The massacre of the Marikana/Lonmin workers has inserted itself within South Africa’s national consciousness, not so much through the analysis, commentary and reporting in its wake. Instead, it has been the power of the visual images of police armed with awesome fire power gunning down these workers, together with images of bodies lying defeated and lifeless, that has aroused a national outcry and wave of condemnation. These images have also engendered international protest actions outside South African embassies. In themselves these images communicate a politics about ‘official state power’. It is bereft of moral concern, de-humanised, brutal and at odds with international human rights standards; in these ways it is no different from apartheid era state sponsored violence and technologies of oppressive rule. Moreover, the images of police officers walking through the Marikana/Lonmin killing field, with a sense of professional accomplishment in its aftermath, starkly portrays a scary reality: the triumph of South Africa's state in its brutal conquest of its enemies, its citizens.
At the same
time, the pain and suffering of the gunned down workers has became
the pain of a nation and the world; this has happened even without
the ANC government declaring we must not apportion blame but mourn
the dead. In a world steeped in possessive individualism and greed,
the brutal Marikana/Lonmin massacre reminds us of a universal
connection; our common humanity. However, while this
modern human connection and sense of empathy is important, it is also
superficial. This is brought home by a simple truth: the
pain of the Marikana/Lonmin workers is only our pain in their
martyrdom. They had to perish for all of us to realise how deep
social injustice has become inscribed in the everyday lives of
post-apartheid South Africa’s workers and the poor. The low wage,
super exploitation model of South African mining, socially engineered
during apartheid, is alive and well, and thriving. It is condoned by
the post-apartheid state. This is the tragic irony of what we have
become as the much vaunted ‘Rainbow nation’.
Moreover, the
spectral presence of the Marikana/Lonmin massacre speaks to us about
another shadow cast by the ‘Rainbow’ fairytale. It
forces us to confront the hard edge of violence fluxing through our
stressed social fabric. At one time, violent crime – car jackings,
robberies, rapes, murders – defined our everyday understandings of
violence. Our narration of these violent events
constructed a sense of criminal violence as a major fault-line
running through South African society. Such violence spreads fear,
racial division and a sense of siege. It has been our undeclared
civil war. However, the social geography of violence changes
with the Marikana/Lonmin moment. A new faultline is revealed. Such a
faultline has been in the making deep inside South African
society through xenophobic attacks, violent police attacks on
striking transport and municipal workers (over the past few years),
violence against gays and lesbians especially in township
communities, and police complicity in thwarting legitimate protest
actions in poor communities and informal settlements. Through a
failure to act decisively (in some instances like during xenophobic
violence or by failing to provide policing in informal settlements)
or through orchestrated violence the South African state is at war
with the working class within its borders; it is a ‘low intensity
war’. More specifically, such a war spans shootings, intimidation,
failure to allow communities to lay charges, failure to investigate
crimes perpetrated against poor communities, failure to be responsive
to the safety needs of poor communities, fabrication and smear
campaigns against local leaders, complicity with goons linked to
local politicians (particularly the ANC) and a failure to act knowing
that innocent lives are in danger.
A few
examples of police orchestrated low intensity warfare working in
cahoots with ANC goon squads or local politicians against
communities illustrates this more clearly. This is based on
testimony received from activists. First, after Abahlali
Basemjondolo (Shack Dwellers movement) successfully challenged the
Slums Act in the Constitutional Court, ensuring community
participation to determine whether there can be relocation from an
established community they became the target of police-ANC violence.
In early 2010 an ANC goon squad violently removes Abahlali from
Kennedy Road informal settlement. This is also captured in a
documentary entitled: Dear Mandela. The police carry out
arrests of Abahlali leadership on trumped up charges and public
violence which are eventually kicked out of court. Abahlali
is not able to return to Kennedy Road informal settlement.
Second, a
more recent example in Umlazi township Durban also shows this
police-political party nexus working in insidious ways to suppress
community demands. The local Unemployed Peoples Movement (UPM) and
ward 88 residents demanded a recall of their ANC councillor and a
democratisation of the ward committee. In their perception the ANC
ward councillor was corrupt, failing to deliver and engaging in
clientelistic control of development resources. This unleashed a
series of reprisals. On 23 July the leader of the UPM was
arrested under false charges. The complainants turned out to
be incited by the councillor working in cahoots with the
station commander at Umlazi police station. These charges could not
stick but they held the leader of UPM for a day. It would
seem these trumped up charges were meant to prevent him from leading
a community meeting being held on the same day. This story has many
twists and turns with the police-ANC apparatus constantly trying to
intimidate the UPM and residents of Ward 88 in the course of this
struggle.
What is
striking about these examples is there challenge to mainstream
academic and media explanations of community based violence as being
merely reducible to intra-ANC battles. In all these instances a
conscious awakening and challenge by communities and movements to the
ANC state unleashes a low intensity destabilisation of these
community forces through the police-ANC state nexus.
Contrary
to Zwelinzima Vavi, the General Secretary of COSATU, who believes
South Africa is poised to experience the shock of a ‘ticking time
bomb’ rooted in deep inequality and unemployment, this bomb is
already exploding in various locales. However, the response of the
ANC state has been about a recourse to low intensity violence. The
Marikana/Lonmin massacre merely brings this trend into sharp relief.
The challenge to COSATU is simple: does it want to remain a
democratising force, with a proud history, and take a stand with the
wider working class or does it want to be complicit in the low
intensity war against the broader working class and citizenry? At
a mass meeting on 22nd August at the University of Johannesburg the
Marikana workers and community passionately appealed for solidarity.
Such solidarity actions are congealing into but not limited to: calls
for a national and international day of solidarity action
with Marikana workers (including 3 minutes of silence on August
29th at
1pm as a symbolic reference to the 3 minutes it took the
callous South African Police Services to mow down the 34 workers on
16 August 2012); support for solidarity strike
action emerging within the platinum mining industry; a call for an
independent ‘peoples commission of enquiry’ to ensure full
transparency, testimony and justice for the Marikana workers and
communities afflicted with state-ANC violence; calls demanding
the withdrawal of charges and immediate release of miners held in
police custody and calls for an end to the police siege and
harassment of the Marikana communities. Marikana as a defining moment
in post-apartheid politics is essentially about galvanising the
battle to reclaim South Africa’s democracy from below. It resonates
with and expresses the desire of the majority to end the ugly reality
of South Africa’s deep seated and racialised class based inequality
that has been widening under ANC rule.
