rikaner people originated outside Europe and that this occurred mostly
during the company period.P
The Dutch East India Company's colony at the Cape of Good Hope had
characteristics that distinguished it from other societies. It was fulfilling its
founders' intentions to be a fortified refreshment station on the trade route
between Europe and Asia. But it was much more than a refreshment sta-
tion. It was the home of a small but vital mass of people of European origin
who had become an increasingly independent force in shaping the colonial
society.They owned virtually all the productive land but did not themselves
do the manual labor. They used the labor of slaves, who were continually
being imported from Asia, Madagascar, and Mozambique, and of indige-
nous pastoralists,whom
they had deprived of their land and livestock and
who had been decimated by smallpox. In Cape Town, a cosmopolitan
entrepot, social relations were more fluid than in the countryside, but even
there the free blacks were too few,and the constraints on them too severe,to
blur the increasingly close coincidence between the lines of race and the
lines of class. This picture was complicated still further by events to the
north and east of the arable lands.
The Dutch Colony, I652-I795:
The Pastoral Northeast