and production of diamonds by color.
As the individual digger phase passed, mining personnel became struc-
tured into a complex hierarchy. The machines were worked by skilled
immigrants from overseas, including men from Cornwall, England, where
the tin-mining industry was in decline. At the other extreme, a mass of
people was recruited to do the manual labor, especially the heavy and
dangerous work underground, from the African societies of Southern Af-
rica. In between, there were overseers of the African labor-white
South
Africans drawn largely from the erstwhile digger population. The skilled
operatives, being scarce, commanded high wages, and the overseers, being
white men in a colonial society already structured on racial lines, were able
to carve out an intermediate and sheltered niche for themselves; but the
manual laborers, drawn from societies with no previous experience of
industrial labor and having no say in the colonial political system, got short
shrift. Step by step, the working class was split into two strata, white and
black: the white, privileged, well paid, and free; the black, unprivileged,
poorly paid, and unfree.
This great and historic racial cleavage was preserved and reinforced by
drastic differences in living conditions. In Kimberley, white workers were