Here is a resolution of the commander and council of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope dated January 14, 1688:
The Honorable Commander having noted that some of the free residents by carelessness give their slaves opportunities to obtain their masters’ firearms and to assemble and hide the same for nefarious escapades, by which this colony easily could be brought to a great and irremediable misfortune, it was decided after mature consideration of the matter, in order to take prompt measures against this highly threatening danger, for the securing of the public good and the peace of the inhabitants, to have it proclaimed by public handbills that all free residents who have slaves are seriously ordered to take their firearms, be they muskets, blunderbusses, carbines, or pistols, whether hung on a rack or kept elsewhere, and at once screw off the upper lip that holds the flint, and keep it in a secure place, on penalty of a fine of 25 Rijks-daalders to be forfeited to the person who made the complaint or who notifies an officer of this gross negligence and disobedience.
On January 20 the soldiers of the garrison were permitted to go hunting twice a week to maintain their skills; on September 27 this was supplemented by a set of rules in thirty-two articles for competition among the soldiers in target shooting on foot and on horseback.
By then the Dutch had experienced a bit of what they feared and sought to prepare against. On March 10, 1688, the council considered a report that a party of ten slaves, under the leadership of a free African and a slave, both from the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa, had armed themselves and escaped inland. Nighttime raids on isolated farms, murders, and house burnings were feared. “In order to strangle in the cradle” the threat of the spread of slave rebellion, a reward was offered for the capture alive of the leaders, and if any other escaped slaves offered any resistance to recapture, they were to be shot through the head or otherwise dealt with as the pursuers wished. By March 31 it was reported that six of the slaves already had been recaptured, and the feared slave rebellion did not materialize.
The slaves whose revolt the Dutch feared were not drawn from the native people of the Cape area, whom modern scholars call the Khoikhoi. The slave whose revolt was feared was likely to be larger and stronger than the Khoikhoi and thoroughly accustomed to warfare with iron weapons. More than half the slaves at the Cape were bought on Madagascar, which was a great stew of conflicts among peoples of Indonesian and African heritages, with incessant warfare and slave taking. The slave, wherever he came from, was an unwilling resident at the Cape who could not freely depart—after all, he or she was property, an investment—taking orders day after day from the master.
But what of the people who had inhabited the Cape area before the coming of the Europeans? They were not the ancestors of the present African majority population of South Africa but a smaller, lighter-skinned people who appear in the Dutch records and in Dampier’s writings as “Hottentots”; “Khoikhoi” is one of the ways they referred to themselves. They had emerged from a hunter-gatherer culture and begun herding cattle and sheep just a few hundred years before. In 1688 the Khoikhoi chief who had closest relations with the Dutch was one whom they called Klaas, who by then had spent almost fifteen years demonstrating his loyalty to the Dutch in many visits to the Cape fort. He bought up large numbers of cattle and sheep from other Khoikhoi for sale to the Dutch, returned their runaway slaves, offered refuge to shipwrecked Dutchmen, and attacked Khoikhoi who were hostile to the company. In return he received company recognition as its agent in the purchase of livestock, gifts of brandy and tobacco, a Dutch suit, a wig, and perhaps even the ultimate sign of trust of a native ally, four guns.
On February 16, 1688, Klaas appeared before the council at the Dutch fort to complain of attacks on him and his people by another Khoikhoi chief—the Dutch called him Koopman (merchant)—with whom he had a long-standing feud. The council gave Klaas some liquor, tobacco, and other goods and agreed to summon Koopman and order him “with sharp threats” to keep the peace and to treat Klaas as his overlord, giving him back the cattle he had stolen. In 1693, however, the Dutch governor abruptly switched to support of Koopman and imprisoned Klaas on the bleak Robben Island, about six miles out in the Atlantic; he eventually was released, spent his last years in drunken decline, and was killed in a fight at Koopman’s camp.
Klaas’s decline was a small piece of the longer and even sadder story of the decline of his people in the Cape region. Khoikhoi groups amassed large herds of cattle and sheep as they prospered, but in time of drought, war, poor leadership, or other misfortunes they might lose all their herds, become dependent servants of other Khoikhoi, or disperse into smaller bands that survived by hunting, gathering, and stealing livestock. The Dutch responded to the little they knew of the Khoikhoi in ways that made the “Hottentots” one of the best known to eighteenth-century Europeans of all examples of bestial, subhuman savagery; Dampier had referred to them in this way in his description of the Australian Aborigines. But the Dutch had little to fear from them, found them useful as stock traders, and did not set out to exterminate them. However, the trade drained cattle and sheep from Khoikhoi society as a whole, and when a group was down on its luck, it drifted not into hunting and gathering but out of organized Khoikhoi society, into hired labor for the Dutch or prostitution and begging in Cape Town. A smallpox epidemic in 1713 marked the disappearance of independent Khoikhoi society from the Cape area.
