South Africa during the mercantile era (Mercantile era and colonization of the Cape)

During the 14th and 15th centuries, mercantilism signifies the decline of feudalism in Europe and rise of capitalism.

Mercantilism is an economic theory that the prosperity of a nation depends upon its capital, and that the volume of the world economy and international trade is unchangeable.

Government economic policy based on these ideas is also sometimes called mercantilism, but is more properly known as the mercantile system.

Some scholars conceive the mercantile system as a subset of, or synonymous with, the early stages of capitalism, while others consider mercantilism to be a distinct economic system.

Merchants from Holland, Portugal, Spain, England and France participated in these expansionist policies to acquire territories and wealth across the world. 

This process was precipitated by the development of maritime technology (ship building) which facilitated the overseas voyages. 

This was accompanied by the establishment of navy which was used to plunder, pirate, loot and wars in the process of primitive accumulation of wealth. Throughout the 1500-1750 period, political and economic institutions changed in response to the bitter competition among European powers who discovered that enormous wealth could be derived from colonial trade and plunder of new territories. England, for example, was involved in a heated rivalry with France and the Netherlands for control of international trade and foreign territory. 

Mercantile voyages and colonization of the Cape

During this period, Portuguese Prince Henry, the Navigator used this position to develop navigation, sponsor sailors and overseas expeditions. 

In 1486 Bartholomew Diaz succeeded to round the southern most point of the African continent as far as Algoa Bay en route to India. Then they reported to King William of Portugal that they named the cape of South Africa, the Cape of Stones then renamed the Cape of Good Hope. Then in 1497 came his countryman, Vasco Da Gama, who went further and sailed right around the Cape as far as present day Natal before going on to India. To the Portuguese the Cape was just a means of gaining access the riches of the East. 

The merchants brought these highly valued commodities to Lisbon where traders from other countries purchased them and Portugal grew rich from the sale of Eastern spices, carpets, perfumes and precious stones. Although the Portuguese basked in the nautical achievement of having successfully navigating the Cape, they showed little interest in colonization. 

The area's fierce weather and rocky shoreline posed a threat to their caravels, (ships) and many of their attempts to trade with the local Khoikhoi (a nomadic people, who inhabited what is now southern and western South Africa) ended in conflict.

The Portuguese found the Mozambican coast more attractive, with appealing bays to use as way stations, prawns, and links to gold ore in the interior. However, while in 1595 Cornelius Houtman, a Dutchman, sailed around the Cape to Java, in modern Indonesia, the long period of Portuguese monopoly of the profitable trade with the East was clearly coming to an end.

At this stage it became clear that a stopover at the Cape would be ideal for ships of all nations. Up until then the route to the East was long and arduous. The ships went down the West African coast, touching Sierra Leone and thence across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil. 

They then re-crossed in an easterly direction back over the Atlantic passing the southern coast of Africa and from there on to the East Indian Islands. By the end of the journey they were extremely tired and quite frequently out of supplies.

Scurvy was rampant, its causes and cures still unknown at this stage, and many seamen died on the voyage. 

A port on the South African coast for ships was becoming an absolute necessity. 

Both the Dutch and the English conducted their commercial activities through chartered companies. In 1600 the English East India Company was founded, and two years later, in 1602, various Dutch companies united to form the VOC, which to us is better known as the Dutch East India Company.

As early as 1619, representatives of the English and Dutch Companies met to consider how best to solve the need for a calling station. 

They failed to reach any agreement, although the suitability of Table Valley for a permanent calling station was vaguely recognized. An Attempt in 1620 by two members of the English Company to annex the land adjacent to Table Bay in the name of King James 1 was unsuccessful because of lack of support from the English Govt. 

Dutch colonization of the Cape

In 1647 a vessel belonging to the Dutch East India Company was wrecked in Table Bay. Its crew moved into Table Valley where they stayed for six months. To sustain themselves they grew vegetables and bartered with the local people for meat. The district had a favourable climate and fertile land and was thus suitable for settlement. 

