Answer: Here you go. This took forever so please give brainlie
The year 1658 marks the beginning of the slave trade at the Cape colony. During the first four years of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) settlement at the Cape only a small number of personal slaves had reached the Cape, mostly by accompanying their owners from Batavia until they were sold at the Cape. For four short years the Cape colony had not played any part in the global slave trade. This all changed when, on 28 March 1685, the Dutch merchantman, the Amersfoort, anchored at the Cape with a cargo of 174 slaves. The Amersfoort’s arrival in Table Bay, with slaves in its hold, firmly brought the Cape colony into the fold of one of the most terrible institutions of the last centuries, the Slave Trade.
Already within seven weeks of landing at the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, the Commander of the settlement, had begun writing letters to the Heeren XVII, the VOC shareholders who essentially had control over the company, asking them to help him get slaves for his settlement. From the beginning of the settlement there was a chronic shortage of man-power, the hundred and twenty or so employees of the VOC, mainly sailors and soldiers, were insufficient to perform all the manual labour required to build and maintain the settlement. The local Khoi people were unwilling to perform the labour for the meagre reward the Dutch tried to offer them, and so sailors and soldiers from passing ships were often called upon to lend a helping hand while their ships anchored in the bay, but this was not a satisfactory solution for the labour problem.Van Riebeeck felt that slaves were integral for the colony to survive for the Freeburghers were unable to get enough labour from Europeans, either knechts or company servants, to farm to the degree and extent necessary for their labour to become profitable. For Van Riebeeck, the incredibly cheap slaves were seen as the best way to deal with this issue, but the Heeren XVII refused his initial request for slaves.
Two years later, in April 1654, after struggling to get the fledging settlement going Van Riebeeck once again wrote to the Heeren XVII asking for slave labour. He wrote in his letter,
‘if it could be agreed upon, however, it would be very much cheaper to have the agricultural work, seal-catching and all other necessary work done by slaves in return for a plain fare of rice and fish or seal and penguin meat alone and without pay. They could be obtained and brought very cheaply from Madagascar, together with rice, in one voyage.’