Compound (migrant labour)

Compounds were company-owned accommodation for migrant mine workers in South Africa from the later nineteenth century onwards. The tightly controlled closed compound, where the ability of workers to leave the compound before their contracts expired was greatly restricted, came to typify the phenomenon in that country and originated on the diamond mines of Kimberley from about 1885 and was later replicated on the gold mines. This labour arrangement, regulating the flow of male workers from rural homes in Bantustans or Homelands to the mines and jobs in urban settings generally, became one of the major cogs in the apartheid state. The single-sex hostels that became flash points for unrest in the last years of apartheid were a later form of compound.