When the crew returned home they gave such a glowing report that it was decided that it was the right place for a European settlement. In 1652 Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck and 90 men landed at the Cape of Good Hope, (left) under instructions from the Dutch East India Company to build a fort and develop a vegetable garden for the benefit of ships on the Eastern trade route.

Their relationship with the Khoikhoi was initially one of bartering, but a mutual animosity developed over issues such as cattle theft and, no doubt, the growing suspicion on the part of the Khoikhoi that Van Riebeeck's outpost was becoming a threat to them By the time Van Riebeeck left ten years later, 250 white people were living in what was beginning to look like a developing colony while the new settlement traded out of necessity with the neighbouring Khoikhoi, it wasn't a friendly relationship, and the authorities made deliberate attempts to restrict contact. 

Partly as a consequence, VOC (Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie ) employees found themselves faced with a labour shortage. To remedy this, they released a small number of Dutch from their contracts and permitted them to establish farms, with which they would supply the VOC settlement from their harvests.

This arrangement proved highly successful, producing abundant supplies of fruit, vegetables, wheat, and wine; and later, livestock was raised. 

This small initial group of free burghers, as these farmers were known, steadily increased and began to expand their farms further north and east

The majority of burghers had Dutch ancestry and belonged to the Calvinist Reformed Church of the Netherlands, but there were also numerous Germans and some Scandinavians. In 1688 the Dutch and the Germans were joined by the French Huguenots (Protestants) who were fleeing religious persecution under the Catholic King Louis XIV.

In addition to establishing the free burgher system, van Riebeeck and the VOC began to import large numbers of slaves, primarily from Madagascar and Indonesia. These slaves often married Dutch settlers, and their descendants became known as the Cape Coloureds and Cape Malays. A significant number of the offspring from the White and slave unions were absorbed into the local Afrikaans speaking white population.

With this expanded labour force, the areas occupied by the VOC spread to the north and east, bringing about clashes with the Khoikhoi. The newcomers drove the Khoisan from their traditional lands, decimated them with introduced diseases, and destroyed them with superior weapons when they fought back, which they did in a number of major wars and with guerrilla resistance movements that continued into the 19th century.

Most survivors were left with no option but to work for the Europeans in an exploitative arrangement that differed little from slavery. Over time, the Khoisan, their European overseers and the imported slaves assimilated, with the offspring of these unions forming the basis for today's Coloured population.

Khoikhoi-Dutch Wars

In 1659 the first of a series of armed confrontations over the ownership of land took place between the Dutch settlers and a Khoikhoi clan led by Doman. The dispute was over cattle. 

In this first anti colonial Khoikhoi-Dutch War the settlers sought refuge in the fort they had built. 

Second Dutch-Khoi war: In 1673 exploratory excursions by the Dutch into the interior north of the colony, revealed fertile grazing land to the northeast of the Hottentots Hollands Mountains, which belonged to the Chainoqua, Hessequa, Cochoqua and Gouriqua Khoikhoi chiefdoms. 

These Khoikhoi tribes had large herds of livestock and were willing to engage in trade with the Dutch. However, the Dutch terms of trade result in warfare and raiding of livestock, as well as between the Khoikhoi chiefdoms

The Dutch East India Company sent Hieronimus Cruse in 1673 to attack the Cochoqua.

The attack was executed on horseback and marked the beginning of the Second Dutch-Khoikhoi War. 

Third Khoikhoi war: In 1674 the Dutch East India Company launched a second follow up attack on the Chocoqua. In that Third Dutch-Khoikhoi War almost 5000 head of livestock in addition to weapons were taken from the Chocoqua. 