The Afrikaners have been called the white tribe of Africa. To them, South Africa is home. Their language is spoken nowhere else. Their culture is no more similar to that of the Netherlands than that of Americans of northern European ancestry is to that of England. For the Afrikaners, as for the Americans, one important reason for this is that people from several European nations contributed to the making of this new people.
There are old French surnames among the Afrikaners: De Villiers, Joubert, Du Toit, Le Roux, Fouché, Malan, Marais. Many of them can be traced back to early Huguenot (Protestant) settlers, refugees from persecution in the France of Louis XIV, the first of whom reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1688. It is not at all out of place to see their arrival as a milestone in the emergence of the Afrikaner people and at the same time to be reminded of other Huguenots we shall meet in this book, all living in exile ih 1688: Pierre Bayle and many others in Rotterdam; Elihu Yale’s bankers in London.
The Dutch outpost at the Cape of Good Hope had been founded in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company, not as a foothold for expansion into the great continent to the north but as a way station providing fresh water, meat, and food for the ships of the company on their long voyages between the Netherlands and India and Indonesia. For the company’s purposes the Cape might as well have been on an island, as long as there was enough room to raise cattle, sheep, and fruit and vegetables to supply the ships. The company had its own herds and gardens, tended by slaves, and tried to encourage the settlement of free burghers—Dutchmen not in company service—to farm on their own and sell their produce to the company for provisioning of the passing ships. But the company did not pay them very well for their produce, many of them preferred tavern keeping to farming, and most Dutchmen who left their prosperous homeland did so in the expectation of a softer or more adventurous life than that of a small cattle farmer. In 1688 there still were only about three hundred company servants, four hundred free burghers, and eight hundred slaves in the little colony, and its farms were just beginning to reach beyond the narrow confines of the Cape Peninsula. The Cape authorities had found the climate excellent for vineyards but had not been able to find settlers who understood the making of wine, vinegar, and brandy.
A few French experts in those fields already had been sent out when, late in 1687, the ruling council of the company decided to offer free passage, as much land as he could farm, and loans of cattle and implements to any Huguenot who would take an oath of loyalty to the Netherlands and emigrate to the Cape. A Huguenot clergyman would be supported by the company to minister to them. Between December 1687 and July 1688 about 180 to 190 Huguenots had responded to this offer and sailed for the Cape. They included a wealthy merchant, a hatmaker, a wagon maker, a vintner, and about 30 women and 50 children. Even if a few of them had been on a ship before, in the Mediterranean or along the Atlantic coast of Europe, none of them had experienced anything like this voyage, in wooden ships less than three hundred feet long, for periods of two months at the best of times, four or six at the worst. Most of them sailed out of a northern European winter, through the stifling doldrums and anxieties of the tropical waters off West Africa, and arrived in April through August, in the Southern Hemisphere winter. Losses to sickness and accident en route were moderate by the standards of the time; by the end of January 1689 I estimate that about 150 Huguenots had reached the Cape alive. Since there were only about 400 free burghers before that, the European population not on the company payroll now was about one-fourth Huguenot. The Huguenots were given farms in the magnificent Drakenstein Valley about twenty miles east of the Cape fort and settlement. The land was fertile but never had been touched by a plow, and clearing it took years of backbreaking work. The settlers needed a good deal of support from the company authorities in their first years and were viewed with suspicion, especially when France and the Netherlands were at war. But eventually they put down roots and prospered, contributing greatly to the Cape wine industry, and they added to the mix of Afrikaner culture a Calvinism steeled by persecution and a sense that Africa now was the only home they had.
South Africa was transformed almost beyond recognition by the great treks inland of the Afrikaners, beginning in the eighteenth century, and the subjugation of large African populations. But the fear remained into our own time, and Robben Island, where Klaas spent his years of captivity, became the harsh prison where the enemies of apartheid were confined. Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years there; study groups flourished, and the African leaders came to call it Mandela University. In March 1998 President Bill Clinton accompanied the frail but still fiery President Mandela on a visit to his old cell on Robben Island.