In 1652 the founding father of South Africa, Jan van Riebeck, landed in Table Bay and knelt on the shore of what was to become Cape Town, the mother city of South Africa. His prayer was that the settlement he was about to establish would be for the glory of God and for the "spreading of the light of the reformed faith" throughout "the dark continent" of Africa.

This missionary vision was shared by the Dutch Reformed settlers that accompanied him and by the Huguenot refugees who fled to the Cape to escape renewed persecution in France. German Calvinists and Scottish Presbyterians later joined the growing community of reformed Christians who made up the expanding civilization on the southern tip of the vast continent of Africa.

The missionary influence of the Afrikaners (the first people to ever call themselves Africans were these Calvinist settlers and their descendants spread rapidly from 1836 as the pilgrims migrated away from what they saw as the decadent British Colonial influence. (The British had seized the Cape during the Napoleonic wars). This great migration became known as the Great Trek as thousands of families loaded their belongings into covered wagons and set off to establish their own Boer (or farmers) Republics.