A 350-YEAR JOURNEY TO LIBERATION (1652-1994)

Expansion and Conflict

The Dutch settlement expanded: French Huguenot refugees arrived in 1689, after Calvinism was banned in their country, and numbers were further swelled by people from Germany, Scandinavia, Flanders, and Switzerland. Dutch livestock farmers – 'trekboers' (semi-migrant farmers – later the 'Boers') started moving beyond the borders of the colony and from the 1770s came into contact and inevitable conflict with isiXhosa-speaking peoples, some 800km east of Cape Town. The Xhosa kingdoms were themselves expanding their own territories along South Africa's east coast. The intermittent clashes, historically known as the nine Frontier Wars, would continue for nearly one hundred years involving Xhosa, Boer, Khoekhoen, San, and (after 1795) the British. As had happened with the Khoekhoen the continuing colonial expansion would eventually dispossess the Xhosa of their herds and their land.

In 1795, the British seized the Cape as a strategic base against the French, controlling the sea route to the East, and permanently occupied it in 1806. Their greatest problem was the unrest on the eastern frontier as neither Boer nor Xhosa were prepared to submit quietly to British rule. In 1820 some 5 000 British settlers, known as the 1820 Settlers, arrived in Algoa Bay (now Nelson Mandela Bay). From all walks of life, they were settled along the turbulent eastern border of the colony, in what is now the Eastern Cape, to create a buffer between Xhosa and Boer, and also had the effect of denying the Boers the opportunity to set up a port on the eastern seaboard.

At the same time celebrated leader, King Shaka, oversaw the military, social, and kinship re-ordering of the Zulu Kingdom on the east coast of what is now KwaZulu-Natal, and established sway over a vast area of southern Africa. As splinter Zulu groups spread, conquered, and absorbed communities in their path, fundamental social disruption spread across the region. It was a nearly 40-year period of widespread conquest and warfare between the indigenous groups, known as the Mfecane (isiZulu) or Difaqane (Sesotho), both meaning 'crushing, scattering, forced dispersal, and migration'. Substantial states, such as Moshoeshoe's Lesotho and other Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms were established, and other groups such as the Matebele (later Ndebele), Mfengu, and Makololo were consolidated.