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Who conquered South Africa?

A company, then an empire, then a settler state built out of both — and four centuries of peoples on the other side of the ledger.

In short

Who conquered South Africa?

The Dutch first, then the British. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) took the Cape from 1652 and broke the Khoekhoe and San. Britain seized the Cape in 1795 and permanently in 1806, then conquered the Xhosa across nine frontier wars, the Zulu kingdom in 1879, and the Boer republics in 1899–1902. The conquest was sealed politically by the Union of South Africa in 1910 and legally extended as apartheid from 1948 until 1994.

"Who conquered South Africa" has no single name in it, which is exactly what makes the country the clearest case study in how colonialism actually works. Conquest here was serial: a trading company became a settler society, an empire took the settler society, the empire then conquered the indigenous kingdoms and finally the settlers themselves — and the settlers inherited the whole apparatus and ran it for another eighty-four years[1].

Reference

Who controlled South Africa, and when

Before 1652
Khoekhoe, San, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and Pedi polities — no European presence beyond passing ships
1652–1795
Dutch East India Company (VOC) at the Cape; slavery from 1658
1795–1803
Britain — first occupation of the Cape
1803–1806
Batavian Republic — the Cape briefly returned to Dutch rule
1806–1910
Britain — the Cape, Natal (1843), and after 1902 the Transvaal and Orange River Colony
1910–1948
Union of South Africa — self-governing British dominion, whites-only franchise
1948–1994
National Party apartheid state; republic from 1961
Since April 1994
Democratically elected government of South Africa

Conquest one

The VOC and the Khoekhoe, 1652–1795

The Dutch East India Company did not arrive as a conquering army. It arrived to grow vegetables for crews bound for Batavia, and within a generation was importing enslaved people from Madagascar, Mozambique, India and the Indonesian archipelago to work farms held by released company servants. The Khoekhoe, who had pastured the Cape for millennia, were dispossessed by land grants, punitive commando raids and the smallpox epidemic of 1713 carried in on company ships. By 1800 they had been reduced from independent herders to a landless rural workforce.

Conquest two

Britain, the Xhosa and the Zulu, 1806–1879

Britain took the Cape for the sea route to India and stayed for what lay inland. Nine frontier wars against the Xhosa between 1779 and 1879 pushed the colonial boundary steadily east. Natal was annexed in 1843. In 1879 Britain invaded Zululand — losing an entire column at Isandlwana in January before destroying the kingdom by July — and broke the Pedi in the same campaigning season[2].

“So little did we know of what was likely to come, that we walked round the British camp at Mafeking and laughed.”
Sol Plaatje · Mafeking Diary (1900)

Conquest three

Britain against the Boers, 1880–1902

The last people Britain conquered in South Africa were the descendants of the first colonisers. The First Boer War (1880–81) restored Transvaal self-government; the Second (1899–1902), fought over the Witwatersrand goldfields, did not. Kitchener's scorched-earth campaign drove roughly 115,000 Boer and Black civilians into internment camps where some 28,000 Boers and at least 20,000 Black Africans died of disease, exposure and malnutrition. The Treaty of Vereeniging turned the republics into British colonies in 1902.

The inheritance

Conquest handed over, 1910–1994

In 1910 Britain merged four colonies into the Union of South Africa and handed the machinery to a whites-only parliament. Three years later the Natives Land Act confined roughly 67% of the population to about 7% of the land. Apartheid, legislated from 1948, did not invent that order — it codified a colonial one. The conquest ended, in the only sense that matters to the conquered, in April 1994.

Read on

The full history

For the whole arc, read Colonial South Africa. For the dates of the British takeover specifically, see When did Britain take over South Africa?

Questions

Frequently asked

Who conquered South Africa?
Two European powers, in sequence. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) took the Cape from 1652 and dispossessed the Khoekhoe and San. Britain seized the Cape in 1795 and permanently in 1806, then conquered the Xhosa in nine frontier wars, the Zulu kingdom in 1879, and the Boer republics in the war of 1899–1902. The conquest was completed politically by the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Who invaded South Africa?
The Dutch East India Company arrived in 1652 as a trading garrison and expanded into a settler colony. Britain invaded twice as a military power — landing at Simon's Town in 1795 and again in 1806 — and thereafter invaded the interior polities: the Xhosa chiefdoms, the Zulu kingdom in 1879, the Pedi, and the Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
Who controlled South Africa, and when?
The VOC controlled the Cape from 1652 to 1795; Britain from 1795 to 1803; the Batavian Republic from 1803 to 1806; Britain again from 1806 to 1910; the white-minority Union and then republic from 1910 to 1994; and a democratically elected government since April 1994. Indigenous polities — Khoekhoe, San, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Pedi and others — controlled the territory before and, in the interior, well into the nineteenth century.
Who was conquered in South Africa?
The Khoekhoe pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers of the Cape, reduced to a landless labour force by land seizure, commando raids and the 1713 smallpox epidemic; the Xhosa chiefdoms of the eastern frontier, defeated across nine wars between 1779 and 1879; the Zulu kingdom, destroyed as an independent power in 1879; the Pedi and other northern polities; and finally the Afrikaner republics, annexed by Britain in 1902.
Who colonised South Africa first — the Dutch or the British?
The Dutch. The VOC settled the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, 143 years before Britain's first seizure in 1795. Britain took over an existing settler society whose legal and labour architecture — slavery, land grants, commando raids — was already in place.
Did South Africa ever defeat its colonisers militarily?
In individual battles, yes. The Zulu destroyed a British column at Isandlwana in January 1879; the Boer republics defeated Britain in the First Boer War of 1880–81 and won back self-government. Neither reversed the wider conquest. What ended white-minority rule was mass internal resistance, strikes, international sanctions and the negotiated settlement of 1990–94.

References

Sources — The conquest of South Africa

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.