 The indigenous people of the region, the Chainouqua Khoi, inhabited a large area on both sides of the Hottentots Holland Mountains.They traded with early European settlers, but were later dispossessed from their lands by the Dutch colonists, who began to move into the area in the late 1600s.After displacing the Chainouqua Khoi, the colonists divided up the Chainouqua land into farms, and the region remained a relatively underdeveloped backwater for many centuries.