Jan van Riebeeck established the colony as a re-supply and layover port for vessels of the VOC trading with Asia.

[2] After King Louis XIV of France issued the Edict of Fontainebleau in October 1685 (revoking the Edict of Nantes of 1598), thereby ending protection of the right of Huguenots in France to practise Protestant worship without persecution from the state, the colony attracted many Huguenot settlers, who eventually mixed with the general Vryburgher population.

The company, in an effort to control these migrants, established a magistracy at Swellendam in 1745 and another at Graaff Reinet in 1786, and declared the Gamtoos River as the eastern frontier of the colony, only to see the Trekboers cross it soon afterwards.

In order to keep out Cape native pastoralists, organised increasingly under the resisting, rising house of Xhosa, the VOC agreed in 1780 to make the Great Fish River the boundary of the colony.

Traders of the United East India Company (VOC), under the command of Jan van Riebeeck, were the first people to establish a European colony in South Africa.

During a visit in 1672, the high-ranking Commissioner Arnout van Overbeke made a formal purchase of the Cape territory, although already ceded in 1660, his reason was to "prevent future disputes".

[6] The VOC favoured the idea of freemen at the Cape and many settlers requested to be discharged in order to become free burghers; as a result, Jan van Riebeeck approved the notion on favorable conditions and earmarked two areas near the Liesbeek River for farming purposes in 1657.

[7] After the first settlers spread out around the Company station, nomadic European livestock farmers, or Trekboeren, moved more widely afield, leaving the richer, but limited, farming lands of the coast for the drier interior tableland.

This prompted Great Britain, at war with France, to occupy the territory that same year as a way to better control the seas on the way to India.

The British sent a fleet of nine warships which anchored at Simon's Town and, following the defeat of the Dutch militia at the Battle of Muizenberg, took control of the territory.

In 1797 their "recorded" populations were:[8] During this period a significant proportion of marriages were interracial, this is at least partially attributed to a lack of 'White' or 'Christian' women within the colony.