ABSTRACT
The first chapter in the Handbook to consider settler colonialism in Africa is Robert Ross’s. It narrates the foundation of a number of settler polities in South Africa. Settlers were present from the early years of the corporate occupation of the Cape of Good Hope, but it took until the final decades of the eighteenth century for a politically assertive settler community to emerge in southern Africa. The arrival, after 1806, of British settlers and administrators at the Cape antagonised several communities of Afrikaners, who subsequently trekked into the interior to found new polities for themselves. When Afrikaners pushed the frontier of settlement north, and the British Cape government gradually and haphazardly attempted to follow in their wake, conflict with native populations escalated considerably.
