DIAMONDS.GOLD.AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
contracts. The stated reason for this was to prevent them from stealing
diamonds. Diamonds were entering the market illegally, and illicit dia-
mond buying was a serious threat to the industry. But compounding also
gave the companies inordinate control over their African workers, as well
as economies of scale in lodging and feeding them.
Africans in Kimberley were subject to summary justice and the indignity
of being stripped for intimate body searches for diamonds. Their annual
mortality rate reached 8 percent in the late 1870S. In most years, pneu-
monia was the principal killer, but in 1883, when smallpox broke out in
Kimberley, the industry tried to hush it up until more than five hundred
people had died of the disease. Conditions in the compounds were es-
pecially inhumane. There, African men, accustomed to living with their
families in a rural environment, were cooped up in confined quarters under
tight discipline without any women for the duration of their contracts-six
months or a year. The migrant labor system also had serious social and
economic effects on the home areas of the migrants. Family life was dis-
rupted for long periods, and women became responsible for the economic
and social management of households.