By way of a literature study, the article provides a concise overview of the origin, history and current form of the migrant labour system. This article briefly reflects on the South African migrant labour system in its historical context. The hostels that formed a key element of this system were, and remain to this day, physical legacies of the systematic policy of racial discrimination and blatant economic exploitation of the indigenous people of South Africa (Hunter & Bundy in Ramphele 1993:15). As part of this system, people (mostly men) were forced to migrate to places of employment but were not permitted to do so with their families or stay permanently, resulting in a system of oscillating migrancy (Posel in Bank 2017:6). The migrant labour system was an historical system, manipulated by capitalist, colonial and apartheid powers as a means of reconciling the conflicting needs for cheap labour in the mines and cities of "white" South Africa, with the desire to restrict black people to rural areas far away from the "white" cities. Keywords: Migrancy compounds hostels workers' housing control apartheid. As with so many other political and social systems, dismantling the migrant labour apparatus, and undoing the harm it caused, often requires even more tenacious efforts over a period of time. In time they became synonymous with violence, overcrowding and squalor. During the late colonial and apartheid periods, the mining compounds and the migrant labour hostels, which formed a key element of this system, were designed (and functioned) as tools of control and repression. Labourers were housed in a unique accommodation type that developed from the Kimberley Closed Compound into the Witwatersrand Mine Compound and ultimately the migrant labour hostel. The migrant labour system was an historical system used to reconcile the conflicting need for cheap labour in the mines and cities, with the apartheid ideology that workers should not reside there on a permanent basis. University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa (ORCID: ) Extreme apartheid: the South African system of migrant labour and its hostels
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