The White Family of Man

Until the 1860s South Africa was, from the imperial point of view, a far-flung outpost of scant allure. In 1867, however, an Afrikaner child chanced upon the first South African diamond. The discovery of the diamond fields at once drew “this most stagnant of colonial regions” into the eddies of modern imperial capitalism and “a land that had seen boatload after boat-load of emigrants for New Zealand and Australia pass it 233unheeding by now saw men tumbling on to its wharves and hurrying up country to the mines.”¹