History

The Khoekhoen & San People

Academics don’t know whether the earliest-recorded inhabitants of South Africa – the San people – are direct descendants or if they returned to the area after aeons of travel, between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago. For centuries, perhaps even millennia, the San and the Khoekhoen, another early Southern African people, intermarried and coexisted. The distinction is by no means clear, hence the combined term Khoe-San.

Culturally and physically, the Khoe-San developed differently from the Negroid peoples of Africa, but it’s possible that they came into contact with pastoralist Bantu-speaking tribes as – in addition to hunting and gathering food – they too became pastoralists, raising cattle and sheep. There’s evidence that the Khoe-San lived on the Cape of Good Hope about 2000 years ago.

First European Visitors

The first Europeans to record a sighting of the Cape were the Portuguese, who passed by on their search for a sea route to India and spices. The land here offered the Portuguese little more than fresh water, since their attempts to trade with the Khoe-San often ended in violence. But by the end of the 16th century, English and Dutch traders were beginning to challenge the Portuguese, and the Cape became a regular stopover for ships. In 1647 the Dutch vessel the Nieuwe Haarlem was wrecked in Table Bay; its crew built a fort and stayed for a year before they were rescued. This crystallised the value of a permanent settlement in the minds of the directors of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie; VOC). They had no intention of colonising the country, but simply wanted to establish a secure base where ships could shelter and stock up on fresh food supplies.

The Dutch Arrive

The task of establishing the VOC station fell to Jan van Riebeeck (1619–77), Commander of the Cape from 1652 to 1662. The Dutch were not greeted with open arms by the Khoe-San and intermittent hostilities broke out. But the locals – who are thought to have numbered between 4000 and 8000 people – hardly stood a chance against the Europeans’ guns and diseases.

With the Khoe-San uncooperative, the Cape settlement was soon suffering a chronic labour shortage. From 1657 Van Riebeeck started releasing VOC employees, allowing them to farm land independently, thus beginning the colonisation of Southern Africa and giving birth to the Boers. The following year he began to import slaves from West Africa, Madagascar, India, Ceylon, Malaya and Indonesia. By the time the slave trade ended in 1807, some 60,000 slaves had been brought to the Cape, laying the foundation for its unique mix of cultures and races.

The Settlement Grows

The process of colonisation kicked off a series of wars between the Dutch and the Khoe-San further inland, who were no match for the well-armed Europeans. The Dutch also allowed some 200 Huguenots (French Calvinists fleeing religious persecution) to settle on the Cape in 1688. There was a shortage of women in the colony, so female slaves and Khoe-San women were exploited for both labour and sex. In time, the slaves intermixed with the Khoe-San, too. The children of these unions were the ancestors of some of today’s coloured population.

Under the VOC’s almost complete control, Kaapstad (the Dutch name for Cape Town) provided a comfortable European lifestyle for a growing number of artisans and entrepreneurs servicing ships and crews. By the middle of the 18th century there were around 3000 people living in the riotous port, known as the ‘Tavern of the Seas’ by every sailor travelling between Europe and the East.

The British Take Over

As the 18th century progressed, the global power of the Dutch was waning and under challenge by the British. Between 1795 and 1806 the Cape was passed like a parcel between the two colonial powers, with the French also briefly drawn into the power play. Even before the colony was formally ceded to the British Crown on 13 August 1814, the British had abolished the slave trade. The remaining Khoe-San were given the explicit protection of the law in 1828. These moves contributed to Afrikaners’ dissatisfaction and their mass migration inland from the Cape Colony, which came to be known as the Great Trek.

Despite outlawing slavery, the British introduced new laws that laid the basis for an exploitative labour system little different from it. Thousands of dispossessed blacks sought work in the colony, but it was made a crime to be in the colony without a pass – and without work. It was also a crime to leave a job.

Cape Economy Booms

Under a policy of free trade Cape Town’s economy flourished. In 1854 a representative parliament was formed in Cape Town, but much to the dismay of Dutch and English farmers to the north and east, the British government and Cape liberals insisted on a multiracial constituency (albeit with financial requirements that excluded the vast majority of blacks and coloureds).

