European expansion into the interior

The process of conquest and dispossession began very early in the history of white settlement at the Cape. As outlined in Chapter 1, the Khoikhoi were forced almost immediately to cede parts of their traditional grazing lands to the Europeans who had landed in Table Bay to develop a refreshment station for the Netherlands East India Company (VOC). Thereafter, the dispossession of the Khoikhoi was swiftly accomplished. In 1672 two of the nomadic tribes were induced to sign treaties under which they surrendered control of a large area of land from Table Bay to Saldanha Bay in the north and to the mountains of Hottentots Holland in the east. The compensation actually paid for this was derisory and only a small fraction of the sums promised in the treaties. The war fought by a third tribe in the mid-1670s was the last occasion on which Khoikhoi in what is now the Western Cape offered organized resistance to white expansion. After that it would take another 100 years before the Europeans expanding eastward from this initial settlement made their first contact with the vanguard of Xhosa farmers moving westward along the coast. From that time forward the economic life of Africans and Europeans would be indissolubly bound together.

One fundamental reason for the slow pace at which the settlers increased both their activity and their numbers, and thus the area over which they operated, was the policy of the VOC. It was never the intention of the Company to promote the development of the colony as an independent territory.