anouk jurgens's List: South Africa Colonization

• The Union  of South Africa was born on May 31, 1910, created by a constitutional convention (in Durban in 1908) and an act  of the British Parliament (1909).

• Racial segregation was further  developed through policies proposed during reconstruction and solidified after 1910.

   

  Both Afrikaner and black nationalism utilized ne

• A few Boer settlers had moved north of the Orange River before 1834, but after that the number  increased significantly, a migration later known as the Great Trek.

• When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries  tried to capture the Cape so  as to control the important sea route to the East. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending  the Dutch East India Company's role in  the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of  Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in  1806 after the start  of the Napoleonic Wars.
• English  replaced Dutch as the language of administration; the British pound sterling replaced the Dutch rix-dollar; and newspaper  publishing began in Cape Town in 1824
• The first step in this process included attacks in 1811–12 by the British  army on the  Xhosa groups, the Gqunukhwebe  and Ndlambe. An attack by the Rharhabe-Xhosa on Graham's Town (Grahamstown) in 1819 provided the pretext for the annexation of more African territory, to the Keiskamma River
• Indeed,  though  Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other countries to do the same, the  British in Southern Africa continued to  import some slaves into the Cape after that date, but in numbers insufficient to alleviate the labour problem.

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• The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend to establish more than a minimal presence at the southernmost part of Africa. Because farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, however, nine men were released from their contracts  with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River in 1657. The company made it clear that the Khoekhoe were not to be  enslaved, so, beginning in that same year, slaves arrived in the Cape from West and East Africa, India, and the Malay Peninsula. By the  end of the century, the imprint of Dutch colonialism in  South Africa was clear, with settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, growing wheat, tending vineyards, and grazing their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots  Holland Mountains some 30 miles (50  km) away. A 1707 census of the Dutch at the Cape listed 1,779  settlers owning 1,107 slaves.
• In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, pastoralists had readily traded with the Dutch. However, as the garrison's demand for cattle and sheep continued to increase, the Khoekhoe became more wary. The Dutch offered tobacco,  alcohol, and trinkets for livestock. Numerous conflicts followed, and,  beginning in 1713, many Khoekhoe communities were ravaged by smallpox. At the same time,  colonial pastoralists—the Boers, also called trekboers—began to move inland beyond the Hottentots  Holland Mountains with  their own herds

• British government and the Afrikaners, of Dutch origin, who had been the first European settlers in the region.

• Dutch traders landed at the southern tip of modern day South Africa in 1652 and established a stopover point on the spice route between the Netherlands and the East, founding the city of Cape Town. After the British seized the Cape of Good Hope area in 1806, many of the Dutch settlers (the Boers) trekked north to found their own republics. The discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) spurred wealth and immigration and intensified the subjugation of the native inhabitants. The Boers resisted British encroachments but were defeated in the Boer War (1899-1902); however, the British and the Afrikaners, as the Boers became known, ruled together under the Union of South Africa. In 1948, the National Party was voted into power and instituted a policy of apartheid - the separate development of the races. The first multi-racial elections in 1994 brought an end to apartheid and ushered in black majority rule.
• Independence: 31 May 1910 (Union of South Africa formed from four British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State); 31 May 1961 (republic declared) 27 April 1994 (majority rule)

• With that system, the government, controlled by the minority white population, enforced segregation between government-defined races in housing, education, and virtually all spheres of life, creating in effect three nations: one of whites (consisting of peoples primarily of British and Dutch [Boer] ancestry, who struggled for generations to gain political supremacy, a struggle that reached its violent apex with the South African War of 1899–1902); one of blacks (consisting of such peoples as the San hunter-gatherers of the northwestern desert, the Zulu herders of the eastern plateaus, and the Khoekhoe farmers of the southern Cape regions); and one of “Coloureds” (mixed-race people) and ethnic Asians (Indians, Malays, Filipinos, and Chinese).