There is no certainty as to when humans first occupied the area prior to the first visits of Europeans in the 15th century. The earliest known remnants in the region were found at Peers cave in Fish Hoek and date to around 12,000 years ago. Little is known of the history of the region's first residents, since there is no written history from the area before it was first mentioned by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1486. Vasco Da Gama recorded a sighting of the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, and the area did not have regular contact with Europeans until 1652, when the Netherlands ' Jan van Riebeeck and other employees of the Dutch East India Company ( Dutch : Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie , VOC) were sent to the Cape to establish a way-station for ships travelling to the Dutch East Indies . The city grew slowly during this period, as it was hard to find adequate labour. This labour shortage prompted the city to import slaves from Indonesia and Madagascar ; many of whom would come to form the first of the Cape Coloured communities.

     The British successfully gained outright control of Cape Town in 1795, during the Battle of Muizenberg . Under the terms of a peace agreement negotiated after the war, the Cape was returned to the Dutch in 1803. The war resumed later that year, and British forces re-occupied the Cape, after winning the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806. In the 1814 peace treaty which ended the war in Europe, the Cape was permanently incorporated into the British Empire . As the territory under British control grew even larger outward from the city, it became the capital of the newly formed Cape Colony .

      The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West in 1869, and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, near the present-day city of Johannesburg prompted a massive gold rush . Johannesburg grew rapidly as the country was flooded with immigrants. Tensions also emerged between the Boers , who had taken part in the Great Trek and established republics in the centre of the country; the new migrants, known as uitlanders ; and the British colonial government. This conflict resulted in the Second Anglo-Boer War . After the British won this war and acquired control of the gold and diamond industries, they unified the Cape Colony with the two defeated Boer Republics (the South African Republic and the Orange Free State ) and the British colony of Natal to form the Union of South Africa , which was proclaimed in 1910 with Cape Town as its legislative capital, a function it has continued to serve for the Republic of South Africa from 1961 to the present.