Class, race and the new native

Achille Mbembe, Mail & Guardian

The single most important transformation brought about by the end of apartheid was an acceleration in turning South African society from a society of control into a society of consumption. This shift has been the main post-apartheid event. More than any other, it underpins South Africa’s contemporary dynamics of class, race, gender and ethnicity.

It is the conflation of the form and substance of democracy and citizenship with the rule of consumption that has mistakenly been given the name of a transition to democracy.

Miners Shot Down

Duma Gqubule: International Best Practise in Nationalisation of Mineral Resources

How Mining Companies Steal Africa's Wealth

We Call This Progress

By Arundhati Roy, Guernica Magazine
December 17, 2012
From a speech at the Earth at Risk conference, Roy on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion.

I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons. What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.

Tumi Moloi, striking miner from Amplats, speaks in London

Revenge of the Commons: The Crisis in the South African Mining Industry

By Keith Breckenridge, History Workshop

Most accounts of the Marikana massacre, and the resulting turmoil in the South African mining industry, stress the ongoing importance of structural poverty, and the gross inequalities of life in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. If the writers on this subject (and many other events of contemporary South African politics) are correct, little has changed. But they are not right, at least not straightforwardly. The violent protests on the mines have been prompted by very dramatic changes in the distribution of power on the mines, changes that have brought about conditions of civil war within the mines’ unionised work force. And what that internecine conflict shows is that the long-term structures of political economy that supported the mines, and the distinctive features created by Apartheid South Africa, present an unexpected threat to the union movement, mining capital and the state.

Lindela 'Mashumi' Figlan

Lindela 'Mashumi' Figlan, Abahlali baseMjondolo

Lindela Figlan was born on the 27th of December 1970 in J.B. Location in Flagstaff in Pondoland in what was then the Transkei bantustan.

His mother was from the Radebe family and she kept the home. His father was secretary of the congress that went into revolt on Ngquza Hill in 1960. More than 4 000 men occupied Ngquza Hill. They were determined to fight for their land and for their dignity. The apartheid state sent in the military and there was a massacre. The courage of the men on Ngquza Hill is always remembered in Pondoland today. The songs from that struggle, like 'Asiyifuni idompas', are still sung today. When Lindela was a young boy the police used to come to their home from time to time, kick in the door and kidnap his father. Sometimes they would take him to a place known as Betani where they would force him to dig potatoes with his hands saying that they did not want to risk damaging their tools. When he came home his fingernails would be red.

Platinum Dreams

Anglo American’s boardrooms at 44 Main Street, Joburg, and Carlton House Terrace, London, are lovely – far lovelier than its mineshafts in Rustenburg. This is business as usual. In a sweeping analysis of corporate social responsibility, from the colonial philanthropy of the Oppenheimers to BEE, Dinah Rajak hunts the elusive ghost of empowerment. What follows is an excerpt from her recent book, In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility (Stanford University Press, 2011), PMS

South Africa: Capital Accumulation & Violence

by Martin Legassick, 1975

Click here to download this article in pdf.

The Marikana Massacre: A Turning Point for South Africa?

by Nigel Gibson, Truthout

It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things - but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces - but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty - but for the worker, deformity. -Marx, "Alienated Labor"

It's better to die than to work for that shit. People are coming back here tomorrow. I am not going to stop striking. We are going to protest until we get what we want. They have said nothing to us. Police can try and kill us but we won't move. -Thandubuntu Simelane, Lonmin miner. 

A Review of Platinum Mining in the Bojanala District of the North West Province

by the Bench Marks Foundation, August 2012

Regarding Lonmin’s operations some of the key problems highlighted by the report include a high level of fatalities, very poor living conditions for workers, community demands for employment opportunities and the impacts of mining on commercial farming in the area. Almost a third of Lonmin?s workforce is contracted labour, and community demands for employment have lead to protests and unrest. The company was also in a union dispute, after which Lonmin dismissed 9 000 workers at the Marikana operations.

Commercial farming in the Marikana area has been negatively impacted upon by the mining activities here. As the mines buy more land, the farms that remain become isolated, and suffer under the environmental impacts of mining on the quality of the water sources in the area.

Marikana is the latest chapter in a long saga

by Micah Reddy, Mail & Guardian

Jacob Moilwa (not his real name) is no stranger to the kind of bloodshed that took place at Marikana, something all too common on the platinum fields of South Africa.

As a young man in the 1980s, he took up employment at Impala Platinum in what was then the Bophuthatswana bantustan. Fed up with appalling conditions and pitiful pay, workers at the mine embarked on wildcat strikes. The ensuing violence cost scores of lives and, as at Marikana, was fuelled by union rivalry.

