Boer HistoryFree Burghers at the Cape
From Refreshment Station to Freemen
The Cape outpost founded in 1652 under Jan van Riebeeck was meant first as a halfway house for VOC fleets — water, greens, meat, and a fort on the shore. Company servants worked the gardens and herds; wages and rations sat on the Company’s books. Within the first months the commander already noted stretches of fertile ground that his garrison could never till alone, and wondered whether free Netherlanders — or Chinese farmers of the kind he had known in Asia — might work land under conditions that still served the fleets. [2][3]
Batavia and Banda already knew a class of freemen released from Company service to farm under rules. At the Cape the idea moved slowly from private garden plots — petty officers drawing money instead of rations and selling a few vegetables — toward full release. Individuals might cultivate for private benefit while still on the payroll; the free burghers of 1657 became something else: subjects of the Company, not its wage servants. [3][2][9]
By late 1656 the directors had authorised cautious experiment: freemen might take over much of the grain and fresh supply that otherwise cost garrison wages. Van Riebeeck had already trialled cornland at the ronde doornbossjen beyond the mountain — wheat, oats, beans — to test wind damage away from Table Valley. Year-page politics of 1657 sit beside this institutional shift from station to settlement of freemen. [2]
Twenty-one February 1657: The First Grants
For more than a year officers and workmen had weighed whether free life would beat wages and security. At length nine men determined to try. They formed two parties, chose ground, and on 21 February 1657 presented themselves before the council in the commander’s hall. Present that day were Van Riebeeck, sergeant Jan van Harwarden, and bookkeeper Roelof de Man; secretary Caspar van Weede took the proceedings at length. Ground was allotted to the first burghers in South Africa. [3]
In a tiny colony the novelty caused excitement. Land for personal cultivation — not a melon patch beside barracks, but real tracts for wheat and stock, released from Company employ — seemed almost too bold to believe. Many servants hesitated to queue for applications: underpaid they still had security; freemen risked debt, drought, and the hard ground beyond the fort. [9]
Two Colonies on the Liesbeek
The first party of five — Herman Remajenne (also written Harmansz / Harman), Jan de Wacht (Jan Maartensz), Jan van Passel, Warnar Cornelissen, and Roelof Janssen — chose land just beyond the Liesbeek and named it Groeneveld (Green Country). They meant to apply themselves chiefly to wheat. Because Remajenne stood first among them, they called themselves Herman’s Colony. [3]
The second party of four — Stephen Botma (then usually Stephen Janssen — Stephen son of John; Botma appears more than twenty years later), Hendrik Elbrechts, Otto Janssen, and Jacob Cornelissen — took ground on the nearer side of the Liesbeek and named it Hollandsche Thuin (Dutch Garden). They intended tobacco as well as grain. Both companies meant also to raise vegetables, cattle, pigs and poultry. [3]
The river itself — a short course from the eastern slopes of Table Mountain toward the Salt River and the bay — offered water, alluvial banks, and a line of separation from the Company’s principal gardens. The two colonies sat on opposite banks, close enough for mutual support, with paths skirting the mountain toward Rondebosch and the fort. Redoubts such as Duynhoop and Coornhoop later stiffened the perimeter. [3]
Terms of Release under the Cape Council
The conditions under which the nine were released from Company service, as first settled at the February council, included:
- full possession of ground they could bring under cultivation within three years, free of taxes during that term;
- after three years a reasonable land tax, with liberty to sell or lease only after notice to the commander;
- provisions from the magazine at the same price as for married Company servants;
- fish from the rivers for their own use;
- free sale of vegetables to ships’ crews when the Company did not need them — but no boarding of ships until three days after arrival, and no strong drink brought ashore;
- no taps; attention to ground and cattle;
- no purchase of cattle or other goods from the Khoikhoi — under penalty of forfeiture;
- cattle bought from the Company at twenty-five gulden per ox or cow and three gulden per sheep, and sold only to the Company at those prices;
- one-tenth of cattle reared paid for pasturage (not pigs or poultry);
- implements, food, guns, powder and lead on credit at Fatherland cost, repaid in produce, with a Company mortgage;
- subjection to laws of the Fatherland and India and to future laws for Company service and community welfare — amendable by the supreme authorities.
