Hey! I was recently reading about the history of South Africa and how they were colonised by the Dutch East India Trading company. I would like to know more about the long term impacts/legacys/political structure that the colonisers left behind, and what has changed berfore and after the colonisation.
Even just the VOC (Dutch East India Co.) era (1652-1795, really) is a huge target, and its reverberations in law, sociocultural practice, and attitudes towards the land and its people are one of the main defining forces of what South Africa would eventually become--together with more local actors (Khoesan and Bantu-speaking as well as "settler") and the British, of course.
Effectively you're asking a textbook-sized question here, so it would help to break it up--most institutions (law, for example, as a pastiche of English common and Roman-Dutch law) and the economic structure of the country (built on Dutch and then British iterations of master-servant regulations) have deep roots that tap into that period, even when the influence is not a direct one. Nigel Worden's The Making of Modern South Africa (5th ed., 2011) gets into some of this, although not always directly in relation to the VOC era--but he is a historian of the VOC period so you can expect an awareness there.
Hi! Interesting period, to be sure.
Did you have specific questions about it? Even if your question is just asking for reading recommendations, having a specific question or set of questions will be a great help to anyone offering a reply.