Dutch Cape Colony and Huguenot Settlement, 1652–1795

The Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. It expanded into a settler colony supplying ships travelling between Europe and Asia. Farms, vineyards and frontier districts grew through coerced labour, imported slavery and the dispossession of Khoekhoe and San communities, making the colony part of both the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds.

French Huguenot refugees arrived in significant numbers from 1688 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Many settled around Drakenstein and the valley later known as Franschhoek, bringing skills and family networks that were gradually absorbed into a Dutch-speaking colonial society. Their experience joined religious exile to the unequal structures of colonial settlement.

Kate Mosse’s The Map of Bones uses the 1688 Huguenot migration and the landscape around Olifantshoek and Franschhoek to explore displacement, women’s survival and the suppression of family memory. Fiction in this context should also acknowledge slavery, Indigenous resistance and the violence behind settler expansion.