"On the island we found an unspeakable number of sea-dogs which lay on the rocks to bask in the sun...our men amused themselves by clubbing fully a hundred to death"
- Admiral Cornelis Matelief (Ships's Log April 16, 1608 off the coast of present day Cape Town)
The Portuguese sailor Bartolomeu Dias was 38 years old when after a journey of many months at sea he rounded the tip of Africa in 1488 at the Cape of Good Hope. He was looking for the passage to India to set up lucrative trade routes. He would die in two years while still at sea due to Scurvy.
Scurvy is a disease of malnourishment mainly due to a lack of Vitamin C. If prolonged it leads to changes in the body, wasting away, infection and death. It was so devastating of a problem that it was one of the principle ways sailors died on long voyages at that time. The mortality rate was as high as 30-50% on long voyages. A journey to India, at that time, was an exceptionally long voyage. The disease is easily treated by consuming citrus fruit such as lemons or oranges. It would be 300 years before the British navy would routinely give lemon juice to it's sailors.
Scurvy plays heavily into the story of the European incursion into South Africa. They came for fruit.
Dias would be followed by Vasco de Gama, who managed to make it back after going to India. The first European to go ashore at the Cape was Antonio de Saldanha, another Portuguese, who climbed Table Mountain. He called it 'The Land of Sweet Waters' in his log. He shot some indigenous people and left.
The people he shot were the Khoi- San. They were a hunter/gatherer people who also herded cattle. They were the predominant people of the Cape peninsula until from the north came migrations of the Bantu people. Why were they important?
Their descendants were the Zulu.
Now that the trade route was discovered, Europeans were eager to exploit it. Great powers quarreled. The Portuguese did not lay claim to South Africa. They found another prize that was worth a greater price. The Portuguese were slavers. They established bases all along the West coast of Africa where the supply of people to be enslaved seemed limitless.
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company was a major trading power. They felt the Cape would provide an excellent 'rest stop' for the ships traveling to India. Jan Van Riebeeck was charged with establishing a base at the Cape and to plant fruits, grains and other supplies for resupply.
The Dutch were not slavers in their own nation, but they did purchase them from the Portuguese. The orchard they planted, called the Company Garden is still in Cape Town today. What the Dutch needed badly was skilled farmers. So they imported them from the home country to come in live in the 'Land of Sweet Waters'
They came. The Dutch word for farmers was Boers.
As Cape Town was established, Van Riebeeck had a mandate to try and trade with the local Khoi-San, not enslave them (he purchased others for that), and limit the colony to the cape. They were not trying to establish a new country. This was a business venture, a 17th century 7-11 if you will. The tension with the Khoi -san was predictable as the Boers continued to push out from the cape wanting larger and larger tracts of land
The Dutch Colony grew and expanded into the 19th Century. Employing Dutch ingenuity and a large measure of enslaved labor and mistreated indigenous people, Cape Town became an important way station for the journey to India. In fact it became so important that when the French invaded the Netherlands under Napoleon, the British could not allow South Africa to fall to the French. So they took it for themselves.
Meanwhile.....
The Bantu people had formed the Zulu nation in the North East of the country. They were powerful and drove out the smaller tribes under their leader Shaka. The Boers (remember them?) they did not care for British rule and pushed inland. Eventually they came into conflict with the Zulu and a number of battles were fought. The Boers decided to make their own countries (These guys are the precursors to the present day Afrikaners). So South Africa started to look like this map below -
The Orange territories belonged to the Boer and the Blue, the British. The Natal area was the Zulu. The Zulu were eventually defeated but at great cost. Everything appeared fine until.....
Gold was discovered in Transvaal in 1870. Boer country. Gold has an amazing ability to get people's attention. The British wanted it and fought two wars with the Boers to get it. The Brits were defeated in the first one (their first loss since the American Revolution) but in the second one they prevailed. The Boer lands were absorbed into the Empire and Victoria got the gold.
I realize this synopsis of the history of this great nation is sloppy and missing important details. As I have done with other countries I am trying to understand what I am looking at and why it matters so if I got something wrong, I do apologize. However, I think this short post gives an overview of where South Africa has been and how it sets the stage what happened next; the creation of the Apartheid regime.
That part of the story is coming in a future blog post.
To think, all of this epic tale was set in motion due to a lack of Vitamin C on ocean voyages.
For want of a lemon, thousands died and arguably the most significant nation in Africa was born.
Fun Fact - The legendary ghost ship "The Flying Dutchman" haunts the waters around the cape. The story goes it is a doomed vessel of the Dutch East India Company that can never make port and it must sail forever. A sighting is a portent of great evil.
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