UHURU (UNIT FOR THE HUMANITIES AT RHODES UNIVERSITY) invites
you to attend the following one-day colloquium:
The Marikana Moment and the Post-apartheid state:
migrant-worker subjectivity and state violence
Where: Faculty of Humanities Seminar Room, Rhodes University
When: 17th April 2014
Time: 08h30 to 17h30
The massacre of 32 migrant workers at the Marikana mine in
August 2012 has raised and continues to raise important questions of an
analytical and political kind in South Africa. The reason is arguably because both the miners and the state did not react according to
theoretically expected ways. The workers insisted on representing themselves and seemed
to reject trade union representation while the state did not pursue its
response through corporatist structures, something a liberal democratic state
would be expected to do, but rather reacted with intense violence.
Yet the dominant accounts see the Marikana moment either as
a criminal act or as a simple effect of the conflictual relations between
labour and capital. But other
questions also arise due to the displacement of migrant labour from official discourse and not least because the
idea of ‘migrant labour’ has been replaced in state discourse by other terms
such as ‘illegal immigrant’. In other
words whereas Harold Wolpe and others had seen the ‘migrant labour system’ as
the social foundation of the apartheid state, with the legal demise of
apartheid, migrant labour although still extant has disappeared from dominant nationalist discourse today. The ideological context is one for which migrants who come to the city
whether from rural areas or from abroad tend to be seen as ‘foreigners’ or
‘outsiders’, as burdens on society not as builders of industry. It should be recalled that the majority of
workers at Marikana (especially the RDOs) were migrants from the Eastern Cape
and also included some from the traditional ‘periphery’ of the South African
economy.
A number of questions arise therefore: How is the
subjectivity of the striking miners to be understood? Were they simply strikers for a higher wage
or were they rebellious workers threatening state power? Did they threaten only the NUM or traditional
unionism as such? Were they acting on their own volition or were they being
manipulated by agitators and how did this question inform state thinking? How far were poverty and living conditions
causes of the strike? What were the consequences of this moment for worker
organisations in trade unions? What was
the role of migrancy in shaping workers’ subjectivities? Is the rural still present in the urban (to
paraphrase Mahmood Mamdani)? How are we
to understand the role of women and community members in the strike?
On the side of the state a number of questions also arise
which cannot simply be reduced to its representing the interests of
capital. It is in fact extraordinary to
think that it has become possible for a state founded on liberal-democratic
norms to react so brutally to a workers’ strike. What does the state action tell us if
anything regarding the character of South African democracy? Was the deployment of violence in this
instance an accidental occurrence or the effect of a systemic problem? Is there any connection between this instance
of violence and other forms of violence (such as xenophobic violence or police
violent reactions to Abahlali baseMjondolo or to community protests) in the country? Are we creating a ‘culture of violence’ in
South Africa? Do apartheid and colonial thinking still exercise effects on
state power? Does the migrant labour system still influence the character and
subjectivity of the post-apartheid state?
Full papers will be presented which will address these
questions and others.
Presenters include:
Ms Sarah Bruchhausen (Rhodes)
Dr Judith Hayem (Université de Lille)
Ms Camalita Naicker (Rhodes)
Prof Michael Neocosmos (Rhodes)
Prof Suren Pillay (UWC)
Dr Paul Stewart (Wits)
Further information: m.neocosmos@ru.ac.za
