George Thompson

Who was George Thompson?

George Thompson was the author of a two-volume travelogue describing Travels and Adventures in South Africa in the years 1823–24. He had arrived at the Cape Colony in about 1818 and became a successful merchant in Cape Town. He travelled widely in southern Africa for purposes, principally, of expanding his company’s business amongst the 1820 settlers of the Eastern Cape and elsewhere. He undertook an expedition to Kuruman and to the Augrabies Falls on the Orange River. The second volume of Thompson's Travels and Adventures describes a journey to the ‘country of the Bushmen, Korannas, and Namaquas’, in the Roggeveld and Namaqualand and contains observations on the interaction and relationships between the colonists and the indigenous people of those regions.