176-7) A place of farms: Van Riebeeck’s farm on the LiesbeekĪs early as 1656, Van Riebeeck informed the Goranhaicona chief, Autshumato, and Gogosoa, chief of the Goringhaiqua, that all their land between Lion’s Head and the Windberg (Devil’s Peak) was to be reserved for the Dutch settlement. In January 1660 leading Khoe chiefs, attesting to their precarious situation, declared their land rights to Van Riebeeck, stating that the Cape was their birthplace and their own country - and highlighting the absence of what they had once had which was an abundance of fresh water. The attraction of the land lay in the wetlands, vleis and rivers which fed the summer pasturages. In November 1655 he and his men described, with a degree of amazement, how the land stretching inland from near the mouth of the Salt River was on an occasion filled with so many cattle and sheep that it was difficult to estimate the numbers present or to see the ground. In those early years, Van Riebeeck frequently recorded the arrival of the tribes at the Salt River and Liesbeek, at times moving on to Hout Bay and Constantia and sometimes - though not often enough in his view - making their way to the fort in town with a carefully studied reluctance to exchange their animals.
In November 1652 Van Riebeeck’s men returning to the fort reported that they had seen a multitude of cattle and sheep in the vicinity of the Liesbeek River and remarked on how hospitably they were received by the people with offerings of fresh milk in their homes made of mats. It was the reason the pastoralists had arrived there every summer with their women and children, huts and herds of cattle and fat-tailed sheep, as they had done for hundreds of years. The earliest Cape farm grants by Jan Van Riebeeck were made along the Liesbeek, an area that generally offered better protection against the wind and had perennial water. (Source: National Library of South Africa) A place of home Men, women and children – arriving to set up summer villages in the Cape
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