San hunter-gatherers, South Africa's first human inhabitants, moved freely through the Cape Peninsula for tens of millennia before being edged into the interior some 2000 years ago by the arrival of sheep-herding Khoikhoi migrants from the north. Over the next 1600 years the Khoikhoi held sway over the Cape pastures. Portuguese mariners, in search of a stopoff point en route to East Africa and the East Indies, first rounded the Cape in the 1480s, and named it Cabo de Boa Esperanza (Cape of Good Hope), but their attempts at trading with the Khoikhoi were short-lived, and no Europeans seriously attempted to create a permanent stopping-off point until the Dutch East India Company (VOC) cruised into Table Bay in 1652 and set up shop.

The VOC, the world's largest corporation at the time, planned little more at the Cape than a halfway stop to provide fresh produce to their ships travelling between Europe and the East in search of spices, slaves and profit. Their small landing party, led by Jan van Riebeeck , built a mud fort where the Grand Parade now stands and established vegetable gardens , which they hoped to work with Khoikhoi labour.

The Khoikhoi were understandably reluctant to exchange their traditional lifestyle for the restrictions of formal employment, so van Riebeeck began to import slaves in 1658. The growth of the Dutch settlement alarmed the Khoikhoi, who declared war in 1659 in an attempt to drive the Europeans out; however, they were defeated and had to cede the Peninsula to the colonists.

During the early eighteenth century, Western Cape Khoikhoi society disintegrated, German and French religious refugees swelled the European population, and slavery became the economic backbone of the colony, which was now a minor colonial village of canals and low, whitewashed, flat-roofed houses. By 1750, Cape Town had become a town of over 1000 buildings, with 2500 inhabitants.

In 1795, Britain , deeply concerned by Napoleonic expansionism, grabbed Cape Town to secure the strategic sea route to the East. This move was not welcomed by the settlement's Calvinist Dutch burghers, but was better news for the substantially Muslim slave population, as Britain ordered the abolition of slavery . The British also allowed freedom of religion , and South Africa's first mosque was soon built by freed slaves, in Dorp Street in the Bo-Kaap.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Cape Town had become one of the most cosmopolitan places anywhere and a sea port of major significance, growing under the influence of the British Empire. The Commercial Exchange was completed in 1819, followed by department stores, banks and insurance company buildings. In the 1860s the docks were begun, Victoria Road from the city to Sea Point was built, and the suburban railway line to Wynberg was laid. Since slavery had been abolished, Victorian Cape Town had to be built with convict labour and that of prisoners of war transported from the colonial frontier in Eastern Cape. Racial segregation wasn't far behind, and an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1901 gave the town council an excuse to establish Ndabeni , Cape Town's first black location, near Maitland.

In 1910, Cape Town was drawn into the political centre of the newly federated South Africa when it became the legislative capital of the Union. Africans and coloureds, excluded from the cosy deal between Boers and the British, had to find expression in the workplace. In 1919 they flexed their collective muscle on the docks, forming the mighty Industrial and Commercial Union , which boasted 200,000 members in its heyday.

Increasing industrialization brought an influx of black workers, who were housed in the locations of Guguletu and Nyanga , built in 1945. Three years later, the National Party came to power, promising a fearful white electorate that it would reverse the flow of Africans to the cities. In Cape Town it introduced a policy favouring coloureds for jobs, admitting only African men in employment, and forbidding the construction of family accommodation for Africans.

Langa township became a stronghold of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which organized a peaceful anti-pass demonstration in Cape Town on April 8, 1960. Police fired on the crowd, killing three people and wounding many more. As a result, the government declared a state of emergency, and banned anti-apartheid opposition groups, including the PAC and ANC.
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