The war continued until 1677 when Governor Bax extracted the submission of the Chocoqua to Dutch rule, that was expressed in an annual tribute of thirty head of cattle. That submission paved the way for Dutch colonial expansion into the land of the Khoikhoi

The Trekboers (migrant farmers)

During the early years of Dutch occupation, the focus was primarily on agriculture. With the growth of the population, more and more people started cultivating agricultural products, which, before long, resulted in a surplus of products such as wine, wheat and vegetables. This overproduction of agricultural products forced the free citizens to explore other avenues, such as stock farming. 

Soon the stock farmers began to move deeper into the interior in their search for more and better grazing.

Young men married and set up their own farms and the resultant large families caused the number of stock farmers to increase rapidly.

The lack of sufficient space for proper stock farming prompted the farmers to pack their possessions into their ox wagons and move deeper into the interior.

This kind of farmer was called a “Trekboer”. The word means, “a migrant farmer”.

Until 1750,there was nothing to prevent the Trekboers from advancing rapidly into the interior. 

There was plenty of water in the interior and they employed Khoikhoi to tend to the cattle. However, the Dutch East India Company became worried about the Trekboers moving so far because it became increasingly difficult to exercise any authority over them.

In order to maintain its authority, the V.O.C. was forced to follow in their tracks. This constant moving also resulted in the V.O.C. having to continually change the boundaries of the eastern frontier of the colony.

Eventually, in 1778, the Great Fish River became the eastern frontier. It was also here that the Trekboers first experienced problems with the Xhosa and led to nine different wars between 1799-1803.

Until that time, the Trekboers had only experienced serious clashes with the San when the San attacked them with poisoned arrows and hunted their cattle.

The Trekboers frequently organised hunting parties in reprisal for the San attacks

The frontier farmers kept on moving across the border and the Xhosa refused to let go of their heritage that easily. 

A number of frontier wars followed and both groups leant to live with regular occurrences of theft, arson and murder

The British occupation of the Cape and the Boer Trek

By the early 1800s the number of British ships sailing to and from their colony of India had increased enormously. Like the Dutch before them, the British needed a supply station for their ships and naval base to protect their ships.

They seized the Cape from the Dutch  in 1795. Seven years later the colony was returned to the Dutch government, only to come under British rule again in 1806, recaptured because of the alliance between Holland and Napoleon. 

The initial somewhat cautious regulations aimed at easing the conditions under which Khoi servants were employed, caused discontent and even open rebellion among the colony's white inhabitants. At the same time, British military strength began to tell in the conflict with the Khoisan

Meanwhile the colonists continued to expand into the rugged hinterlands of the north and east. Many began to take up a semi nomadic pastoralist lifestyle, in some ways not far removed from that of the native inhabitants they displaced. In addition to its herds, a family might have a wagon, a tent, a Bible, and a few guns. 

As they became more settled, they would build a mud walled cottage, frequently located, by choice, several days’ travel from the nearest European. 

These were the first of the Trekboers (wandering farmers, later shortened to Boers) completely independent of official controls, extraordinarily self-sufficient, and isolated Their harsh lifestyle produced individualists who were well acquainted with the land. Like many pioneers with Christian backgrounds, the burghers attempted to live their lives based on teachings from the Bible.

As the 18th century drew to a close Dutch mercantile power began to fade and the British moved in to fill the vacuum. They seized the Cape in 1795 to prevent it from falling into rival French hands, then briefly relinquished it to the Dutch (1803) before finally achieving recognition of their sovereignty over the area in 1815.

At the tip of the continent the British found an established colony of 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan, and 1,000 freed black slaves.

Power resided solely with a white élite in Cape Town, and differentiation on the basis of race was deeply entrenched. 

Outside Cape Town and the immediate hinterland there were isolated black and white pastoralists. Like the Dutch before them, the British initially had little interest in the Cape Colony, other than as a strategically located port. As one of their first tasks they tried to resolve a troublesome border dispute between the Boers and the Khosan on the colony's eastern frontier

In 1820 the British authorities persuaded about 5,000 middle-class British immigrants (most of them "in trade") to leave England behind and settle on tracts of land between the feuding groups, with the aim of providing a buffer zone. The plan was singularly unsuccessful.

