by Niren Tolsi, Mail & Guardian
The supplement to the M&G on the anniversary of the Marikana Massacre is online at: http://marikana.mg.co.za/
What happened during the fatal miners’ strike in Marikana in
August 2012 did not end there. Thirty-four people were killed in the massacre
on August 16. Those miners who survived and were arrested say they were
tortured and brutalised by the police. People also died, violently, before and
after that date.
Families were left without husbands, brothers, sons and
fathers. And a daughter and mother: Pauline Masuhlo was an ANC councillor in the
Madibeng municipality and a campaigner for better social conditions in the
squalid informal settlements around Lonmin’s shafts. She died from injuries
visited upon her during a government clampdown of Nkaneng informal settlement
on September 15.
The nuclear and extended families in rural areas – and
sometimes satellite “second” families at Marikana – were shattered by the
violent manner in which their loved ones died, and are still struggling to deal
with the trauma. But they are also struggling in a material sense, deprived of
their breadwinner’s wages and remittances, so important for survival.
Rural communities have lost people who put aside portions of
their wages to buy football kits and balls for the local teams they grew up in
and coached. They have lost mediators, drinking companions, and elders who
advised on issues affecting them. Churches have lost pastors and choir members.
Shebeens have lost scallywags.
Marikana has changed families and communities across South
Africa. It has certainly changed how they see their relationship with their
democratically elected government.
This supplement is the first step in a project that started
in December last year and will continue for another year at the very least. It
seeks to answer the question: What happens after Marikana?
These are complex answers that cannot be fully documented by
two journalists, but the project does seek to move away from the mainstream
media’s snapshot pictures and easy headlines. It aims to investigate the real
cost of Marikana to families, to communities and – through this microscope of
the intimate – this strange new South Africa that Marikana has ushered in.
To do this requires being embedded in space and subject. It
requires returning the journalistic form to its best traditions of immersion
and social investigation. It requires time, or “slow journalism”. It requires
returning.
Santu Mofokeng’s vital documentation of sharecropper Kas Maine
was not an Insta(nt)gram exercise. The work of social documentary photographer
Chris Ledochowski in the Cape Flats emerged from him “becoming” a part of those
communities.
These are singular individuals with different training,
drives, demons and curiosities. But their art of composition, light, drawing
out texture, depth and attention to detail was honed in some way by the social
documentary approach to go back, to return.
In doing so these characteristics of photography transmuted
onto the national narrative and how South Africa understood itself. Their work
shed light, added depth to knowledge, texture to understanding and brought out
the detail in this country through the little-big stories they told so
artfully.
Neither Paul Botes nor I consider ourselves in the league of
Mofokeng, Ledochowski or the many fine writers and photographers who have
documented this contradictory and sometimes cruel country with such bravery and
intelligence.
But, with this project, we do subscribe to a belief that journalism
should be thoughtful, responsive, empathetic and relevant.
We feel this is important in an age when journalism can be
reduced to superficial, instant news. We feel it is important because we, South
Africans, need to understand what happens after Marikana: to the families, and
what is happening to ourselves and to our democracy.
This is vitally important. In the eight months we have spent
with them, we have seen take deep root in the Marikana families the
overwhelming sense that they have been abandoned. By government, by Lonmin and
by their fellow South Africans.
There is scant political will to provide the financial and
structural mechanisms required to ensure that a stuttering Farlam Commission of
Inquiry delivers quickly on its mandate to uncover the truth of the fatal
strike and give closure to the families.
With both a civil action suit by the families’ lawyers,
supported by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute, and Lonmin’s offer to allow
family members of the slain miners to replace them on hold until the Farlam
Commission’s findings have been concluded, lives remain in flux.
Traumatised families dealing with unresolved grief are
descending further into poverty.
Our world can never be the same. What happened at Marikana
was a deep echo from our apartheid past. It was unrestrained and brutal. It was
also state-administered.
The attendant imagery of Marikana is frighteningly cyclical:
the massacre recalls all too fiercely the killing of students by apartheid
police on June 16 1976 in Soweto and the Sharpeville massacre of March 21 1960
when 69 people died.
It especially echoes the Bhisho massacre of September 7 1992
when the Ciskei Defence Force killed 28 ANC supporters who were demanding free
political activity in the former homeland, and, in the confusion, one of their
own.
There was razor wire rolled out at Bhisho, too. Armoured
vehicles and helicopters were present. And there was an attempt to escape
through security force lines that was led by Ronnie Kasrils.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission noted: “When the
shooting started there was complete chaos. None of the deponents reported any
warning from the soldiers before the shooting started. Most did not know where
the shots were coming from; many were convinced they were being shot at from
the helicopters.”
The miners congregating on the Marikana koppies is also reminiscent
of the Pondo Revolt of 1960 and their gatherings and massacre on Ngquza Hill in
the Eastern Cape, a province where the majority of the dead miners came from.
So too is the sight of the helicopters that hovered over the
miners and the massacre last year.
Jonny Steinberg, in his paper, “A Bag of Soil, A Bullet from
Up High” – included in the book Rural Resistance in South Africa, documents a
source’s retelling of the massacre at Ngquza as passed on by a previous
generation: “The whites took Botha Sigcau, king of Eastern Mpondoland, up in a
helicopter. They flew him to Ngquza, and there the helicopter stopped, hovering
just over the rebels. Then the white commander put a rifle in Botha Sigcau’s
hands, and he said: ‘Whether we end this rebellion is your decision to make. We
can do nothing if you cannot fire the first shot. The choice is in your hands,
not ours’. Botha Sigcau thought for a little while, took the rifle from the
white man, aimed at the rebels below, and fired the first shot. It hit a man in
the chest and killed him. That is how the massacre began.”
South Africans have seen the footage of the Marikana
massacre. The country knows who fired the shots. What we as a nation are still
hoping to answer, are the more political and philosophical questions of who
took the gun from the metaphorical “white man” and why the first shot was
fired.
These are questions this project hopes to answer with the
voices of the families of those who died in Marikana.
It is a mammoth project. It involves driving long distances
into the deep recesses of rural South Africa – and getting lost, often. It has
meant navigating the roles of traditionalism and patriarchy involved in a
community deciding who gets to tell what stories, and in how grief is
confronted. It has meant encountering the indomitable spirit of South African
women often. We hope to do their stories justice.
