The next year, the notorious 1913 Land Act was passed. It was the mining houses who pioneered the prison-like compound system. The world class innovator was De Beers in Kimberley, where the company first experimented with convict labour. It was also mining houses that pioneered the racialised, contract labour system, and that pressed for the refinement, extension and tightening up of the pass laws. But this past oppression garnered huge profits that continue to be the basis of the vastly unequal distribution of power, privilege and wealth in our society today.
Past coercion goes on earning compound interest.
However, the complicity of business in racial oppression is not just a distant historical fact with present-day consequences. The AHI submission to the commission, admittedly a more sensitive document than Sacob's, is outrageous in its claim that Afrikaner businesses did not benefit from the NP regime. In close co-operation with the apartheid regime, white farmers used convict labour extensively. But it was not just Afrikaans capital, or farming capital, that was heavily implicated in the apartheid system. A large part of the private sector was deeply complicit in the militarisation of our society under PW Botha's Total Strategy.