Article; After the Diamond Rush
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/after-the-diamond-rush/
For over 150 years, mining has constituted a core feature of the South African economy. The seemingly inexhaustible bounty of the earth made the country the wealthiest in the continent and financed one of the most all-encompassing systems of racial segregation in the world. Blessed with the largest gold deposits on the planet, successive governments in the colonial and apartheid periods cultivated a tight relationship between industry and the state. Mining wealth was used on a large scale to economically uplift white residents and to finance industrialization through state-owned corporations.