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On the 6th of April, 1652, Jan van Riebeek founded a refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape. Together with Van Riebeeck the (Dutch) Reformed Church also came to South Africa. In subsequent decades the European population increased, first with the coming of the Huguenots and later, in 1820, with the arrival of the British Settlers. The number of congregations grew gradually as the members moved inland. When the first synod was convened on the 2nd of November 1824, there were already 14 congregations of the church.
Contact with the indigenous people provided a unique opportunity for mission work and education. The contribution of the church in these fields was however limited by a shortage of ministers. Ministers from the Netherlands and Scotland were recruited. During the Great Trek in the thirties of the 19th century, a large percentage of the population moved across the northern border of the Cape Colony (the Orange River) into the regions which would later be known as the Free State, Northern Cape, Kwa-Zulu Natal, Gauteng, North West and Northern Province. Many new congregations were formed as a result, and the need for ministers became greater. The wave of liberalism that washed over Europe, stimulated the need for the local training of ministers for the DRC Church, and the first Theological Seminary was founded in 1859 at Stellenbosch.
At first the Cape Synod was the only synod of the DR Church. As a result of the conflict about liberalism in the Church and subsequent court cases, however, the representation of the delegates outside the Cape Colony was terminated in 1862. Churches in the other territories constituted their own synods, viz. Natal in 1864, Orange Free State in 1865, and Transvaal in 1866 (although a different form of "General Church Assembly" had already been formed in this territory in 1853). Efforts to unite the different synods after the establishment of a political union in 1910, were unsuccessful.
Eventually church union was achieved in 1962, and the General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church was founded. Various indigenous churches grew out of the mission work of the Dutch Reformed Church. In the years after 1948 the relationship between the Dutch Reformed Church and these churches were often seriously hampered through the policy of apartheid. Since 1994 the ideal of unification with the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa and the Reformed Church in Africa has gathered momentum although a lot of work still has to be done.
Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century the Dutch Reformed Church paid serious attention to the relationship between church and society. This resulted in the publication Church and Society (1990) and the rejection of apartheid by the DRC in 1998.
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