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 dramatically decreased the amount of shipping that sailed via the Cape, but the discovery of diamonds and gold in the centre of South Africa in the 1870s and '80s helped Cape Town maintain its position as the country’s premier port. Immigrants flooded into the city and the population trebled, from 33,000 in 1875 to over 100,000 people at the turn of the century.

Boer War

After the Great Trek, the Boers established several independent republics, the largest being the Orange Free State (today’s Free State province) and the Transvaal (today’s Northern Province, Gauteng and Mpumalanga). When the world’s richest gold reef was found in the Transvaal (a village called Johannesburg sprang up beside it), the British were miffed that the Boers should control such wealth – which precipitated war in 1899. The Boers were outnumbered, but their tenacity and local knowledge meant the war dragged on until 1902, when the British triumphed. Cape Town was not directly involved in any of the fighting, but did play a key role in landing and supplying the half-million imperial and colonial troops who fought for Britain.

Act of Union

After the war, the British made some efforts towards reconciliation, and instituted moves towards the union of the separate South African provinces. In 1910 the Act of Union was signed, bringing the republics of Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free State together as the Union of South Africa. Under the provisions of the act, the Union was still a British territory, with home-rule for Afrikaners. In the Cape, blacks and coloureds retained a limited franchise (although only whites could become members of the national parliament, and eligible blacks and coloureds constituted only around 7%), but did not have the vote in other provinces.

The first government of the new Union was headed by General Louis Botha, with General Jan Smuts as his deputy: statues of both these figures are found in the City Bowl. Their South African National Party (later known as the South African Party or SAP) followed a generally pro-British, white-unity line.

Apartheid Rules

Afrikaners were economically and socially disadvantaged when compared with the English-speaking minority, which controlled most of the capital and industry in the new country. This, plus lingering bitterness over the war and Afrikaners’ distaste at having to compete with blacks and coloureds for low-paying jobs, led to strident Afrikaner nationalism and the formation of the National Party (NP) in 1914. The NP championed Afrikaner interests, advocating separate development for the two white groups and independence from Britain.

In 1948 the NP came to power on a platform of apartheid (literally, ‘the state of being apart’). Non-whites were denied the vote, mixed marriages were prohibited, interracial sex was made illegal and every person was classified by race. The Group Areas Act defined where people of each ‘race’ could live and the Separate Amenities Act created separate public facilities: separate beaches, separate buses, separate toilets, separate schools and separate park benches. Blacks were compelled to carry passes at all times and were prohibited from living in or even visiting towns without specific permission.

Fictional Homelands

A system of homelands was set up in 1951, whereby the proportion of land available for black ownership in South Africa increased very slightly to 13%. Blacks then made up about 75% of the population. The homelands idea was that each black group had a traditional area where it belonged – and must now stay. The area around Cape Town was declared a ‘coloured preference area’, which meant no black person could be employed unless it could be proved that there was no coloured person suitable for the job. The plan ignored the huge numbers of blacks who had never lived in their ‘homeland’. Millions of people who had lived in other areas for generations were forcibly removed into bleak, unproductive areas with no infrastructure.

The homelands were regarded as self-governing states, and it was planned that they would become independent countries. Four of the 10 homelands were nominally independent by the time apartheid was demolished (though they were not recognised as independent countries by the UN), and their leaders held power with the help of the South African military.

Meanwhile, white South Africa depended on cheap black labour to keep the economy booming, so many black ‘guest workers’ were admitted back to the country. But unless a black person had a job and a pass, they were liable to be jailed and sent back to their homeland. This caused massive disruption to black communities and families. Unsurprisingly, people without jobs gravitated to cities such as Cape Town to be near their spouses and parents. But no new black housing was built; as a result, illegal squatter camps mushroomed on the sandy plains to the east of Cape Town. In response, government bulldozers flattened the shanties, and their occupants were forced into the homelands. Within weeks, inevitably, the shanties would rise again.

Mandela Jailed

In 1960 the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC) organised marches against the hated Pass laws, which required blacks and coloureds to carry passbooks authorising them to be in a particular area. At Langa and Nyanga on the Cape Flats, police killed five protesters. The Sharpeville massacres in Gauteng were concurrent and resulted in the banning of the ANC and PAC. In response to the crisis, a warrant for the arrest of Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders was issued. In mid-1963 Mandela was captured; at trial he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.