Within three years, almost half of these 1820 Settlers had retreated to the towns, notably Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth, to pursue the jobs they had held in Britain. While doing nothing to resolve the border dispute, this influx of settlers solidified the British presence in the area thus fracturing the relative unity of white South Africa. Where the Boers and their ideas had previously gone largely unchallenged, European Southern Africa now had two language groups and two cultures. A pattern soon emerged whereby English speakers became highly urbanised and dominated politics, trade, finance, mining, and manufacturing, while the largely uneducated Boers were relegated to their farms.

The gap between the British settlers and the Boers further widened with the abolition of slavery in 1833, a move that the Boers generally regarded as against the God given ordering of the races. Yet the British settlers' conservatism and sense of racial superiority stopped any radical social reforms, and in 1841 the authorities passed a Masters and Servants Ordinance, which perpetuated white control. 

Meanwhile, British numbers increased rapidly in Cape Town, in the area east of the Cape Colony (present day Eastern Cape Province), in Natal and, after the discovery of gold and diamonds, in parts of the Transvaal, mainly around present-day Gauteng. The British began to settle in Natal, but minor conflicts followed. The British fearing repercussions in the Cape Colony annexed Natal, where a small British settlement called Port Natal (later Durban) had already been established. 

On the highveld, however, two Boer republics were formed the central Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal or ZAR - Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek) to its north. By the mid 1800s the tiny refreshment post at the Cape of Good Hope had become white settlement stretching over virtually all of what today is South Africa. In some areas the indigenous Bantu speakers maintained their independence, most notably in the northern Natal territories which were still unmistakably the kingdom of the Zulu

However, almost all were eventually to lose the struggle against white overlordship British or Boer. One territory that was to retain independence was the mountain area where King Moshoeshoe had forged the Basotho nation by offering refuge to tribes fleeing from the whites. He clashed with the ZAR Free Staters and asked Britain to annex Basotholand, which it did in 1868. Known today as Lesotho, this country is entirely surrounded by South Africa, but has never been a part of it.

Meanwhile, the Boers had started to grow increasingly dissatisfied with British rule in the Cape Colony. The British proclamation of the equality of the races particularly angered them. Beginning in 1835, several groups of Boers, together with the black servants, decided to trek off into the interior in search of greater independence. North and east of the Orange River (which formed the Cape Colony's frontier.)

These Boers or Voortrekkers ("Pioneers") found vast tracts of apparently uninhabited grazing lands. They had, it seemed, entered their promised land, with space enough for their cattle to graze and their culture of anti urban independence to flourish. Little did they know that what they found deserted pasture lands, disorganised bands of refugees, and tales of brutality from the clearance of the native people rather than representing the normal state of affairs. With the exception of the more powerful Ndebele (people of modern Zimbabwe)

The Great Trek (1836-1854)

At the time of the migration of Boers from the eastern Cape Colony to beyond the Orange River in the late 1830s, it was neither a single ‘trek’ (from the Afrikaans ‘to pull’ a wagon), nor was it very great. It was perceived to be a continuation of the long established Boer search for new land that could be settled without too much resistance from its local African occupants

In and after 1835 many Afrikaners families dispossessed of their property in the Cape colony, brought large supplies of gunpowder, mustered their livestock, wagons, and trekked northwards across the Orange River. Since the late 19th century they have been know  as emigrants Voortrekkers and their migration as the Great Trek

How great was the Great trek?

From soon after the event, writers called it ‘great’ because they wanted to distinguish it from earlier Boer treks, for the Boer people had been moving into the interior for well over a century by the time the Great Trek took place. (Another way of distinguishing this movement from the earlier treks was by calling the earlier trekkers ‘trekboers’ and those who went on the Great Trek ‘Voortrekkers’.

