The DeBeers Diamond Cartel—an empire inside of imperialism

Cecil Rhodes named his Kimberley diamond mines DeBeers, after the
farmer who had previously colonized the land. In 1888 he formed the
DeBeers Consolidated Mines, a diamond cartel. This means that he
sought to control the entire world market for diamonds. He bought up
all other diamond mines in southern Africa, restricted supply and
raised prices.
When Rhodes was alive the diamonds at Kimberley were still alluvial,
easily picked up from the ground. Africans, enslaved on their own
land, had tin cans tied around their necks. They were lined up and
forced at gunpoint to get down on their hands and knees to pick up
the diamonds and put them into the cans.
After the death of Rhodes, the German Jew Ernest Oppenheimer took
over the ownership of DeBeers in the 1920s and it has remained in the
control of his family ever since. 
Today DeBeers is a multi-billion dollar operation that acts like a state
power with armies of its own. 
DeBeers and the Oppenheimer family are the real reigning power
behind South Africa. DeBeers was the driving force behind the setting
up of apartheid and the system that violently forced African people off
their land in order to create the workforce for the mines in highly
profitable slave-like conditions. 
DeBeers pushed for multiple taxes to be imposed on the people to
drive them into the mines to earn money to pay the taxes. DeBeers
backed the pass laws and the concentration camp-like conditions for
the mine workers who were virtually imprisoned for months working at
10
least 60 hours a week, forced to sleep out in the open with no
protection from the weather. 
For every 10-hour shift Africans were given a crust of bread and a
flask of cold tea. They were housed in bunkers with 20 men to a room
and forced to eat out of aluminum buckets. If an African worker
somehow managed to scrape together the means to buy a car or
house he was arrested on suspicion of stealing diamonds.
DeBeers and South Africa were forced to end the apartheid system
only when the armed mass African liberation movement made it
necessary, as a means of saving imperialism.