Dias called it Cape of Storms before Portugal renamed hope
Cape Town is South Africa’s legislative capital, oldest city, and Parliament’s seat, second in population only to Johannesburg. Bartolomeu Dias reached the shore in 1488 as Cabo das Tormentas; John II of Portugal later rebranded the point Cape of Good Hope.
In 1510 Francisco de Almeida and sixty-four men died at the Battle of Salt River against local Gorinhaiqua resistance—an early warning that the refreshment station would not be uncontested.
The oldest human remains in the region came from Peers Cave in Fish Hoek in the late 1920s and have been radiocarbon dated to the mid-Holocene, roughly 5400 to 5100 BCE. Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Danish ships later stopped in Table Bay to swap tobacco, copper and iron with Khoikhoi clans such as the Gorinhaiqua for fresh meat. In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck arrived for the Dutch East India Company to set up a supply station and the Fort de Goede Hoop, and labour shortages led the company to import enslaved people from Indonesia and Madagascar, ancestors of many Cape Coloured and Cape Malay families.
Britain seized the Cape in 1795, handed it back in 1803, and took it again after the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806. Abolition in 1833 freed more than 5,500 enslaved people in the city, nearly a third of its inhabitants. The colony gained its own parliament in 1854 and a prime minister in 1872, voting under the non-racial Cape Qualified Franchise, and between 1891 and 1901 the population jumped from 67,000 to 171,000. In 1910 Cape Town became legislative capital of the new Union of South Africa, though Johannesburg had overtaken it in size by 1936.
After the National Party's 1948 victory, the 1950 Group Areas Act drove residents out of mixed suburbs, most notoriously District Six. Students from Langa, Gugulethu and Nyanga marched in 1976, and Robben Island, 10 kilometres out in Table Bay, held Nelson Mandela, who gave his first speech after release from the City Hall balcony on 11 February 1990. Nobel Square at the V&A Waterfront now honours Luthuli, Tutu, de Klerk and Mandela, and in 2014 the city was named World Design Capital.
Source: Cape Town
