The VOC, the world's largest corporation at the time, planned little more at the Cape than a halfway stop to provide fresh produce to their ships travelling between Europe and the East in search of spices, slaves and profit. Their small landing party, led by Jan van Riebeeck , built a mud fort where the Grand Parade now stands and established vegetable gardens , which they hoped to work with Khoikhoi labour.

The Khoikhoi were understandably reluctant to exchange their traditional lifestyle for the restrictions of formal employment, so van Riebeeck began to import slaves in 1658. The growth of the Dutch settlement alarmed the Khoikhoi, who declared war in 1659 in an attempt to drive the Europeans out; however, they were defeated and had to cede the Peninsula to the colonists.

During the early eighteenth century, Western Cape Khoikhoi society disintegrated, German and French religious refugees swelled the European population, and slavery became the economic backbone of the colony, which was now a minor colonial village of canals and low, whitewashed, flat-roofed houses. By 1750, Cape Town had become a town of over 1000 buildings, with 2500 inhabitants.

In 1795, Britain , deeply concerned by Napoleonic expansionism, grabbed Cape Town to secure the strategic sea route to the East. This move was not welcomed by the settlement's Calvinist Dutch burghers, but was better news for the substantially Muslim slave population, as Britain ordered the abolition of slavery . The British also allowed freedom of religion , and South Africa's first mosque was soon built by freed slaves, in Dorp Street in the Bo-Kaap.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Cape Town had become one of the most cosmopolitan places anywhere and a sea port of major significance, growing under the influence of the British Empire. The Commercial Exchange was completed in 1819, followed by department stores, banks and insurance company buildings. In the 1860s the docks were begun, Victoria Road from the city to Sea Point was built, and the suburban railway line to Wynberg was laid. Since slavery had been abolished, Victorian Cape Town had to be built with convict labour and that of prisoners of war transported from the colonial frontier in Eastern Cape. Racial segregation wasn't far behind, and an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1901 gave the town council an excuse to establish Ndabeni , Cape Town's first black location, near Maitland.

In 1910, Cape Town was drawn into the political centre of the newly federated South Africa when it became the legislative capital of the Union. Africans and coloureds, excluded from the cosy deal between Boers and the British, had to find expression in the workplace. In 1919 they flexed their collective muscle on the docks, forming the mighty Industrial and Commercial Union , which boasted 200,000 members in its heyday.

Increasing industrialization brought an influx of black workers, who were housed in the locations of Guguletu and Nyanga , built in 1945. Three years later, the National Party came to power, promising a fearful white electorate that it would reverse the flow of Africans to the cities. In Cape Town it introduced a policy favouring coloureds for jobs, admitting only African men in employment, and forbidding the construction of family accommodation for Africans.

Langa township became a stronghold of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which organized a peaceful anti-pass demonstration in Cape Town on April 8, 1960. Police fired on the crowd, killing three people and wounding many more. As a result, the government declared a state of emergency, and banned anti-apartheid opposition groups, including the PAC and ANC.

In 1966, the notorious Group Areas Act was used to uproot whole coloured communities from District Six and to move them to the desolate Cape Flats . Here, rampant gangsterism took vicious root and remains one of Cape Town's most pressing problems today. To compound the problem, the National Party stripped away coloured representation on the town council in 1972.

Eleven years later, at a huge meeting on the Cape Flats, the extra-parliamentary opposition defied government repression and re-formed as the United Democratic Front , heralding a period of intensified struggle to topple apartheid. In 1986, one of the major pillars crumbled when the government was forced to scrap influx control; blacks began pouring into Cape Town seeking work and erecting shantytowns, making Cape Town one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. On February 11, 1990, the city's history took a neat twist when, just hours after being released from prison, Nelson Mandela made his first public speech from the balcony of City Hall to a jubilant crowd spilling across the Grand Parade, the very site of the first Dutch fort. Four years later, he entered the formerly whites-only Parliament, 500m away, as South Africa's first democratically elected president.

Despite five years of non-racial democracy, on the eve of the 1999 elections, Cape Town remained a divided city. On the one hand, the whites still enjoyed a comfortable existence in the leafy suburbs along the two coasts and the slopes of Table Mountain, with the V&A Waterfront complex continuing to develop apace. On the desolate Cape Flats , however, some progress had been made in bringing electricity to the shantytowns, but the shacks were still there - and spreading. Despite white fears about crime, it was still blacks and coloureds who were overwhelmingly and disproportionately the victims of protracted violence, much of it gang-related.

Some attempts were made to foster cultural interaction and to forge a more integrated city. In 1999, the Cape Times launched a highly popular "One City, Many Cultures" campaign, featuring regular articles highlighting the rich diversity of Cape Town's ethnic and religious groups. To the same end, a restructuring of local government began. The city's 69 racially segregated bodies were rationalized into six councils that deliberately linked the wealthy and disadvantaged, and brought black, white and coloured areas under common administrations for the first time.

However, the 2000 local elections proved just how divided a city Cape Town remains. The ANC had hoped its campaign for better services in poorer areas would capture the hearts and minds of the city's African and coloured township dwellers, and allow it to wrest control of the Western Cape and Cape Town city council from the National Party, which had now restyled itself as the New National Party (NNP), and was fronting itself with coloured candidates in an attempt to distance itself from its shabby apartheid past. But in the run-up to the election, the liberal Democratic Party, which for decades had been the only vociferous parliamentary opposition to the apartheid government, joined its NNP former-enemy to form the Democratic Alliance (DA), which won control of the city and the province. The NNP's Gerald Morkel and Peter Marais became the Western Cape provincial premier and Cape Town mayor respectively. Marais - described by the Mail and Guardian as "a buffoon of note" who "offers voters a curious mixture of American evangelism and H.F. Verwoerd" - proved to be a populist and erratic city leader, whose arbitrary behaviour, particularly over the street-renaming debacle, led to his sacking in 2001 by the DA leader, Tony Leon. This in turn led to the swift collapse of the alliance, with Marais opting to stay with the NNP, while Morkel threw in his lot with the Democratic Party.

In a curious twist to the saga, the NNP then entered an alliance with the ANC. Formerly the bitterest of adversaries - the NNP's predecessors had, after all, incarcerated the ANC's leadership on Robben Island - they made unlikely bedfellows. In the farcical follow-up to the street renaming fiasco, the NNP in alliance with the ANC retained control of the province but the DA held on to Cape Town, with Morkel and Marais playing musical chairs. By the end of 2001, Marais had become the provincial premier and Morkel Cape Town mayor. This proved, if nothing else, how resourceful Western Cape politicians can be in preserving their jobs. What remains to be seen is whether they can apply those resources to running Cape Town