The first arrival of Muslims in South Africa took place in the 17th century, when Malay slaves were brought to the Cape. This was followed by the arrival of free Muslims and political exiles from Sumatra. By the mid 18th century, Islam had spread significantly amongst the Cape slave population. By 1804, Muslims had been granted religious freedom and in 1805, they had been allocated a piece of land - the Tana Baru Cemetery - for burial purposes. In 1886, the cemetery was closed under the Public Health Act of 1883. This left the Muslim community with no alternate burial ground. On 17 January 1886, in defiance of the closure, 3000 Muslims buried a child at Tana Baru. This was followed by a march. General unrest continued in the Cape for another three days. The Tana Baru cemetery uprising was one of the most significant political events in the 19th Century history of Cape Muslims. In commemoration of the 124th anniversary, a remembrance march will be held on this day in 2010 from the Boorhanool Centre to the Tana Baru Cemetery. Related: SAHO Feature: History of Muslims in South Africa SAHO Archive: 1804-1899

The newly appointed British High Commissioner for Southern Africa delivers to Cetshwayo the Zulu king to disband his army, handover offenders. Frere who was appointed in 1877 wanted to pursue the idea of creating a Confederation of all Southern African territories, with a view to being appointed Governor of the entire region. Frere immediately realised that Cetshwayo was a major stumbling block in the attempt to bring all of Southern Africa under British control. He was thus determined to break Cetshwayo's resistance, hoping that this would pave the way for the British to extend their rule into the interior of the country. Cetshwayo's ruled the Zulu nation at a time when British colonial penetration of the South African hinterland was gaining momentum. Successive British Colonial administrations in Natal, beginning with the occupation of the Territory in 1843, had been wary of provoking a war with the Zulu Kingdom. But with changed circumstances in the 1870s and 1880s as European powers began to take up colonies in Africa. South Africa took on a new significance and importance to the British Colonial Office. As part of the British efforts to gain control of South Africa, Frere's demanded that Cetshwayo disband his army. Meanwhile Cetshwayo who had cultivated a very close friendship with a Scottish hunter and trader John Dunn appointed him as his advisor, especially in his dealings with the British. Dunn was allocated land between the Mhlathuze and Tugela Rivers and installed as a 'chief'. When war between British and the Zulu became inevitable, Dunn who was anxious to keep his chiefdom and wealth approached the British government, offering his services. War broke out between the British and the Zulu and at the battle of Ulundi on 4 July 1879, Cetshwayo's forces were defeated and he was captured and exiled to London until 1883.

Piet Retief completes the manifesto that sets out the reasons why the Voortrekkers are leaving the Cape Colony. It is published in English in the Graham's Town Journal on 2 February 1937. To understand the mass emigration of the Afrikaans frontier farmers out of the Cape Colony it is important to look at the circumstances in the Cape at that time. On the one hand there was ongoing conflict between these farmers and the Xhosa inhabitants on the frontier, as well as growing resentment between the farmers and the British colonial authorities. The farmers argued that because the colonial government limited the activities of the burgher commandos, and refused to let them handle the law and order on the frontier themselves, they could not protect themselves from Xhosa attacks. Furthermore, they blamed the government of not giving them any financial support in the frontier wars and other confrontations with the Xhosa. The conflict on the frontier was an indication of how scarce land had become in the region. Both the Xhosa and Afrikaner farmers needed land to support themselves and their livestock. Land prices had also increased considerably during the 1820s and 1830s. This meant that the younger generation could not afford their own pieces of land, and this problem would surely grow. Another reason for the Great Trek was a lack of labour. In 1828 the government passed Ordinance 50, which outlawed slavery. This Ordinance has been called 'The Magna Carta of the Khoikhoi', as it determined that the Khoikhoi was equal to White people and did not need to carry passes anymore. Not many of these farmers owned slaves, but some did suffer losses with the emancipation of slaves, like Trek leader Gert Maritz. For the frontier farmers, the Ordinance meant less strict control over their servants and farm labourers. It also meant that many labourers left the farms, and many of them formed moving gangs. These plundering gangs were the first grievance Retief mentioned in his manifesto. Many farmers believed that in the country's interior, there was land in abundance (and therefore cheap land), and especially no British government. Between 1834 and 1840 about 15 000 Afrikaners left the Cape Colony permanently. They called themselves 'emigrants' and their mass-trek an 'emigration', but in the late 19th century this mass-movement became known as the Great Trek, and the emigrants Voortrekkers.

The Mfengu (or Fingo in the colonial lexicon) were defeated and left landless by King Shaka's Zulu army, and slowly arrived in Xhosa territory over a period of time. By the 1830's, a centre of Mfengu settlement had been established around the Methodist missionary station in Butterworth (Eastern Cape), where missionary John Ayliff was stationed. By 1835, the relations between the Mfengu and the Xhosa groups under Hinsta had become strained, and the Mfengu were feeling vulnerable without land to call their own. As a result, many Mfengu looked to Ayliff as their source of political patronage (see Frontier Wars for more information). In reply to a letter by the Rev. John Ayliff, on behalf of the Mfengu, Sir Benjamin D'Urban accepted the Mfengu as British subjects on 3 May 1835. In this letter he promised them land in Government Notice No. 14, dated at Ndabakazi. Therefore, the Mfengu became the first of the Nguni people to convert to Christianity, and accede to be subjects of the Crown, or Black 'settlers'. *Note: Mfengu - Although they speak a common language, Xhosa people belong to loosely organized but distinct chiefdoms that have Northern Nguni origins. Since the Mfengu arrived in various areas of Xhosa territory over a period of time, they are considered a Xhosa sub-group.

John Thomas Baines was born in England on 27 November 1820. Apprenticed to a coach painter at a young age, he left for South Africa in 1842 to work as a portrait artist. Baines was first employed as a painter for a cabinet maker, and then as a marine and portrait painter. In 1848, he moved to the Eastern Cape, from where he took three journeys into the interior, one of which was past the Orange River. Baines recorded the Eighth Frontier War and became South Africa's first official war artist. Some years later, he returned to England, where he published Scenery and Events in South Africa (1852). In 1855, Baines joined the Royal Geographical Society's expedition to Australia to work as a storekeeper and artist. This expedition included his exploration of north-west South Africa to determine its suitability for colonial settlement. Due to the extent of his involvement, Mount Baines and the River Baines in Australia were named after him. He became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and was awarded with a medal in 1858. In the same year, Baines was the artist commissioned to David Livingstone's expedition to the Zambezi. Having been dismissed from that commission, he travelled to South West Africa (Namibia) and then to Victoria Falls in present-day Zimbabwe. Ten years later, Baines led an expedition to Matabele King Mizilikazi, and also attended the coronation of King Cetshwayo. Baines fell ill and died in 1875. The journals in which he recorded his experiences in South Africa were published in two volumes in the 1960's. Baine's greatest contribution was his ability to capture South African history through his paintings.

"I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land. I am an African! I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape, they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and independence and they who, as a people, perished in the result. Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again. I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me. In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture is a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done. I am a grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom. My mind and my knowledge of myself are formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert. I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins. I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns. I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence. Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that: I am an African. I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle; the one to redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible. I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image. I know what it signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who subhuman ... I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest... I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings. There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality, the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain. Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage ... Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past, killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self enrichment. All this I know and know to be true because I am an African! Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines, of a people who would not tolerate oppression. I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice. I am an African. I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa ... The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share. The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair. Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now! Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace! However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!" Source: Mbeki, T. in (2003). Sowetan, 18 June, p.17.