The Marikana Massacre: a Premeditated Killing?

by Benjamin Fogel, CounterPunch

“Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar `fall of rock` and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners` phthisis’ and pneumonia.”

- Sol Plaatjie, first Secretary of the African National Congress, describing the lives of black miners in 1914

Echoes of the Past: Marikana, Cheap Labour and the 1946 Miners Strike

by Chris Webb, The Amandla Blog

On August 4, 1946 over one thousand miners assembled in Market Square in Johannesburg, South Africa. No hall in the town was big enough to hold them, and no one would have rented one to them anyway. The miners were members of the African Mine Worker's Union (AMWU), a non-European union which was formed five years earlier in order to address the 12 to 1 pay differential between white and black mineworkers. The gathering carried forward just one unanimous resolution: African miners would demand a minimum wage of ten shillings (about 1 Rand) per day. If the Transvaal Chamber of Mines did not meet this demand, all African mine workers would embark on a general strike immediately. Workers mounted the platform one after the other to testify: "When I think of how we left our homes in the reserves, our children naked and starving, we have nothing more to say. Every man must agree to strike on 12 August. It is better to die than go back with empty hands." The progressive Guardian newspaper reported an old miner getting to his feet and addressing his comrades: "We on the mines are dead men already!"[1]

Umshini Wam

by Chris McMichael, Mahlala

“There’ll be civil war, said Johnny. Civil fucking war, that’s what there’ll be. I said, What you think we got now? Not a fucking picture is it?”- GB84, David Peace’s harrowing novel of the 1984-1985 UK Miners’ Strike depicts how the Thatcher government threw the weight of the security state (millions of pounds spent on riot police, intimidation and illegal surveillance) against the National Union of Coal Miners. But as violent as at the Iron Lady’s yearlong campaign against organised labor was, this pales in comparison with the massacre of Marikana on Thursday. 

Marikana and the New Politics of Grief by Jon Soske

by Jon Soske, History Matters

In July 1981, 1,700 workers at the Penge asbestos mine in the Northwestern Transvaal struck after a bitter, two year struggle for recognition by the Black Allied Mine and Construction Workers Union. After four days, the mine owners fired all of the workers, who then responded by occupying the living compounds attached to the mine. The company brought in scabs and petitioned the South African supreme court to evict the mineworkers: since the strike was technically illegal, the company claimed that the workers had quit their jobs, and therefore had no right to remain in its quarters. Predictably, the Pretoria court ruled in the mine owner’s favor; the company offered to reemploy 1,000 of the striking workers at reduced wages. The strikers refused. Given the absence of ventilation and other basic safety measures, most of the workers faced a slow and excruciating death from silicosis if they returned to work. One trade unionist later explained: “We don’t envisage a situation where we would choose to die in order to earn very little. We’d rather starve than sell our lives.”

The Marikana Mine Worker's Massacre – a Massive Escalation in the War on the Poor

8 August 2012

The Marikana Mine Worker's Massacre – a Massive Escalation in the War on the Poor

by Ayanda Kota

It’s now two days after the brutal, heartless and merciless cold blood bath of 45 Marikana mine workers by the South African Police Services. This was a massacre!

South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. The amount of poverty is excessive. In every township there are shacks with no sanitation and electricity. Unemployment is hovering around 40%. Economic inequality is matched with political inequality. Everywhere activists are facing serious repression from the police and from local party structures.

The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of 'Nongoloza' Mathebula, 1867-1948

by Charles van Onselen (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984)

Introduction

Modern South Africa's industrial achievements are often pointed to with considerable pride — sometimes by outsiders, but more frequently by the powerful or privileged within the country. Viewed from the heights of the cabinet room, the company boardroom, the stock exchange or the bank, there is no doubt some justification for this pride. A country which in 1981 had a gross national product of approximately R70,000 million, a private consumption expenditure bill of almost R 38,000 million and a wage bill of close on R35,000 million is indeed, as a recent edition of the Official Yearbook of the Republic of South Africa put it, 'the economic workshop of the African Continent'¹ Yet common sense as much as class analysis would lead one to believe that the view from the lower terrain of the township house, the mine compound or the farm hut would be more critical.

"We Must Speak for Ourselves": The Rise & Fall of a Public Sphere on the South African Goldmines 1920-1931

"We Must Speak for Ourselves": The Rise & Fall of a Public Sphere on the South African Goldmi... by TigersEye99