On April 9, 1652, Jan van Riebeck stepped ashore in Table Bay with orders to plant a kitchen garden and build a small fort. He came not to found a country but to supply passing ships with fresh vegetables and cattle. Twelve years later, he left behind a functioning colony that had pushed the Khoikhoi off their land, planted the Cape's first vineyards, and drawn the first boundary between European and African land in southern Africa.
On April 9, 1652, a Dutchman named Johan van Riebeck stepped ashore in Table Bay and began marking out the site of a fort. He was a surgeon turned merchant who had served the Dutch East India Company in Japan, Greenland, India, and Brazil. He was thirty-three years old, practical, energetic, and completely devoted to his employers. What he built that day — with his men discharging cargo while others threw up earthworks, and the head gardener Hendrik Boom beginning to prepare the first plots of soil — was not intended to become a city. It was a kitchen garden. A refreshment station. A place where passing ships could take on fresh meat and vegetables before the next long leg to India. Neither van Riebeck nor the Dutch East India Company had any idea they were founding a country.
The Man the Company Chose
The Dutch East India Company in 1652 was the greatest trading organization the world had ever seen. Greater than Venice or Genoa or the Hanseatic League. Greater than the King of Spain. Its capital was subscribed by all the towns and states of Holland, every province represented on the Council of Seventeen that managed it. The Seventeen could declare war, make peace, recruit armies, and fit out navies. They ran a vast empire in the East with fortresses and tributary princes and a system of government so precise it worked like clockwork. The decision to plant a refreshment station at the Cape came from two practical-minded men named Jansen and Proot, who had been stranded at the Cape for five months when their ship, the Haarlem, was wrecked in the bay. They had grown vegetables, bartered cattle from the Khoikhoi, and fed the scurvy-stricken crew of the rescue ship that eventually came. Then they wrote a clear-headed memo to the Seventeen explaining what could be done. The Seventeen submitted this memo to a young official in their service named Johan van Riebeck, who had himself spent three weeks salvaging the Haarlem's cargo. His reply was confident and detailed — he knew what could grow there, what ships would need, how to deal with the natives. He was given the job. His portrait shows a handsome man with dark cavalier locks, a van Dyck moustache, black piercing eyes, and a beautiful hand resting on his chest. His wife Maria de Querelleri was, by all accounts, equally striking. When they said goodbye to their friends in Amsterdam and sailed for an unknown country with their small children, the voyage was rough enough from the start — the lead ship was so badly ballasted that a channel gale laid it on its beam-ends — but they made it to the Cape on April 4, 1652. Five days later, van Riebeck went ashore.
Van Riebeck came not to found a colony but to plant a kitchen garden for passing ships. What he actually created was something far larger — a country.
The First Terrible Winter
Nothing went right at first. The ground was hard and cracked. The tarpaulins that served as roofs tore in the fierce south-easter winds, and floods washed away the garden soil. The men were ill-lodged, cold, overworked, and dying of dysentery. Entry after entry in van Riebeck's diary has the same tone of stoical misery: "About fifty men at work — the rest all ill; nourished them with wine and some greens grown from our Dutch seeds. Since our arrival not more than one cow and calf have been obtained — life is growing a misery, one after another falls ill, and many die." And three days after a beautiful crop of peas and cabbages and wheat: "Gardens flooded with all the crops spoilt — a miserable sight." But van Riebeck replanted five days later. And the rain did its work. By the southern autumn, the grass was coming in deep and green everywhere, and with it came the Khoikhoi nomads, following their seasonal grazing patterns. Sometimes herds estimated at twenty thousand cattle and sheep were visible from the fort. Slowly, laboriously, through barter — a cow for two copper plates, a sheep for as much tobacco and wire as the sheep was long with its tail — the Dutch built up their herd. On March 1, 1653, the last rations of bread were distributed. On March 2, a ship appeared over the horizon. Then another. The crisis was over.
Dealing with the Khoikhoi — First to Creep, Then to Go
Van Riebeck's native policy was summed up in the Dutch East India Company's famous phrase: "First to creep and then to go." Win their trust with tobacco, brandy, rice, and music. Draw them close. Then use their divisions and jealousies to serve the Company's interests. The Khoikhoi were entertained in the fort with tobacco and arrack and food. They were shown themselves in mirrors — which terrified those who'd never seen their own reflection. Their chief Sousoa was seated on a mat in the Commander's room and treated to cheese, fresh bread, and sugar, and entertained on the claversingel while his wife sat beside him and the Dutch poured out wine and played rollicking tunes. Van Riebeck's diary describes the scene with a certain satisfaction. But the underlying tension was there from the beginning. When the Khoikhoi stole back cattle they'd sold, van Riebeck dreamed of seizing both the cattle and the people and sending them as slaves to India. When they killed a herd-boy and drove off forty-two cattle on a Sunday morning while the Dutch were at sermon, he plotted his revenge for five years before the "suitable opportunity" came. Eventually the land question exploded. The Dutch were expanding, taking the best grazing ground. The Khoikhoi complained plainly: "Have we then no cause to prevent you from obtaining cattle, as having many you cover our pastures with them? And if you say the land is not big enough for us both, who ought then in justice to retire, the real owner or the foreign usurper?" Van Riebeck told them they had lost the land in a defensive war and must leave. He built a line of three little forts across the peninsula from the Devil's Peak to the shore, linked by a thorn hedge, and pushed the Khoikhoi outside it. It was the first boundary drawn in South Africa between European and African land.
The kitchen garden van Riebeck planted in Table Valley was the beginning of everything — the fort, the town, the thorn hedge boundary, and eventually the country of South Africa.
Van Riebeck governed the Cape for twelve years. He planted the colony's first cherry. He pressed the first Cape wine from Muscadel grapes. He built roads and blockhouses, fought lions and hippos, sent expeditions into the interior, and dealt with French pirates and English rivals with the same cool Machiavellian intelligence he brought to everything. When he finally left for Batavia in 1662, he had founded a country — though he never quite intended to. His son Abraham, born at the Cape, eventually became Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. The family did well. And in the valley below Table Mountain, the colony he left behind grew and grew.
