Cape Colony Kaapkolonie |
|||||
British colony | |||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
Anthem God Save the King (God Save the Queen 1837–1901) |
|||||
The Cape Colony ca. 1890 with Griqualand East and Griqualand West annexed and Stellaland/Goshen claimed (in light red) |
|||||
Capital | Cape Town | ||||
Language(s) | English, Dutch ¹ | ||||
Religion | Dutch Reformed Church, Anglican | ||||
Government | Constitutional monarchy | ||||
King/Queen | |||||
- 1795–1820 | George III | ||||
- 1820–1830 | George IV | ||||
- 1830–1837 | William IV | ||||
- 1837–1901 | Victoria | ||||
- 1901–1910 | Edward VII | ||||
Governor | |||||
- 1797–1798 | George Macartney | ||||
- 1901–1910 | Walter Hely-Hutchinson | ||||
Prime Minister | |||||
- 1908–1910 | John X. Merriman | ||||
Historical era | Scramble for Africa | ||||
- Established | 1795 | ||||
- Dutch colony | 1803–1806 | ||||
- Anglo-Dutch treaty | 1814 | ||||
- Natal incorporated | 1844 | ||||
- Disestablished | 1910 | ||||
Area | |||||
- 1910 | 569,020 km2 (219,700 sq mi) | ||||
Population | |||||
- 1910 est. | 2,564,965 | ||||
Density | 4.5 /km2 (11.7 /sq mi) | ||||
Currency | Pound sterling | ||||
Today part of | South Africa ² | ||||
¹ Dutch was the sole official language until 1806, when the British officially replaced Dutch with English. Dutch was reincluded as a second official language in 1882. ² Except for the exclave of Walvis Bay, which is now part of Namibia. |
The Cape Colony, part of modern South Africa, was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, with the founding of Cape Town. It was subsequently occupied by the British in 1795 when the Netherlands were occupied by revolutionary France, so that the French revolutionaries could not take possession of the Cape with its important strategic location. An improving situation in the Netherlands (the Peace of Amiens) allowed the British to hand back the colony to the Batavian Republic in 1803, but by 1806 resurgent French control in the Netherlands led to another British occupation to prevent Napoleon using the Cape. The Cape Colony subsequently remained in the British Empire, becoming self-governing in 1872, and united with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa in 1910, when it was renamed the Cape of Good Hope Province[1]. South Africa became fully independent in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster
The Cape Colony was coextensive with the later Cape Province, stretching from the Atlantic coast inland and eastward along the southern coast, constituting about half of modern South Africa: the final eastern boundary, after several wars against the Xhosa, stood at the Fish River. In the north, the Orange River, also known as the Gariep River, served for a long time as the boundary, although some land between the river and the southern boundary of Botswana was later added to it.
Contents |
Dutch East India Company (VOC) traders, under the command of Jan van Riebeeck, were the first people to establish a European colony in South Africa. The Cape settlement was built by them in 1652 as a re-supply point and way-station for Dutch East India Company vessels on their way back and forth between the Netherlands and Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies. The support station gradually became a settler community, the forebears of the Afrikaners, a European ethnic group in South Africa.
The local Khoikhoi had neither a strong political organisation nor an economic base beyond their herds. They bartered livestock freely to Dutch ships. As Company employees established farms to supply the Cape station, they began to displace the Khoikhoi. Conflicts led to the consolidation of European landholdings and a breakdown of Khoikhoi society. Military success led to even greater Dutch East India Company control of the Khoikhoi by the 1670s. The Khoikhoi became the chief source of colonial wage labour.
After the first settlers spread out around the Company station, nomadic European livestock farmers, or Trekboeren, moved more widely afield, leaving the richer, but limited, farming lands of the coast for the drier interior tableland. There they contested still wider groups of Khoikhoi cattle herders for the best grazing lands. By 1700, the traditional Khoikhoi lifestyle of pastoralism had disappeared.
