Approaching South African immigration

South Africa's immigration history is rich, long and complex. The story of white migration begins when the first white settlers arrived at the Cape in 1652 under the leadership of the mythologised Jan van Riebeeck, with the intention of establishing a victualling station for the Dutch East India Company. Other Dutch, French and German settlers and refugees soon followed. By 1820, six years after Britain took control of the Cape, the white population numbered over 42 700, of whom about 5 000 were British. The migratory history of black Africans who lived in and moved in and out of the region that would become South Africa stretches back even further.

Between 1814 and 1899 the British government initiated and assisted several public and private settlement schemes, with the aim of establishing and consolidating colonial control in the Cape and Natal. Not all the new settlers were British, and other settlement schemes brought Dutch, German and Scandinavian settlers. At the vanguard of the British schemes were the ‘1820 settlers’, who, for English-speaking South Africans, came to rival Jan van Riebeeck as icons of white South African settler history. However, it was not until the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 that South Africa experienced a significant inflow of immigrants and migrants. The ‘mineral revolution’ transformed South Africa into an industrialised country and stimulated inmigration from all over the world, particularly from Britain and Europe. The white population tripled between 1850 and 1891 to approximately 620 000. British post-Anglo-Boer War colonial settlement schemes and independent migration raised South Africa's white population to over 1.2 million by 1911. The ‘mineral revolution’ also initiated the development of temporary and more permanent black labour migration from neighbouring states to work on the mines, establishing migratory patterns that persist today. It was accompanied by the expansion of white agriculture and migration from neighbouring states to work on commercial farms.

The copious literature on migration to the British colonies and the Boer Republics prior to the formation of the Union emphasises the edges of white settlement silencing the presence and lives of black people who were already living in the region.