“The Very Soul Must Be Held in Bondage!”: Alice Victoria Kinloch's Critical Examination of South Africa's Diamond-Mining Compounds

Abstract

This article focuses on the intellectual efforts made by a South African activist named Alice Kinloch, one of the first people to openly criticize the violence perpetrated against black mineworkers in Kimberley's compound system, at the end of nineteenth century. In the first section, we focus on Alice Kinloch's early life, her involvement in early Pan-Africanism in Britain, and the beginning of her efforts to denounce the compound system. In section two, we shift our analysis to the interaction between missionaries working in the compounds, and the colonialist discourse on “civilizing the natives”. As representatives of the Christian faith, in which Alice Kinloch also was brought up, missionaries play a central role in her critique, which takes aim at their collaboration, as Christians, with a system of racist violence that, in Kinloch's eyes, had nothing to do with the “civilization” it claimed to bring. The conclusions Alice Kinloch drew on observing the compound system were published in Manchester in 1897. In the third section we dive into her pamphlet Are South African Diamonds Worth Their Cost?, in which she condemned the hypocrisy inherent in the compound system and laments its effects on the black mineworkers subjected to a horrible regime.