A slave or Khoikhoi servant transporting wine to Cape Town.
The first free burghers’ instructions were simple: a vegetable and fruit garden had to be laid out, a fort and a hospital had to be built and cattle had to be acquired from the native people through barter. Colonisation was in no one’s mind. But it did not escape Van Riebeeck’s attention that the land on the eastern side of Table Mountain, ‘traversed by the loveliest fresh rivers one could desire’, was eminently suitable for agriculture. In 1657 he released nine Company servants to become full time farmers on their plots of 13,3 morgen (about 11,4 hectares).
The Company did not release its European employees in order to implement some grandiose scheme. Some of the VOC’s top officials would have preferred Chinese or free blacks to European farmers, and in their letters they frequently expressed contempt for the abilities of the free burghers. Company officials never ceased to be outraged by what they regarded as the ordinary burghers’ preposterous demands. Van Riebeeck obviously thought that the burghers ought to be grateful for the freedom they had received and should therefore subordinate their own interests to those of the Company. Van Riebeeck, almost without reflection, believed that the intensive cultivation of land in a rotation system was the best for producing food. It would bring about a neat, compact settlement that would not extend much beyond the shadow of the coastal fort. But such a system of intensive agriculture required an injection of capital, which the burghers did not have, and strenuous labour, for which they had little enthusiasm. Officials in colonies across the world discovered that if slaves or indigenous labour could be found, European immigrants refused to do manual work. Only farmers with labour and capital, and who were farming for themselves, could do the job at the Cape.
Willem Berg’s canteen in Dorp Street, Cape Town.
The farmers living near the Cape market had to operate in a buyers’ market that was heavily tilted in favour of the Company. Wheat had to be offered first to the Company at prices it fixed. The Company also had first claim on vegetables and fruit. It leased the wine trade to contractors, who had to supply wine to the Company at low prices. They had a monopoly to sell wine to the numerous taverns in the port city, which meant that farmers could not retail their own. The sale of meat was leased in a similar way. With burghers instructed to sell their produce to the ships only three days after they had docked in Table Bay, large-scale smuggling of all kinds of products was the order of the day. The prospects for export were not bright. In 1659 Van Riebeeck wrote that ‘to the honour of God the first wine from Cape grapes was produced’. However, the wine was too poor to export in large volumes. The Company rejected appeals from the burghers to export their own produce in its own ships.
