History of South Africa - Episode I: The Beginning!

That country at the south end of Africa is called South Africa. In this series of videos, we take a look at how it came to be that way. So South Africa really all starts in Portugal in 1415. You see, Spain and Portugal just spent the last 700 years reconquering the Iberian Peninsula from the Emirate of Cordoba, generating support from Christian Europe and really anyone that wanted to be a nobleman and conquer Muslim territory for one of the Christian kings. Conquering Muslim territory was important, you see, because it meant you got free land and the Muslim armies that used to be there stopped harassing you. Well, by 1415, the Kingdom of Portugal pretty much won the race to reconquesting by reaching the southern end of its strip on the peninsula before Castile, Leon, and Aragon, and it realized that it wanted more of that sweet, sweet Muslim land. Luckily for them, they found some Muslims in the North African city of Ceuta that were harassing them, and the next thing you know, Portugal learned that they can conquer African land as well. This began the Age of Discovery, or for Portugal, the age of how much of Morocco can we take over before someone stops us. As it turns out, so long as what they wanted was on the coast, the answer to that question was quite a bit. Soon, the Madeira and Azores Islands were colonized, and Juliana sailed southward enough for Morocco to discover that the ocean didn't end after Cape Bojador in 1434. By 1446, the heavily populated areas of West Africa were reached, and trading fortresses and voyages of exploration started to cover any part of the African coast that the Portuguese could get their hands on. The 1480s saw Diogo Cão explore the future Congolese and Angolan coasts, eventually running out of luck at the Namib Desert, where the wind is against you when there's nothing on the land you want to take. This was a disappointing turn of events, but it was even more frustrating for Portuguese ambitions. Portugal had, at one point, studied math, and reasoned that since the ultra-rich lands of India and China were to the east, and they were to the west, Africa would have to end at some point, and after it did, you could just go around it and conquer India. But you can't do that if you're stuck next to a desert going nowhere and starving to death. Here's where Bartolomeu Dias' voyage changes everything. In 1487, Dias set off to continue Diogo Cão's explorations. By 1488, he reached Namibia, and kept going south, and hit a massive storm, blowing him far out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Normally this would be very bad, but in Dias' case, it was very bad. He used his intricate knowledge of Atlantic trade winds and currents, but found nothing but more ocean. But after 30 days, he followed a northeasterly wind that eventually found land. It turns out that not only did he find a wind that went right to the southern tip of Africa, but he accidentally went the long way all the way around it. After planting some rocks by some rivers, his crew made him go home, but history had already been made. Portugal had now discovered a way to go around Africa, directly to India, and it went right past this little patch of green at the end of the Namib desert they called the Cape of Good Hope. South Africa was never meant to be colonized. There was no grand plan to settle it with Europeans all the way up to the Congo and cause every third biggest international headache in the 20th century. It didn't have Muslim caliphates, it didn't have big trade networks or exotic tropical fruits or exquisite cloth or spices. It didn't even have all that many people to enslave, like the Portuguese holdings in the rest of Africa. What it did have was the only habitable land between Sierra Leone and the Indian Ocean on Portugal's voyages to India. When Vasco da Gama left on the follow-up voyage to finally reach India, he charted a path due south to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, going about 6,000 miles until Diaz's winds brought him to the Cape. And for hundreds of years, this was how you got to India. Now, the Portuguese didn't find the Cape area all that impressive. Diaz's original landing spot at Mosul Bay was good for some trade and repairs, but not as important if you weren't starving to death after a storm hit you in Namibia. Instead of trying to squeeze whatever they could out of a rocky, lightly populated peninsula at the bottom of the continent, they decided to conquer Arabian slave trade islands just slightly farther down at places like Zanzibar, Mozambique, and Sofala. There they could get slaves and resources, steal land with lots of laborers nearby, and scare lots of people into Catholicism, all of which are Portugal's favorite thing. So for a few hundred years, Portugal dominated the coastlines of southeastern Africa and the greater Indian Ocean as the Estado da India, largely lording it over the rest of Europe. Well, after a few hundred years of this, the rest of Europe realized they could do this sort of thing themselves, only better. And so in 1600, England chartered the East India Company, followed in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company. These companies, with the full backing of their respective governments, quickly broke the Portuguese monopolies on Indian trade, with the Dutch forming their headquarters at Batavia, now Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1619. These guys made a ton of money conquering various ports and islands in Indonesia, and they weren't much interested in anything else for the time being. But in 1647, the ship New Harlem was wrecked at the Cape on its way from India, and realized they didn't die when they had to rely on its provisions before being rescued. Since Portugal took all the good midway points, like Brazil, Mozambique, and various islands here and there between Europe and India, the Dutch didn't really have a permanent, reliable restocking point on their route east. So in 1652, Jan van Riebeck landed a group of settlers at modern-day Cape Town. They weren't supposed to be a big priority. All they were supposed to do was build a fort, run some farms, and buy some cows from the local Koi people, so they could restock Dutch ships sailing past them. No big conquests, no slave trades, just veggies and cows. And so, for the next 400 years, white people stayed strictly within the confines of the Cape Peninsula and never bothered anyone ever again. Or to be more precise, they started taking over shit almost immediately. Crop failures forced company officials to allow more and more settlers to venture out in hopes of farming enough food for the settlement, and the Koi Koi peoples around them proved especially susceptible to disease, leaving more farmland to be taken. Once Simon van der Stel took control in 1679, farming growth became an active policy. This got a massive boost from the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, which basically evicted all Protestants from France, and causing a wave of refugees to the Cape. Before the East India Company could do anything about it, the Cape Colony was making French wine and expanding past even the good farmable parts of the Cape area into the Veld. The Dutch East India Company was rather cross about all this. The whole point to Cape Town was that it wasn't supposed to be all that much trouble, just food. Company policies cut down on migration, dictated what farmers had to provide, mandated they provide it to the companies for the ships and all, and put everything back under their control, seeing as it was their idea to have this whole thing here in the first place. But since the company was thousands of miles away in the Netherlands, the Boer farmers sort of didn't do what they were told to do. Since Dutch traditional practices left all land to the first born male heir in the event of the owner's death, any sons past the first one had to keep moving outward to find their own land, and there were more of them than there were people who really cared what they did in the worst part of Africa along the Indian shipping routes. The Dutch tried to tax the hell out of these guys, but by 1795 the farmers in Graaf Rijnet and Swellendam just sort of kicked them out and ran independent governments. This wasn't going to last long, unfortunately, for them. 1795 was the same year that Napoleon conquered the Netherlands, proving that they were weak and useless around the globe, or at least that they were right next to French territory right when a crazy cannon general took control of revolutionary France. Either way, England freaked out and realized that if France could conquer the real Netherlands, they could easily conquer the strategically important Cape on the route to an increasingly British India. So instead, Britain decided to conquer the Cape themselves. That same year, Sir James Henry Craig threatened Cape Townants to surrender and sent armies to subdue the farmers in Graaf Rijnet. By 1814, the Dutch finally surrendered the colony to Britain, setting the stage for a much bigger conflict of visions in the decades to follow. Thanks for watching! If you liked this video, please leave us a thumbs up on your way out. 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