page_title: Dutch diaspora
section_title: South Africa
hierarchical_section_title: Dutch diaspora / South Africa
caption_attribution_description: The Voortrekkers
context_page_description: The Dutch diaspora consists of Dutch people and their descendants living outside the Netherlands.
  Emigration from the Netherlands has been occurring for at least four hundred years, and may be traced back to the international presence of the Dutch Empire and its monopoly on mercantile shipping in many parts of the world. Dutch people settled permanently in a number of former Dutch colonies or trading enclaves abroad, namely the Dutch Caribbean, the Dutch Cape Colony, the Dutch East Indies, Surinam, and New Netherland. Since the end of World War II, the largest proportion of Dutch emigrants have moved to Anglophone countries, namely Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, mainly seeking better employment opportunities. Postwar emigration from the Netherlands peaked between 1948–63, with occasional spikes in the 1980s and the mid-2000s. Cross-border migration to Belgium and Germany has become more common since 2001, driven by the rising cost of housing in major Dutch cities.
context_section_description: The Cape of Good Hope was first settled by Europeans under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (also known by its Dutch initials VOC), which established a victualing station there in 1652 to provide its outward bound fleets with fresh provisions and a harbour of refuge during the long sea journey from Europe to Asia. Since the primary purpose of the Cape settlement at the time was to stock provisions for passing Dutch ships, the VOC offered grants of farmland to its employees under the condition they would cultivate grain for company warehouses, and released them from their contracts to save on their wages. Prospective employees had to be married Dutch citizens, considered "of good character" by the Company, and had to commit to spending at least twenty years on the African continent. They were issued with a letter of freedom, known as a "vrijbrief", which released them from company service, and received farms of thirteen and a half morgen each. However, the new farmers were also subject to heavy restrictions: they were ordered to focus on cultivating grain, and each year their harvest was to be sold exclusively to Dutch officials at fixed prices. They were forbidden from growing tobacco, producing vegetables for any purpose other than personal consumption, or purchasing cattle from the native tribes at rates which differed from those set by the Company. With time, these restrictions and other attempts by the colonial authorities to control the European population resulted in successive generations of settlers and their descendants becoming increasingly localised in their loyalties and national identity and hostile towards the colonial government.
  Relatively few Dutch women accompanied the first Dutch settlers to the Cape of Good Hope, and one natural consequence of the unbalanced gender ratio was that between 1652 and 1672 some 75% of children born to slaves in the colony had Dutch fathers. The majority of slaves had been imported from the East Indies (Indonesia), India, Madagascar, and parts of eastern Africa. This resulted in the formation of a new ethnic group, the Cape Coloureds, most of whom adopted the Dutch language and were instrumental in shaping it into a new regional dialect, Afrikaans.
  In 1691, there were at least 660 Dutch people living at the Cape of Good Hope. This had increased to about 13,000 by the end of Dutch rule, or one half of the Cape's European population. The remaining Europeans settled during the Dutch colonial era were Germans or French Huguenots, reflecting the multi-national nature of the VOC workforce and its settlements. Thereafter the number of people of Dutch ancestry at the Cape became difficult to estimate, due in part to the almost universal adoption of the Dutch language and the Dutch Reformed Church by those of German or French origin, as well as a significant degree of intermarriage. Since the late nineteenth century, the term Afrikaner has been evoked to describe white South Africans descended from the Cape's original Dutch-speaking settlers, regardless of ethnic heritage.
  The Netherlands lost the Cape Colony to a British invasion in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars. Following the end of that conflict, the Cape was formally ceded to Great Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Many influential South Africans of Dutch descent led the Afrikaner community in resisting the imposition of the English language and British laws. One such example was Christoffel Brand, son of a former senior VOC official, who became the first Speaker of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope. Brand argued that "England has taken from the old colonists of the Cape everything that was dear to them: their country, their laws, their customs, their slaves, their money, yes even their mother tongue...[they] had done everything to prove that they wanted to be British, while their conquerors had continually worked to remind them they were Hollanders." In 1830, De Zuid-Afrikaan was started as a Dutch-language newspaper to counter the dominant influence of English journalism in the Western Cape. 
caption: Boer Voortrekkers in South Africa
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