ABSTRACT
The development of apartheid was firmly rooted in the colonial era. The country was first settled by European colonists under the Dutch East India Company in 1652. In 1806 the colony was occupied on a permanent basis by Great Britain. Although at the end of the Dutch period there were only 25,000 European settlers in the country, they had occupied land extending up to 1,000 kilometres from the original settlement at Cape Town through the evolution of an extensive farming system. Within the isolation which this system imposed, a distinct community evolved, later to become the Afrikaner nation. In the British period, South Africa was not perceived as a land of opportunity to rival the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand as a destination for emigrants (Christopher 1988a). As a result European immigration was never on a scale whereby British immigrants outnumbered the Afrikaners. Indeed between 1815 and 1914 less than 4 per cent of emigrants from the United Kingdom went to South Africa (Figure 1.1). However, the British contribution to the country in the administrative and commercial fields was profound.
