The Dutch East India Company established a supply station at Table Bay, near present-day Cape Town, in 1652. Expanding farms brought settlers into conflict with Khoikhoi and San communities over land, livestock and water. Enslaved people imported from Africa and Asia also shaped the colony's population.

The colony created the multilingual conditions from which Afrikaans literature emerged. Khoisan oral traditions and later poets such as C. Louis Leipoldt and Adam Small offered contrasting memories of land, dispossession, slavery and belonging.