by Camalita Naicker, Amandla Magazine
Often when the history of 'big' events is recorded, after a
while, the stories with specific details are eroded and obscured. It is made to
fit easily into a certain kind of analysis that endures over time. So much so
that what is subsumed under these theoretical beacons of hope are the very
real, very human stories of everyday life and the complexity involved in the
moments leading up to them.
When one reads representations of Marikana among some left
circles in the elite public sphere, there is a propensity to fit 'workers'
struggles' into narrow and dogmatic forms of class analysis. In which race,
class and gender politics can be divided neatly and spoken about separately as
if the inclusion of these issues are a threat to solidarity. The failure to see
how workers' struggles are profoundly linked to community-based struggles
places workers in perpetual isolation. This isolation not only distorts the
everyday reality, in which workers are part of a broader community, but also
limits the way in which people think about the wave of strikes on the platinum
belt last year. Often, the historical picture of male-only hostels on the mines
endures despite the reality that there is a huge community of men, women and
children present in Marikana. So much so that many representations of Marikana
carry an overtone of triumphalism in which the Lonmin workers appear
victorious. This tone distorts both the unfinished status of the struggle for
R12 500 and neglects the counterattacks of Lonmin on workers over the last
year.
This tone also distracts from the necessary moral outrage
that should have been expressed after Marikana. The moral outrage which was
both drowned by lies and distortions in the media pinning the massacre on
savage muti-crazed miners or outside agitators, as well as the left's own
triumphalism.
Exploring other narratives of Marikana adds to our
understanding of the reasons workers went on strikes as well as how the
confluence of race, class and gender issues affect people living in Wonderkop.
For example, many people in Marikana express concerns about
the way in which race still functions as a mechanism of power and control on
the mines, preventing black people from receiving promotions or getting wage
increases. People are also concerned about their health and the lack of
attention and compensation given to work injuries. It is less about changing
the entire system, although there is no doubt that Marikana was a challenge to
that system, than it is about improving one's life and that of one's family and
community, and asserting one's humanity. The notions of dignity, respect and
communalism cannot be ignored.
One person expressed it more clearly when he said that it
wasn't about fighting or dying; he just felt like Lonmin could treat its
workers much better: 'I'm going to [the] shop, I'm coming, I can't buy a sweet
for small boy. He's gonna cry to me, he's gonna say, yah tata, ungathi
ungaluxoka ngoku. He gonna make the young generation, the respect, I deserve
the respect. He deserves the respect. All these people, my family deserves the
respect. Me also, I deserve the respect.'
Many people spoke about how their families suffered because
of these inequalities and how wives and girlfriends and mothers provided
support. For Silvia Tklabane, her experience of Lonmin is profoundly shaped by
the intimidation and racism of senior management who openly threaten her and
refuse her promotion on the basis that she is a 'trouble-causer'. When she
described her job situation she said, 'I've got so many [problems] to tell,
because really I, if I talk about these issues, I feel like I can burst,
because this company really it doesn't treat us like human beings. We are nothing,
especially we blacks, we are nothing.'
Still, the representations create a sense of isolated
workers fighting against capital, with their families as merely dependent on
their wages. Yet Inkaneng is a huge community in which the Marikana women's
group has been instrumental not only in sustaining the men on the mountain,
during the strikes, and then caring for them after the massacre, but also in
struggles around land, water, electricity and roads which many in the
settlement still live without. Accounts of resistance should not treat this as
separate to workers' struggles for wages, dignity and respect. The support and
solidarity of the community before and after the strikes allow it to endure
over a long period, as has historically been the case in South African history.
When Simba Chips factory workers went on strike during
apartheid, there was an immediate boycott of Simba products in their respective
communities, as was the case in the famous red meat and Colgate boycotts. In
many instances, these acts of resistance were organised and sustained by women
who usually made decisions about household purchases. Yet the narratives of
worker struggles continue to write out not only the way in which women's
organisation and support strengthens workers struggles, but also how women,
through care-work and domestic labour, reproduce workers themselves.
This is taken up even by some forms of feminism to force the
actions of waged and unwaged female labourers into a narrow frame which asserts
that women who are involved in political action that centres on their role as
mothers or care-givers are not feminist. This notion of feminism and women's
politics proliferates in South Africa and often does not see women as agents in
just any situation unless they are talking about reproductive rights (not an
unimportant issue in itself). Rather it is the failure to valorise the work of
women in every community, to provide political will, support, care and often
political organisation that are the failures of feminist discourse.
Surely to take only women who scream 'f*@# patriarchy'
seriously is equal to not taking workers who are not screaming 'f#@%*
capitalism' seriously, and both are tantamount to denying the legitimacy of
struggles that are not explicitly stating a political agenda that fits the
elite norms.
The caricature of women on the mines in South African
literature, perhaps thanks to Alan Paton and others, has been that women are
always on the edge of urban deviance. They are at the mines as prostitutes,
mistresses or beer-brewers, or they are common women whose contributions are
only sexual. There is no doubt that this has historically been the case, that
women migrants often had to attach themselves to men in one way or another
because of the patriarchal structure of South African society. But the
depoliticisation of sex as work, whether one is a wife, girlfriend, or
sex-worker, creates the image of urban women as cheap and therefore operating
outside of the realm of the political. Yet it is also the case that many women
in Marikana have come to seek work, or to be with husbands and boyfriends or
fathers and brothers, and to carve out a small space for themselves within the
community and to improve it.
Sikhala Sonke, the women's group in Marikana, began to
organise because they felt they needed to support the men on the mountain, so
they gathered women they knew, some of whom came from church groups, and first
they prayed for the men on the mountain: their friends, lovers, husbands,
fathers and brothers. Then they collected donations from Somali shop owners to
cook food for the strikers. When the police entered their homes and the
community space and began shooting, resulting in the death of a councillor and
friend Paulina Masuthlo, they marched to the police station to say enough! They
marched for safety and security for themselves and their children and to be
treated like human beings. For a while now, women in Marikana and some of the
men who are also part of SANCO have been trying to organise around securing
running water for everyone, electricity and roads, which is one of the most
important resources for them, since it is impossible to leave one's home
sometimes when it rains heavily. Lonmin, however, has never been helpful in
this regard; not only have they refused them gravel for a road, but they have
refused to fence off a dam where a child drowned last year on the way to
school. They have made contacts with various organisations in Johannesburg to
learn more skills and to share their experiences and their struggles. Many of
the women in Inkaneng remain unemployed and help each other through stokvels,
or through subsistence farming, and provide support to the mineworkers who in
turn support them.
Recently Nomzekhelo Sonti, one of the leaders of the women's
groups, wrote a play about the massacre performed by 50 women at the one-year
memorial held at Marikana. They continue to struggle for roads and for Lonmin
to start taking more responsibility for its workers and their families. Some
would argue that this is not a feminist organisation because it lacks the kind
of 'political thrust' that Shireen Hassim and others believe should be at the
centre. Of course, in the face of extreme conditions and little resources, the
political will and organisation of women like Nomzekhelo Sonti and others
cannot be seen as anything other than autonomous, radical political thrust
rooted in community struggles within which workers' struggles must be located.
