By the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of conflicting populations were struggling for land and power in South Africa. Bantu-speaking Africans, of whom the Zulus would later become the most powerful, had entered from the north, perhaps before 300 C.E., driving the indigenous Khoikhoi and San peoples into less fertile regions of desert and scrub. Europeans arrived more than a millennium later—first the Portuguese, who founded trading settlements such as Delagoa Bay in Natal on the eastern coast in the early 1500s, and then in greater numbers the Dutch, who founded the first permanent white settlement at Cape Town in 1652. During the golden age of Dutch commercial expansion in the seventeenth century, Cape Town served as a stopover for Dutch East India Company ships that sailed between Europe and Asia. Cape Town and the fertile land around it were settled by Dutch merchants and farmers. Their descendants called themselves Afrikaners (the Dutch word for “African”; their language, derived from Dutch, is Afrikaans, and they are known also as Boers from the Dutch word for “farmer”). The city and its adjacent territory remained in Dutch hands until 1795, when the area was captured by the British, who made Cape Town the capital of what became the new British-ruled Cape Colony.
This is a free page. This page contains 192 words. This
article contains 5,172 words (approx. 17 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our King Solomon’s Mines Access Pass.
