South Africa: White Settlement in South Africa

▪ 1995

      White settlement of South Africa began in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a station at Cape Town and soon introduced European settlers and black slaves. By the time Britain annexed the Cape Colony in 1814, white farmers had occupied much of the present-day Western and Eastern Cape. During the 19th century white settlement spread unevenly over much of present-day South Africa and beyond.

      The 17th- and 18th-century settlers were mainly of Dutch and German origin, ancestors of the Afrikaners. In 1798 the white population was about 20,000, increasing to 43,000 by 1820. Some 5,000 British settlers were established in the Eastern Cape in 1820, and from the 1840s Natal attracted English immigrants. The discovery of diamonds in 1868 and gold shortly thereafter led to further white immigration, including miners from Australia and the United States and Jews from eastern Europe. In 1911 the white population of South Africa was 1,250,000 (to nearly 5 million blacks).

      In 1899-1902 Britain defeated the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State in the South African (or Boer) War, paving the way for the unification of South Africa in 1910 with a constitution excluding the black majority from the vote (except in the Cape Colony, where there was a limited nonracial franchise, removed in the 1930s from blacks and in the 1950s from the mixed-race Coloureds).

      In the 1930s, drawing on a legacy of enmity toward British imperialism, English-speaking capitalists, and African tribes and seeking to uplift impoverished whites, an exclusivist populist nationalism took shape among the Afrikaner majority of whites. Organized as the National Party (NP), it defeated the mildly reformist United Party government of Jan Smuts in 1948 and ruled South Africa until 1994.

      The NP implemented the notorious system of racial apartheid, a rigid form of social engineering and repression of blacks that intensified the gap between white prosperity and black poverty. For this policy the NP gained increasing, though never unanimous, support among whites. Apartheid was fiercely resisted in the 1950s by the African National Congress (ANC), banned in 1960, and its allies.

      Apartheid reached its peak in the early 1970s but then began to erode under its internal contradictions and challenges from below: the rise of a trade-union movement of black workers and the violent discontent of black youth.

      In February 1990 Pres. F.W. de Klerk lifted the bans on the ANC and other organizations and released from jail ANC leader Nelson Mandela. The negotiations that followed established a constitution that for the first time in the country's history removed power from the white minority (now 5 million in a population of nearly 42 million) and gave a vote to all the people. The new freedoms and opportunities were welcomed by nearly all South Africans—black and white alike.

      (MARTIN LEGASSICK)

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