Important reason why historians have used the term ‘Great Trek’ is because of what they saw to be its significance. It was termed great because it was, it still is, the central event in story of European in southern Africa. The results that have flowed from it can be traced far north to the equator and beyond witnessing Europeans expansion from the originally inhabited Cape colony.

Another greatness lie on the mileage covered i.e. beyond the Transvaal and Orange rivers to Limpopo. Time taken i.e 13 years

Number of people involved more than 10000 people and their wagons

Displacement of people: Xhosa, Nguni, Khoisan communities

Discoveries and states formed in the course of the trek.

Most of the voortrekkers were derived from the colonial trekboer community of semi nomadic pastoral farmers.

It was their mode of life that made it possible for them to become voortrekkers and determined their manner of migrating and settling in a new terrain.

The trekboer movement was a slow and continuous advance of the frontiers of white settlement in South Africa, extending back over four generations to the very beginning of the 18th c.

It continued to be an uncoordinated movement of families and small family groups, who had no overwhelming grievances against the cape government, regarded themselves as remaining British subjects, and assumed that sooner or later government would extend the cape frontier to incorporate them in their new lands.

By the mid 1837 about 50000 voortrekkers men, women and children had crossed the Orange river

It enabled them to outflank the Xhosa peoples who were blocking their eastward expansion, to penetrate into Natal and the Highveld (which had been opened up by the tribal wars of the previous decade), and to carry white settlement north to the Limpopo River

It was a sudden dramatic leap forward, which turned the flank of the southern Nguni chiefdoms, conquered the two most powerful kingdoms in southern Africa, and brought the frontiers of white settlement to the Tingela river and towards the Limpopo 

It was also a sort of rebellion against British government.

Though they all crossed the Orange River, they were soon divided as to their ultimate destination some wanted an outlet to the sea in Natal, and others wished to remain on the Highveld.

In both areas, after initial setbacks, they were able to defeat powerful African military kingdoms through the skilled use of horses, guns, and defensive laagers (encampments), though in later years they were to find the problems of maintaining control over Africans and establishing stable politics more intractable.

In Natal the Voortrekkers established a short lived republic, but, after its annexation by the British in 1843, most rejoined their compatriots across the Drakensberg, where, except for a short period, the British government was reluctant to pursue them.

In 1852 and 1854 the British granted independence to the trekkers in the Transvaal and Transorangia regions, respectively. In Transvaal several warring little polities were established, and factional strife ended only in the 1860s. 

In Transorangia the trekkers established the Orange Free State, which, under the double threat posed by the Sotho and the proximity of imperial power, settled down in more unified fashion after the British withdrawal in 1854

The course of the Great trek was affected by the main factors

The qualities of the voortrekkers as individuals and as a community each voortrekker regarded himself as an independent farmer skilled in hunting expedition for adventure rather than profit.

The depended on others to satisfy their basic needs religion, labour and trade

In their movement they required regular supplies like gunpowder, as the means to accumulate wealth

The migrated hoping that they would become independent of British control and access further spheres beyond British  

The reaction of the British government and its local representatives

In summary, what were causes of Great trek?

Political independence formerly from VOC and then British colonization of the cape

Cultural domination language and religion question

Abolition of slave in 1834 which was a backbone of their economy

Quest for more land and pasture

The Impacts of the Great Trek

The formation of two independent republics Transvaal and Orange free state Mfecane upheavals 

The fall and rise of some states

Mineral discoveries. Diamond at Kimberly (1867) and Gold at Witwatersrand(1886)

Drifting of many African communities

Wars between Boers and Africans, Boers against British

Expansion of white frontiers which culminated in the colonization of the whole southern and central Africa

It was not until 1910 that a united South Africa came into being, but such a state was prefigured and made possible by those who moved out from the Cape into the interior in the late 1830s and early 1840s and set up new white states in other parts of what became South Africa.