A
migrant worker compound is a key institution in a system such as that which regulated labour on mines in
South Africa from the later nineteenth century. The tightly controlled closed compound which came to typify the phenomenon in that country 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.