There is an intimate relationship between the prison and concepts of freedom, as Stephen Dillon observes. Operating on dual levels, as both confinement and the basis for freedom, the institution of incarceration has an ambivalent presence. “The prison is present in our lives and at the same time, the prison is absent in our lives,” argued Angela Davis. This oscillating presence/absence masks the ideological function that the prison serves, as “a site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real problems that afflict the communities from which prisoners are drawn.” It exists, in other words, to produce and naturalize the category of “undesirables.”

The prison has a strikingly prominent place in South African history. As Michel Foucault argues through the concept of the carceral, the prison operates not only as a physical space but as a powerful social formation. In South Africa, colonial discourses of African disposability and unfitness for owning land operated alongside laws that created new forms of criminality. Because the colonial and apartheid states saw themselves as bastions of civilization in a sea of African barbarity, they used the instrument of the law to generate new forms of criminality and to transform black people into carceral bodies by definition. These bodies were also expediently made available for exploitation as cheap labor. The proliferating use of the pass laws (first passed under British colonial rule in 1809 and only abolished towards the end of apartheid in 1988) and the Masters and Servants Act (1841 and 1856, and only abolished in 1974) eventually created the largest imprisoned population on the continent. Such laws created widespread African illegality at a scale “as industrial as making cars.” At the level of discourse, they generated the notion that black bodies are inherently criminal, deviant, and dangerous. That is, following Angela Davis and Katherine McKittrick’s formulation, they naturalized the “undesirability” of African subjects.

What explains the long hold of the prison on notions of state governance from the colonial to the apartheid and even post-apartheid periods? The laws that cast a widening net of criminalization over Africans remained in place for nearly 180 years and became built into the very structure of the South African state. In fact, after the South African war ended in 1902, the state and the mining industry became increasingly reliant on the labor of incarcerated Africans. There was a direct correlation between laws that increased levels of imprisonment and the labor needs of the state and the agricultural and mining industries. As Charles van Onselen notes, this mutual reliance on prison labor reflected a “deeper circular logic” of an “economy… heavily reliant on labour-repressive institutions and instruments such as compounds, prisons and pass laws.”

The infinitely painful pass laws terrorized black South Africans by making their presence in their own country a crime. During apartheid, any black South Africans who did not have approved employment and was caught outside the Bantustans was immediately charged with a crime. This ensured that to be African in South Africa was to be criminal. The Bantustans were created by the apartheid state in order to remove black people’s South African citizenship and simultaneously acted as impoverished labor reserves with an endless supply of vulnerable workers, always either imprisoned or about to be imprisoned. Indeed, during apartheid, “the pass laws ensured the constant flow of men into and out of prisons” (per Van Onselen). These laws tied the state to the mining industry through a system of continual imprisonment of black people.

The South African prison system developed alongside and in parallel with the mine compound. De Beers operated both mining compounds and the earliest private prisons in South Africa. The explicit relationship between the mining industry and the industrial scale of state incarceration became clear by the end of the South African War. “The mining company … paid the state for the use of their prison labour. By the end of the 19th century, the De Beers Diamond Mining Company was using over 10,000 prison labourers daily.” Through its penal policies, the state in effect became a channel of cheap labor to the mines. K.C. Goyer notes that “convict labor was integral to the growing South African mining industry until as recently as 1952” and was only abolished in 1959. Even after the legal ending of prison labor, policies such as the “teaching of skills” and the recommendation of “useful and healthy outdoor work” for short-term prisoners nonetheless ensured that the state continued to benefit from penal labor. The relationship between the South African and the mining industry exemplified the cynical conclusion that “[e]very system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships.”

The colonial prison system thus shaped the creation of a modern industrial labor force in South Africa through the production of a constant source of imprisoned labor. This closed machine for manufacturing systematic African criminality would govern the colonial and apartheid economies for over a century and a half. By the early twentieth century, the system of incarceration had become an “accelerating motion of an engine of oppression.” From 1902 to 1936, there was “a huge increase in the numbers sentenced and imprisoned. Very nearly all were black men prosecuted under the taxation, pass and masters and servants laws.” Much of the modern South African landscape was built through forced labor. This is obvious on slave-built farm estates, but prison labor was also used to build public roads constructed during the 1840s and 1850s, as well as the breakwater that forms the harbor of Cape Town.

Criminalization is therefore central to the history of labor in South Africa. The dangerous connection posited between poverty and moral degradation was given a particular racial taint in South Africa. The political threat posed by racial mixing, especially among the poor, drove an elite project to separate black and white workers under the guise of the “moral threat” of racial mixing. The criminalization of black workers served to divide workers along race. In effect, just as Pumla Dineo Gqola argues that “rape creates race,” the development of the working class in South Africa was profoundly shaped by incarceration.

The normativity of racialized incarceration transformed black men into prison material whose confinement was seen as necessary both for their own rehabilitation, and for ordinary society to function safely and effectively. The imprisonment of African and formerly enslaved people therefore became naturalized and even insidiously viewed as beneficial. In the 1930s, the South African government created programs to address “coloured poverty” that took the form of the “teaching of skills” through the increasing use of prison labor for road-building and farming. Through these policies, African and coloured bodies were emptied of all meaning other than carcerality, and marked by the taint of criminality as “waste” bodies which could only be redeemed by useful (imprisoned) labor. This turned black people into objects of fear and simultaneously obscured the crimes that they themselves experienced. Reviewing South African practices of incarceration in the mid-twentieth century, Gail Super concludes that “coloured and black men were disproportionately criminalized under apartheid [while] coloured and black crime victims were largely ignored by white South Africans.”