The government tried for decades to eradicate squatter towns, such as Crossroads, which were focal points for black resistance to the apartheid regime. Violent removals and killings failed and the government, forced to accept the inevitable, began to upgrade conditions. Since then, vast townships have sprung up across the Cape Flats. No one knows exactly how many people call them home, but it's thought to be in excess of 1.5 million.

The Coloured Experience

Apartheid’s divide-and-rule tactics – favouring coloureds above blacks – stoked the animosity that still lingers between those Cape communities today. Even so, coloureds did suffer under apartheid, such as the residents of the poor inner-city area of District Six, which in 1966 was classified as a white area. Its 50,000 people, some of whose families had been there for five generations, were gradually evicted and removed to bleak and soulless Cape Flats suburbs like Athlone, Mitchell’s Plain and Atlantis. Friends, neighbours and relatives were separated. Bulldozers moved in and the multiracial heart was ripped out of the city, while in the townships, depressed and dispirited youths increasingly joined gangs and turned to crime.

The coloured Muslim community of the Bo-Kaap, on the northeastern edge of Signal Hill, was more fortunate. Home to Cape Town’s first mosque (the Auwal Mosque on Dorp St dates back to 1798), the district was once known as the Malay Quarter, because it was where many of the imported slaves from the start of the Cape Colony lived with their masters. In 1952 the entire Bo-Kaap region was declared to be a coloured area under the terms of the Group Areas Act. There were forced removals, but the residents of the community, which was more homogeneous than that of District Six, banded together in order to successfully fight for and retain ownership of their homes. Many were declared National Monuments in the 1960s, which saved them from the bulldozers.

Path to Democracy

In 1982 Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. (In 1986 senior politicians began secretly talking with them.) Concurrently, the state’s military crackdowns in the townships became even more pointed. In early 1990 President FW de Klerk began to repeal discriminatory laws, and the ANC, PAC and Communist Party were legalised. On 11 February the world watched in awe as a living legend emerged from Victor Verster Prison near Paarl. Later that day Nelson Mandela delivered his first public speech since being incarcerated 27 years earlier to a massive crowd overspilling from Cape Town’s Grand Parade.

From this time onwards virtually all the old apartheid regulations were repealed; in late 1991, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) began negotiating the formation of a multiracial transitional government, and a new constitution extending political rights to all groups. Two years later a compromise was reached and an election date set. In the frustration of waiting, political violence exploded across the country during this time, some of it sparked by the police and the army.

Despite this, the 1994 election was amazingly peaceful, with the ANC winning 62.7% of the vote. In Western Cape, the majority coloured population voted in the NP as the provincial government, seemingly happier to live with the devil they knew than with the ANC.

Truth & Reconciliation Commission

One of the first acts of the new ANC government was to set up the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to expose the crimes of the apartheid era. This institution carried out Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s dictum: ‘Without forgiveness there is no future, but without confession there can be no forgiveness.’ Many stories of horrific brutality and injustice were heard during the commission’s five-year life, offering some catharsis to individuals and communities shattered by their past.

The TRC operated by allowing victims to tell their stories and perpetrators to confess their guilt, with amnesty offered to those who came forward. Those who chose not to appear before the commission face criminal prosecution if their guilt can be proven. Although some soldiers, police and ‘ordinary’ citizens have confessed their crimes, it seems unlikely that those who gave the orders and dictated the policies will ever come forward (former president PW Botha was one famous no-show), and gathering evidence against them has proven difficult.

Rise, Fall & Rise Again of Pagad

The governmental vacuum that existed between Mandela’s release from jail and the election of a democratic government left Cape Town in a shaky social position. The early 1990s saw drugs and crime become such a problem that communities began to take matters into their own hands. People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) was formed in 1995 as an offshoot of the Islamic organisation Qibla. The group saw itself as defending the coloured community from the crooked cops and drug lords who allowed gangs to control the coloured townships.

