CHAPTER
2
TheWhite Invaders:
TheCapeColony,
1652-1870
The hunting and herding peoples of Southern Africa remained
isolated from the wider world until the end of the fifteenth
century. Throughout that century, Portuguese mariners were
probing further and further from Europe along the western
coast of the African continent.! Eventually, in 1487, Bar-
tholomeu Dias's expedition of two fifty-ton caravels rounded
the Cape peninsula in a storm, anchored in Mossel Bay 170
miles further east, arid sailed another 170 miles along the coast
to Algoa Bay before returning to Lisbon. In 14'97, five years
after Christopher Columbus had crossed the Atlantic under
Spanish patronage, Vasco da Gama led another Portuguese
expedition that rounded the Cape, sailed along the east African
coastline to Malindi (modern Mombasa), and then crossed the
Indian Ocean to Calicut, India, returning to Portugal with two
of his four ships after an absence of twenty-six months. These
epic enterprises were longer, more hazardous, and in the short
run far more rewarding than Columbus's crossingsofthe Atlan-
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