ABSTRACT
The colonial history of South Africa traditionally gets divided between the Dutch and British ‘periods’.6 From the establishment of a refreshment station in Table Bay in 1652 until the conquest, in the context of the Napoleonic wars, of the Cape of Good Hope by Britain in 1795, the west and south coasts of southern Africa were under the control of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). From that year, except for a brief interregnum during 1803-6 when the Cape reverted to control by the Dutch Batavian Republic, southern Africa remained part of the British Empire until the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For most of the twentieth century this historical
‘division’ was replicated in the historiography of the country with the VOC period considered the almost exclusive terrain of Afrikaans-speaking historians (who viewed themselves as the descendants of the European settlers who came to southern Africa during the VOC period). These historians reinterpreted the early modern history of South Africa to serve the Afrikaner nationalist paradigm prevalent for most of the twentieth century. In practical terms this meant a concentration on settler disputes with the VOC (demonstrating a desire for freedom and sovereignty from oppressive ‘foreign’ powers) – thus revealing an innate nationalism on the part of Afrikaner forebears – and on the advancing frontier of the colony which was driven by the needs of pastoralists farmers. The latter (called trekboers) were seen as the forerunners of the nineteenth-century Voortrekkers who, in Afrikaner mythology, opened up the hinterland (the southern African Highveld) for the Afrikaners,7 thus spreading them all across what would later become ‘South Africa’.8 It is noticeable how these Afrikaner historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries virtually ignored the history of the (very cosmopolitan) early modern Cape Town, as well as the larger place of the Cape in the world of the VOC and in the context of European expansion and global interaction. These were not historians who would have encouraged their students to adopt a broader perspective on the history of colonial South Africa.9
