"During the last ten days of their contracts, black laborers were kept nude except for leather mitttens padlocked to their hands. Two days before their release all were heavily purged and the stool examined for any diamonds that might have been swallowed earlier... The De Beers Company received a petition from supervisors stating that whites should be exempt from examinations in the nude: It would be a disgraceful and degrading thing if they should be compelled to disrobe in the searching house, and so lowered in the sight of the natives." -- Stefan Kanfer, The Last Empire: DeBeers, Diamonds, and the World, 1993.
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