were sent to the Cape to protect it from the British during the war between France and Great Britain. By 1784 these troops had left and in 1795 the Netherlands was invaded by France, which created financial ruin!
After the Prince of Orange fled to England the British successfully invaded the Cape in the battle of Muizenberg and immediately announced the beginning of free trade!
The 1800 & 1900’s
By 1802, the Cape was returned to the Dutch. In 1814 Britain gained victory over France and the Cape was taken from the Dutch for big sums of money.
Did you know…The emancipation of the British Empire slaves took place in 1834 and this led to the Bo-Kaap area being established.
This was also the year in which the Cape Town legislative Council came into existence. The formation of the Cape Town municipality took place in 1840. Diamonds and Gold were discovered in the 1870s & 1880s in the former Transvaal region. This led to big changes in Cape Town as it became the primary port and this new mineral wealth laid the foundation for an industrialized society. The first signs of segregation in the city began at this point. The bubonic plague was blamed on the native Africans and the natives were moved outside of the city near the docks and at Ndabeni.
Did you know…Ndabeni was the start of what would later develop into the townships of the Cape Flats.
After many bitter constitutional battles the voting rights of the Coloured community in Cape Province were revoked and in 1948 the National Party stood for election based on its apartheid policy. In 1966, The District Six area was bulldozed and declared a white-only area. The Group areas act resulted in whole communities being uprooted and relocated to the Cape Flats. Source: Wikipedia – History of Cape Town
Apartheid
Under apartheid, the government continued to remove focal points of black resistance like the largely Xhosa squatter camp such as Crossroads. The last of these forced removals was in 1986 when an “estimated 70,000 people were expelled from their homes”. Source: Wikipedia – History of Cape Town
More recent
On the 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela made his first public speech, hours after being released from imprisonment from the balcony of the Cape Town City Hall, to mark the beginnings of a new South Africa.
Other interesting facts from Wikipedia
- “Greenmarket Square is a historical square in the centre of old Cape Town, South Africa.The square was built in 1696, when a ‘burgher’ watch house was erected here. In 1761, the watch house was demolished and the Old Town House built on the site. This building functioned as the city hall for a while. Over the years, the square has served as a slave market, a vegetable market, a parking lot and more recently, an informal flea market trading mainly African souvenirs, crafts and curios. During the apartheid era, Greenmarket Square was often the focus of political protests, due in part to its proximity to parliament, as well as the ethnicity of its traders and shoppers.” Source: Wikipedia
- The Purple Rain Protest, Purple Rain Revolt or Purple Rain Riot was an anti-apartheid protest held in Cape Town on September 2, 1989, four days before South Africa’s racially segregated parliament held its elections. A police water cannon with purple dye was turned on thousands of Mass Democratic Movement supporters who poured into the city in an attempt to march on South Africa’s Parliament. The police were using a new water cannon with purple dye whose purpose was to stain protestors for later identification and arrest. After the riot, somebody sprayed graffiti that would make it into the history books. The Cape Times told it this way.
“Did you know…Graffiti artists at the weekend sprayed several Cape Town suburban railway stations with slogans reading: Release our leaders, Free our leaders, unban the ANC and Forward to purple people’s power, — a reference to the police use of purple dye in the water cannon directed against demonstrators….” Source: Wikipedia
*A note about the information on this page
ShowMe™ is grateful to the wonderful research done by Wikipedia. For more information please Go to the Cape Town Heritage Webpage