Immigrant Skills
The Europeans meanwhile imported slaves from Malaya as artisans. Their skills have contributed to the clothing being a major industry in the Cape today. There were other waves of migration from Europe. Persecuted Huguenots from France turned their hands to wine production and Germans and British grew the nascent industrial base and developed modern farming methods.
The province of Natal, a British colony was found suitable for sugar production but the local Zulu tribes could not be attracted as cane cutters. Indentured labour was brought from India. The descendants of these labourers play an active role in commerce and industry today.
The European migrants diverged: the Continental Europeans merged to speak a Dutch-derived language, Afrikaans, and the English continued to speak English which became the language of commerce. This dichotomy was also seen in the economy, as Afrikaners were mainly farmers while English-speaking South Africans were drawn to commerce and industry.
Read more about this topic: Economic History Of South Africa
Famous quotes containing the words immigrant and/or skills:
“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
—Anonymous.
An axiom from economics popular in the 1960s, the words have no known source, though have been dated to the 1840s, when they were used in saloons where snacks were offered to customers. Ascribed to an Italian immigrant outside Grand Central Station, New York, in Alistair Cooke’s America (epilogue, 1973)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)