ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the discovery of diamonds in Africa in 1867, and the emerging labor market in the diamond mines in South Africa and neighboring Namibia, whose coastal diamond fields were taken from Germany during World War One. A migrant labor system was instituted by South African military officers to recruit Ovambo labor in northern Namibia to work the diamond fields on the southern border, seeing that neighboring Herero and Nama communities had been subjected to genocide when they rose up to overthrow German rule in 1904–1908. This chapter then studies how this landscape became the foundation of a capitalist ruling class.
