Episode 11 – Jan van Riebeeck sets up the Tavern of the Seas and the amaXhosa/Khoekhoe relationship develops

This is episode 11 and it’s all about Jan van Riebeeck arrival in 1652 and the amaXhosa/KhoeKhoe relationship.

South Africa’s modern community is a melting pot of people and part of that melting story started when the Dutch company the VOC decided to build a refreshment station in Table Bay. But it took quite some time to convince the Heeren 17 to agree to this plan.

Van Riebeeck’s landing was also extremely well documented – the logs he kept and those maintained by the VOC is a vast repository of the past.

We need to talk a little about van Riebeeck. I mentioned a few things last episode, but now we must understand the short, fiery and energetic person more completely. He was lionised as the man who had vision leading the arrival of Europeans who came to live in south Africa – but the tale is not as it seems.

The real distinction for running a proper colony fell to later men such as Simon van der Stel and Hendryk van Rheede whereas van Riebeeck never wanted to remain in Africa.
In the mid-1600s the amaXhosa were still living in the vicinity of the Mbashe River in the modern Transkei and were going through a process of major segmentation as several chiefdoms hived off from the paramountcy. Some of their history was noted in 1554 after Portuguese ship São Bento ran aground at the mouth of the Mbhashe River.