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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Chiefs, diggers and African labour: the Tlaping diamond rush, 1920-1921
Author:Clynick, TimISNI
Year:1995
Periodical:African Studies
Volume:54
Issue:2
Pages:73-93
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:class relations
employment
diamond mining
Labor and Employment
History and Exploration
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Development and Technology
External link:https://doi.org/10.1080/00020189508707830
Abstract:This essay explores the class dynamics of an alluvial diamond rush in South Africa in the immediate post-First World War period. It focuses on the alluvial diamond digging Tlaping, proclaimed in 1920 on the Taung Native Reserve in the northern Cape. Tlaping was the first public digging within a native area. In the first two sections of the essay the author notes the characteristics of this form of rural accumulation, and its interrelationship with the wider political economy of the western highveld. In sections three and four he examines the intersection of the diamond digging industry with the politics of the chieftaincy, in this case that of the Thlaping in the Taung Reserve. In the final section, he relates the impact of alluvial digging on the local labour market at Tlaping and the gender and ethnic politics of the reserve. The diggings were a potential domestic cash reservoir, not only for Africans living on white farms or in the native reserves on the edge of the western highveld, but also for labour migrants from more distant parts of the subcontinent. Labour migrancy to a labour reserve introduced a new and intractable ethnic dynamic into the region that was not there before. Notes, ref., sum.
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