At first the police tolerated Pagad, but their vigilante tactics turned sour in 1996 with the horrific (and televised) death of gangster Rashaad Staggie. A lynch mob burned then repeatedly shot the dying gangster. Other gang leaders were killed, but Capetonians really began to worry when bombs, some believed to have been planted by the more radical of Pagad’s members, began to go off around the city. The worst attack was in 1998, when an explosion in the Planet Hollywood restaurant at the Waterfront killed one woman and injured 27 other people. In September 2000 a magistrate presiding in a case involving Pagad members was murdered in a drive-by shooting.

Pagad leader Abdus Salaam Ebrahim was imprisoned in 2002 for seven years for public violence, but no one has ever been charged, let alone convicted, for the Cape Town bombings. For a time, Pagad was designated a terrorist organisation by the government. However, in 2009 it began a comeback campaign, rebranding itself the 'new Pagad', yet still operating like the organisation of old by marching on the homes of suspected drug dealers and demanding they cease their activities. In 2013, murder charges were dropped against Ebrahim, who had been arrested following the slaying of three Tanzanians (alleged to be drug dealers) in Cape Town.

Shifting Alliances

In 1999, two years after Mandela had stepped down as ANC president and was succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa held its second free elections. Nationally, the ANC increased its vote, coming within one seat of the two-thirds majority that would allow it to alter the constitution, but in the Western Cape a pact between the old NP (restyled as the New National Party, or NNP) and the Democratic Party (DP) created the Democratic Alliance (DA), bringing them victory not only in the provincial elections but also in the metropolitan elections.

In 2002 the political landscape shifted radically when the NNP completed a merger with the ANC, which gave the ANC control of Cape Town and brought the city its first black female mayor, Nomaindia Mfeketo. In national and provincial elections two years later the ANC were equally triumphant, and Ebrahim Rasool – a practising Muslim whose family had been moved out of District Six when he was 10 – was appointed premier of the Western Cape.

Conscious of their core vote in the Cape Flats, the ANC-led city council vowed to improve the lot of township folk by upgrading the infrastructure in the informal settlements and boosting investment in low-cost housing, such as the N2 Gateway Project. Urban renewal projects were also announced for Mitchell's Plain, one of the deprived coloured areas of the city blighted, like so many Cape Flats suburbs, by the murderous drug trade. Particularly deadly has been the rise in addiction to methamphetamine, known locally as ‘tik’.

Xenophobia & Football

Battling charges of corruption and blamed for disruptive rolling power cuts caused by the Western Cape’s overstretched nuclear power station at Koeberg, the ANC narrowly lost out to the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the municipal elections of March 2006. The DA’s Helen Zille became Cape Town’s mayor. In July 2008, Rasool – mired in controversy over the sale of the V&A Waterfront and nearby Somerset Hospital site – was replaced as Western Cape premier by Lynne Brown.

For the poorest Capetonians, however, the political circus counted for little against lives blighted by dire economic, social and health problems. In May 2008 frustrations in the townships, fuelled by spikes in food and fuel prices, boiled over in a series of horrific xenophobic attacks on the most vulnerable members of society – immigrants and refugees from wars and political violence. As some 30,000 people fled in panic, the vast majority of Capetonians rallied to provide assistance.

Despite controversies over the location and spiralling costs of the new Cape Town Stadium, the city’s various factions united to support the hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2010. The event was judged a huge success but, facing global recession and social problems, many locals wonder if the money could not have been better spent.

2014 Elections

Prior to the 2014 national and provincial elections, disenchantment with corruption, crime and slow progress on providing critical services to poor communities fed a growing desire for change; one beneficiary was firebrand politico Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party. Nationally the ANC won comfortably with 62.1% of the vote (down from 65.9% in 2009), with the the DA lagging way behind on 22.2%. However, in the Western Cape, the DA held onto power with 59.4% of the vote, and the ANC at 32.9%.

The DA remains in control of Cape Town, too, with Patricia de Lille as mayor since 2011. The ANC are attacking hard in the run-up to the next local government elections in 2016, but de Lille and her DA compatriot Helen Zille, the Western Cape premier, both look pretty secure given their party's track record in governing both the province and the city.