I am Portuguese, born in Angola and today in the forenoon I had an argument with a White South African nationalist/jingo who told me this:
ANC propaganda. How do you steal land from someone who isn’t there? The whites started farming to provision Dutch East Indies Company vessels. It would have been much cheaper to buy produce from locals - only there weren’t any. The whites first met indigenous inhabitants a long way north of the Cape. The documents still in existence in Holland prove it. The authors of those documents had no reason to falsify anything. They did not, after all, know that eventually the place would be governed by incompetent corrupt politicians out, as far any outsider can tell, for a quick buck.
What do you think, is he correct?
Ah, the 'empty land' thing. It's what in technical terms is called "racist bullshit lies". More can always be said on this matter; for the meantime, we can turn to several previous posts.
u/khosikulu, whose flair is specifically 'Southern Africa | European Expansion', has previously addressed the Empty Land myth in these threads: this is fairly recent, and they also address the myth here, along with u/AlotOfReading, both examining an article on the matter. There's also this thread, while they also examine the Mfecane here, should that matter also come up.
People were already there--pastoralists, who moved seasonally, not true nomads. I won't port over the answer linked by /u/DanKensington (or that I provided in /r/AfricanHistory) but this is an important bit for academics here. We've really come quite some way in our understanding of how people lived, where they lived, and what relations were like, but all the documents and even the celebratory paintings (like CD Bell's 1850s painting of the 1652 landing of Van Riebeeck, a very famous one; here's an image) shows that people were there. The Portuguese depended on them to trade fresh meat; the VOC (United East India Company) in fact planned their settlement partially around that expectation. The land was expropriated from others, full stop, whether or not one feels it was done justly or requires some kind of redress.
If you have access to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, much about our current understanding of the Dutch colony can also be found in the essay by Gerald Groenewald of UJ. For precolonial, John Wright covers the broad state of the ball in play here, which may be open-access. [e: See note 38 in the latter, which covers the question of Dutch Company failure to negotiate any kind of permission.]
