South Africa: What Is A Mining Town Without A Whorehouse?

The time when real economic value is discovered in South Africa, not coincidentally, is about the time things start getting a little more violent. In the 19th century, there is gold, and there are diamonds, and there are wars to push indigenous peoples off of their land, skirmishes between British and Dutch colonists who don’t always see eye-to-eye, and further internecine ethnic clashes between different groups being shuttled (and struggling) up South Africa’s eastern coast.

And thus begins a painful pattern of the powerful white minority claiming land and subjugating native black and colored South Africans.

In South Africa, seeing diamonds the size of good steaks mined from ground surrounded by a sterile, artificial town that exists only because there is work nearby, it’s more obvious than ever that cash rules everything around me.

(I have no idea what the quote in the title was about, or who uttered it, or whether it was even uttered, or why it was or was not uttered. But it does seem like an interesting rhetorical question.)