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As the Dutch
and later English increasingly established
permanent settlements in the country, relations
with indigenous
people changed dramatically. Of utmost
importance were a series of discoveries during
the mid and late
nineteenth centuries of precious
metals—especially gold and diamonds—in the
country’s interior. Large
industrial conglomerates sought to utilize the
indigenous African population as a cheap labor
source to
maximize profits in these labor intensive mining
industries.
While the interests of the South African state
(dominated by Afrikaners) and the (English)
mining
conglomerates never entirely coincided, the
ability of industrial elites to influence state
policies during the
early and middle twentieth century resulted in
the creation of the Bantustan system, formalized
in the
8
1913 Natives Land Act and 1951 Bantu Authorities
Act (Magubane 1979). The Bantustans both created
a
stable labor pool from which industrial capital
could draw and, by preserving a pre-capitalist
system of
subsistence agriculture, allowed employers to
pay a below-subsistence level wage (Legassick
and Wolpe
1977; Burawoy 1976). Three important
characteristics of this system must be
emphasized. First,
connected with the Bantustans was an elaborate
legal mechanism—known as Segregation—for
controlling black movement throughout the
country and especially between the rural
Bantustans and
urban industrial centers (of which the infamous
Pass Laws are the most extreme example). Second,
the
Bantustan system functioned economically to
perpetuate a particular stage of capitalist
production. And
third they were associated with a vast
ideological apparatus which legitimated
exploitation through
reference to the genetic inferiority of black
Africans (Wolpe 1972).
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