Two
weeks after the Marikana massacre, the state/capital/police’s
narrative of the events that led up to the slaughter of 34 miners on
the 16th of August has collapsed. Autopsy
reports have
confirmed the majority of those killed on that fateful day were shot
in the back, contradicting the official narrative largely endorsed by
an unquestioning fourth estate – that the police shot the miners in
self-defense.
Subsequently, an article by Greg Marinovitch for the Daily Maverick has confirmed the reports delivered by the left, that there was a ‘second kill zone’ in which the majority of miners were murdered and that the still-living bodies of the miners were driven over by police Nyalas (armoured cars).
It also
appears as if the state is continuing to persecute the miners, who
have continued their strike against all odds into the third week.
Reports from those miners who were arrested on the day and who still
linger in jail- denied bail – have suggested that many of those
arrested have been subject to torture inflicted by a vengeful police
force.
This
week, in a truly surreal twist -these miners have not only been
charged with public violence, as previously suggested by the NPA
(National Prosecuting Authority), but have,
incredibly, also been charged with murder;
not the murders of the two policemen and two security guards in the
days leading up to the shooting, but those of their 34 comrades
gunned down by the police!
Drawing on an
archaic clause in apartheid era law, the state has – let me repeat-
charged the survivors of the worst act of state violence in South
Africa since the end of apartheid with murdering their comrades.
Other
revelations have included the fact that a labour
broking firm with
strong links to Zuma’s son does business with Lonmin. An elite
police squad was sent hundreds of kilometers to Marikana and
allegedly opened fire first on the miners. The NUM (National Union of
Mineworkers)’s investment wing has significant shares in
Lonmin. Frans
Baleni -the chairperson of NUM earns around 1.4 Million Rand (
$165000) a year ,
77000 over $9000 rand a month (104000 when adjusted for total pay
package). While NUM members working for Lonmin earn around 4000 rand
a month or around $500.
These
sort of revelations have been largely ignored in the narrative still
being pushed by the majority of the mainstream media which has
focused instead on absurd speculation around the miners’ alleged
use of ‘muti’ (magic). The best example of this was a monty
pythonesque story about a sacrificed rabbit which,
according to the Sangoma (diviner,) had rendered the miners’ muti
(intended to make them ‘invulnerable’ to bullets) redundant.
This
racist bullshit is an attempt to remove the agency of the striking
workers fighting quite rationally for a basic salary of 12500 rand a
month The miners are attempting to transform the structural
inequality present in a mining industry completely untransformed from
that which sustained the apartheid system, dependent on cheap migrant
labour from the former Bantustans and violence. Instead of this, the
miners are reduced in a narrative pushed by many within the
mainstream media into a primal black mass of medieval superstition,
something straight out of Heart
of Darkness.
With few
exceptions, the media overage of Marikana has been a complete and
utter disgrace. Marinovitch’s big break was built on two things
which apparently no journalist had bothered to do over the last two
weeks: He walked around the Marikana site with a camera and
discovered markings made by the forensics team made where a dead body
was found and, secondly, he bothered to talk to the miners and
actually took their story seriously. Somehow this was beyond the
capability, capacity or imagination of the country’s fourth estate.
Who knew that talking to poor black people might actually be
worthwhile for something else than some racist crap about muti?
At the core
of Marikana stand two things: despite 18 years of black rule, black
life is still worth nothing in South Africa, and the structural
economic inequality which characterised apartheid persists
unchallenged by the ruling party. Somehow the demand for 12500 rand a
month is crazy and unsustainable in South Africa for working-class
blacks, while it’s quite reasonable for Canadian miners doing
essentially the same job to be paid $130.000 a month as proper
compensation for performing a depressing and dangerous job. Somehow
it’s okay for black workers to live in squalid hostels or shacks,
while their white compatriots working at the same mine get paid well
enough to live a comfortable life in the suburbs. Somehow it’s
unreasonable to ask for 12500 rand a month, when, on average, each
miner is supporting over 10 people. And, of course, it’s completely
reasonable for the police to murder these men, when they try and
upset this inhumane system. It was “self-defense”, the fact that
the police turned up with assault rifles which are incapable of
firing rubber bullets was merely a side issue.
Last year in
the United Kingdom one man was murdered by the police and cities
burned, here in South Africa 34 men get gunned down and only a few
hundred people turn up to protests across the country. If this
happened in a country where black life meant something, the
government would have collapsed, instead people shrug their shoulders
and go on with their lives.
The only
major political figure to display any sort of open support for the
miners has been the opportunistic ex-ANC Youth League president
Julius Malema, who has been using the miners to fight back against
his nemesis, president Zuma. The best the ANC-aligned left can do, is
speak of some mysterious “third force” involved in the massacre,
the lack of class consciousness among striking workers and the threat
of an upstart union like AMCU (Association of Mining and Construction
Workers Union) to established labour relations.
The most
disturbing thing about this strange and terrible saga is that odds
are things are only going to get worse – the state’s use of
violence to suppress dissent will be employed again and the mining
industry will continue to reproduce the apartheid system which
sustains its profits, while a small black elite connected to largely
white mining capital profit off the corpses of those murdered at
Marikana.
