They were not doing it because they believed the area had great economic
promise. But in that very month a prospector named Carl Mauch was in
Pretoria claiming to have found gold in Tswana country, and a stone was
on exhibition in Cape Town that had been identified as a diamond.
In 1870, Southern Africa was occupied by numerous small agrarian
societies, loosely linked by the dynamic forces of settler expansionism and
merchant capitalism originating in northwestern
Europe. In spite of its
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