Cape Town Founded

By the mid-seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company dominated the sea route between Europe and Asia, and its ships required a midway station to take on fresh water, vegetables, and meat to combat scurvy on the long voyage around southern Africa. The company decided to establish a permanent refreshment post at the Cape of Good Hope.

In April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck, an official of the company, landed at Table Bay with a party of settlers and built a fort and gardens. The post grew into the settlement of Cape Town, the first permanent European foothold in what would become South Africa.

The Dutch traded with and increasingly displaced the local Khoikhoi pastoralists, imported enslaved people from Asia and elsewhere in Africa, and encouraged free burghers to farm the surrounding land, giving rise to the Afrikaner community. Cape Town remained under company control until the British seized it during the Napoleonic Wars, formally acquiring the Cape Colony in 1814.