The two parties took possession at once and built houses of sod and thatch before the rains — forests close enough for timber, other materials at hand. Implements were scarce at first, then supplied. What looked generous still left the freemen tightly tied to magazine, fixed prices, and Company monopoly of the cattle trade. [3]
Van Goens Revises the Terms
On 17 March 1657 a homeward ship brought Ryklof van Goens, with authority to correct what he found amiss. He judged the freemen’s conditions improvable and altered several clauses. Plots along the Liesbeek were fixed at forty roods by two hundred — equal to about 13 morgen — free of taxes for twelve years (not three). Farming utensils were to be repaired free for three years. Freemen might purchase from the natives until further order, provided they paid no more than the Company; the price of horned cattle between freemen and Company fell from twenty-five to twelve gulden. Penalty for selling cattle except to the Company was set at twenty rixdollars. To keep minds on grain, freemen were not to plant tobacco or even more vegetables than their own tables needed. [3]
Only married men of good character and of Dutch or German birth were to receive ground; upon request, wives and children might be sent from Europe; in every case they were to agree to remain twenty years in South Africa. Unmarried men might be freed as mechanics, for special useful trades, or as hired hands to landholders. Burghers were to keep guard by turns in redoubts built for their protection, and were not to shoot game except noxious beasts — with raised premiums for lion, hyena and leopard. [3]
One of the most respectable burghers was to sit and vote in the council of justice whenever freemen’s cases were tried, holding office as burgher councillor for a year. Stephen Botma received the first term. Van Goens’s written instructions told the Cape government to encourage freemen because they would relieve the Company of wages: about one hundred persons then drew pay in South Africa; when farmers multiplied, that number was to fall toward seventy. [3]
Trades, Skills and Further Free Papers
A commencement made, applications multiplied. Many who received free papers later re-entered Company service or left for Europe; others left names still known in the country. Within about a twelvemonth further free papers went, among others, to:
- Wouter Mostert — miller; contracted to build a mill driven by the Fresh River after a horse mill proved wanting, then ran it on shares of grinding fees;
- Hendrik Boom — the gardener already central to the Company’s plots;
- farmers such as Pieter Visagie, Jacob Cloete, Jan Reyniers, Caspar Brinkman, Hans Faesbenger, Jacob Theunissen, Jan Rietvelt, Otto van Vrede, Simon Janssen;
- hired farm servants including Herman Ernst, Cornelis Claassen, Thomas Robertson (an Englishman), and others;
- hunters Christian Janssen and Peter Cornelissen, with a monopoly of game at fixed prices and leave to keep a tap;
- Leendert Cornelissen — strip of forest to cut timber at council-fixed prices;
- tailors Elbert Dirksen and Hendrik van Surwerden;
- Jan Vetteman — surgeon of the fort, with a monopoly of practice;
- waggon- and plough-maker Roelof Zieuwerts; fishermen Martin Vlockaart, Pieter Jacobs, Jan Adriansen; sawyers and carpenters Pieter Kley, Dirk Vreem, Pieter Heynse.
The free population was never only grain farmers. It was a thin mesh of skilled hands — mill, hunt, timber, cloth, medicine — still priced and licensed by the council, still dependent on the magazine and the fleet’s appetite for fresh food.
Burgher Councillor, Second Seat, and Militia
Stephen Botma’s single seat on justice cases was the first formal freeman voice inside Company courts. The following year he was joined by Hendrik Boom as a second burgher councillor — two freemen where free interests were on trial, still far short of a seat on the council of policy that made law. [3]
Freemen were enrolled as militia; a council of militia took shape beside the political board. Guard turns at the redoubts were not optional civic colour — they were part of the price of freehold on an exposed river line. Later decades would thicken burgher complaint and petition; the institutional seed is already here in 1657–58. [3]
Limits, Growth, and a Farming People
Restrictions that later ages would call harsh were ordinary in a monopoly company built for war and long-distance trade. Individual free trade was not on offer: the Cape existed for the Company’s fleets. Remonstrances against new clamps, fixed wheat prices, and cattle rules appear already in the late 1650s narrative; vines at Wynberg, maize, ale, and more colonists followed in the same crowded years. [3]
Not every free paper made a permanent settler. Re-enlistment and return to Europe thinned the first lists. Those who stayed — Botma, Cloete, Visagie, Boom, Mostert and their neighbours — anchored a freehold farming edge beyond the fort gardens. In ordinary speech the rural freemen would in time be called boers — farmers — long before that word named inland republics. The institutional beginning is the 1657 release: freehold strips on the Liesbeek, Company prices, militia duty, and a thin burgher voice in court.
For the calendar of that year see 1657. For the earthen fort these freemen still looked to for defence, see Fort de Goede Hoop and Castle of Good Hope. Later expansion of free farming, wine, and inland trek is carried on the year pages of the 1660s–1680s and on the Huguenot settlement story at French Huguenots at the Cape.