Victorian-era Cape banknotes.

From the establishment of the Cape Colony's first commercial banks in the 1830s and 1840s through the consolidation of the South African Reserve Bank in 1921, the Cape operated under what historians describe as a free-banking system: a regime in which private banks could issue their own banknotes against their own reserves, redeemable on demand at the issuing institution. Country merchants, shipping agents, and town businesses occasionally issued their own scrip as well, particularly in remoter districts of the Western Cape where formal banking infrastructure remained thin.

The system held together for the better part of a century. Most of the notes circulated locally — trusted within the geographic radius in which the issuer's name carried weight, less trusted beyond it. Many of the issuers eventually failed, were absorbed by larger banks (notably Standard Bank from the 1860s onward), or were folded into the eventual SARB framework when the 1920 South African Reserve Bank Act was passed. By 1921, all private-bank note issuance had ceased, and the Reserve Bank held the sole right to issue South African currency.

What survives is fragmentary. Most Victorian-era Cape banknotes were redeemed at face and destroyed; surviving examples are rare to extremely rare, with single-digit population counts the norm rather than the exception. The Bergman 1968 catalogue — Walter Bergman's A History of Regular and Emergency Paper Money Issues of South Africa — was the first serious attempt to catalogue the surviving issues. Brian Hern's South African Banknotes & Papermoney Pre-Reserve Bank (2010) updated and extended Bergman's framework with auction records, additional discoveries, and corrected attributions. Pierre Nortje's WCNS work on Victorian-era banknotes of the towns of the South Western Cape sits alongside Bergman and Hern as the principal modern reference.