The Cape society in this period was thus a diverse one. The emergence of Afrikaans, a new vernacular language of the colonials that is however intelligible with Dutch, shows that the Dutch East India Company immigrants themselves were also subject to acculturation processes. By the time of British rule after 1795, the sociopolitical foundations were firmly laid.
In 1795, France occupied the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands, the mother country of the Dutch East India Company. This prompted Great Britain to occupy the territory in 1795 as a way to better control the seas in order stop any potential French attempt to get to India. The British assumed control of the territory following the minor Battle of Muizenberg. The VOC transferred its territories and claims to the Batavian Republic (the Revolutionary period Dutch state) in 1798, and ceased to exist in 1799. Improving relations between Britain and Napoleonic France, and its vassal state the Batavian Republic, led the British to hand the Cape Colony over to the Batavian Republic in 1803 (under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens).
Cape Colony History |
---|
Pre-1806 |
1806–1870 |
1870–1899 |
1899–1910 |
In 1806, the Cape, now nominally controlled by the Batavian Republic, was occupied again by the British after their victory in the Battle of Blaauwberg. The temporary peace between Britain and Napoleonic France had crumbled into open hostilities, whilst Napoleon had been strengthening his influence on the Batavian Republic (which Napoleon would subsequently abolish later the same year). The British, who set up a colony on 8 January 1806, hoped to keep Napoleon out of the Cape, and to control the Far East trade routes. In 1814 the Dutch government formally ceded sovereignty over the Cape to the British, under the terms of the Convention of London.
The British started to settle the eastern border of the colony with the arrival in Port Elizabeth of the 1820 Settlers. In 1854, the Cape Colony received representative government, and in 1872 under Prime Minister JC Molteno, responsible government. The discovery of diamonds around Kimberley in 1870 led to a rapid expansion of British influence into the hinterland under colonialists such as Cecil Rhodes. The ill-fated Jameson Raid curbed this expansion somewhat until British victory following the Second Boer War at the turn of the century. The politics of the colony consequently came to be increasingly dominated by tensions between the British colonists and the Afrikaners, a division that replaced the earlier tensions between the eastern and western halves of the Cape.
The Cape Colony remained nominally under British rule until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when it became the Cape of Good Hope Province, better known as the Cape Province.
The title of the founder of the Cape Colony, Jan van Riebeeck, was "Commander of the Cape" (initially called "opperhoof"), a position which he held from 1652 to 1662. He was succeeded by a long line of both Dutch and British colonial administrators, depending on who was in power at the time:
The post of High Commissioner for Southern Africa was also held from 27 January 1847 to 31 May 1910 by the Governor of the Cape Colony. The post of Governor of the Cape Colony became extinct on 31 May 1910, when it joined the Union of South Africa.
No. | Name | Party | Assumed office | Left office |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Sir John Charles Molteno | Independent | 1 December 1872 | 5 February 1878 |
2 | Sir John Gordon Sprigg | Independent | 6 February 1878 | 8 May 1881 |
3 | Thomas Charles Scanlen | Independent | 9 May 1881 | 12 May 1884 |
4 | Thomas Upington | Independent | 13 May 1884 | 24 November 1886 |
— | Sir John Gordon Sprigg (2nd time) | Independent | 25 November 1886 | 16 July 1890 |
5 | Cecil John Rhodes | Independent | 17 July 1890 | 12 January 1896 |
— | Sir John Gordon Sprigg (3rd time) | Independent | 13 January 1896 | 13 October 1898 |
6 | William Philip Schreiner | Independent | 13 October 1898 | 17 June 1900 |
— | Sir John Gordon Sprigg (4th time) | Progressive Party | 18 June 1900 | 21 February 1904 |
7 | Leander Starr Jameson | Progressive Party | 22 February 1904 | 2 February 1908 |
8 | John Xavier Merriman | South African Party | 3 February 1908 | 31 May 1910 |
The post of prime minister of the Cape Colony also became extinct on 31 May 1910, when it joined the Union of South Africa.
|
|