Camalita Naicker on Marikana as an Event in the Subaltern Sphere of Politics

Remember Marikana - A screening of 'Miners Shot Down' & a Talk by Ayanda Kota

Post-Marikana SA, birthing the new student politics

Camalita Naicker, The Daily Maverick

The Black Student Movement has established a political praxis that shows marked breaks with traditional hierarchical student representative structures. This has serious implications for the post-Marikana student, who has seen the failings of the government, the party, and the leader, and who has witnessed popular mobilisations that break with traditional top-down politics; practices which have repeatedly failed to fix the problems of black and oppressed people in this country.

Life after Marikana

Stuart Wilson, The Daily Maverick

First the facts. In August 2012, a group of Rock Drill Operators, dissatisfied with their wages, and with the representation available from either of the labour unions with a presence at the Lonmin Marikana Shaft, embarked upon an unprotected strike to push Lonmin for higher wages. The strike, and its attendant protest, soon gained widespread support, and incited a violent response – both from union officials and the police. In the days before 16 August 2012, the striking miners, union officials, Lonmin security guards, and the police themselves, all took a small number of casualties. The striking miners – about 3,000 of them – retreated to the top of a small rocky outcrop just outside the Lonmin shaft compound. There they stayed for four days, demanding that Lonmin management come and address them on their demands.

How to write about the deaths of people who don’t matter

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

I was asked this week what it takes to tell the stories of black lesbians killed in the townships in South Africa. The answer, in some ways, lies in Ferguson, Missouri, far away from South Africa, in an American community that has been burning all week.

There is much that South African journalists and editors can learn from the coverage of the protests that have arisen in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Under normal circumstances the shooting death of a black teenager from a segregated community in the Southern state of Missouri would not have garnered much attention nationally, let alone globally. After all, two black men are killed every week by law enforcement officials in the US – most of them unarmed. Indeed, until he died, it is unlikely that Michael Brown mattered much to anyone except those who loved him. In his death he has come to matter a great deal to a great many people in America and beyond.

Marikana, Gaza, Ferguson

Richard Pithouse, The Con

In colonial wars the occupying power invariably reaches a point where it has to acknowledge that its true enemy is not a minority – devil worshipers, communists, fanatics or terrorists – subject to external and evil manipulation, but the people as a whole. Once this point is reached every colonised person is taken as a potential combatant and the neighbourhood and the home are cast as legitimate sites of combat.

This is the moment when liberal paternalism breaks down.

Marikana: Executed with extreme prejudice

T.O. Molefe, City Press

After the guns fell silent that afternoon in Marikana two years ago, the incomprehensible happened.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) used the doctrine of common purpose to charge the 270 surviving miners in police custody with the murders of their 34 dead colleagues.

The common purpose doctrine holds all parties involved in a crime responsible for its consequences.

Miners Shot Down

Understanding Marikana Through The Mpondo Revolts

Sarah Bruchhuasen, 2014

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate some of the ways in which rural histories can enhance our understanding of both rural and urban resistance, both past and present, in contemporary South Africa. In order to do so, it explores two books in conversation with each other, Thembela Kepe and Lungisile Ntsebeza’s edited volume Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years as well as Peter Alexander, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi’s Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer. These two books provide a useful platform from which to engage in a re-examination of rurally based protest and repression in order to locate some of the suggestive links, particularly in regard to the transmission of repertoires of struggle, between the Marikana strike and the Mpondo revolts, as well as the on-going struggles of the organised poor in some of South Africa’s urban centres.

Miners Shot Down: Grahamstown Screening

Marikana Colloquium: 17 April 2014

The Marikana Moment and the Post-apartheid state: migrant-worker subjectivity and state violence

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 Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus

The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus by TigersEye99

Thapelo Lekgowa, Jane Duncan and Bheki Buthelezi on the media coverage of the Marikana strike and massacre

on MEDIA coverage x264 from marikanabuch on Vimeo.

The Missing women of Marikana

by Camalita Naicker, Amandla Magazine

Often when the history of 'big' events is recorded, after a while, the stories with specific details are eroded and obscured. It is made to fit easily into a certain kind of analysis that endures over time. So much so that what is subsumed under these theoretical beacons of hope are the very real, very human stories of everyday life and the complexity involved in the moments leading up to them.

Durban Poison

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

On the last day of September Nqobile Nzuza, a seventeen year old girl, was shot dead by the police near Cato Manor in Durban. She was unarmed and she was shot in her back and the back of her head. She was part of a large group of people who were gathering to organise a road blockade in protest at both oppression, in the form of violent and illegal evictions at the hands of the eThekwini Municipality, and the repression of resistance to the evictions in the form of two assassinations. The police claimed that they had fired at the protestors in self-defence. Witnesses vigorously contest this and insist that a police officer, who they have named, fired at the unarmed protestors without provocation or warning.

Marikana: One Year After the Massacre

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.

Marikana Land Occupation Evicted on Workers' Day: Reports from ENCA & the Daily Maverick

There are also various statements, reports etc on the Abahlali baseMjondolo website.

'Marikana' UnFreedom Day land occupation ends in violent Workers’ Day eviction

I found myself among a community of homeless and backyard-dwellers on Sunday through connections with the shackdwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which held its controversial UnFreedom Day rally on 27 April in the settlement of Sweet Home Farm in Philippi, Cape Town. What follows is a personal account of the beginnings of the 'Marikana' land occupation. By JARED SACKS. The Daily Maverick

Zowi Zulu berates the police after they threw her and her new born child out of their shack

Marikana: the Massacre and its Meaning - 22 April 2013

The Faculty of Humanities invites you to attend the following seminar:

Prof Peter Alexander, Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg, where he holds the South African Chair in Social Change.

Title: Marikana: the Massacre and its Meaning

Date: Monday 22nd April 2013

Time: 5pm

Venue: Faculty of Humanities Seminar Room, Cnr Somerset & Prince Alfred Streets

Discussants:

Camalita Naicker, MA Candidate, Political and International Studies

Nosipho Mngomezulu, MA Candidate, Anthropology

Popstars Politics in the New South Africa: A Conversation with Masello Motana

by Zachary Rosen, Africa is a Country

South African actress/singer/writer Masello Motana has had a career in the entertainment business that many would envy. She has played a leading role in a number of South African television shows as well as in a mainstream feature film. Her poems have been published in several anthologies in that country and she regularly amazes audiences as a musical performer. Sounds like the good life. Well, life would be much simpler for Masello if only she was content with collecting paychecks from beauty contracts and soap opera gigs. If only she pretended last year’s horrific massacre of mineworkers at the now infamous Marikana platinum mine in South Africa’s northwest never happened. If only she ignored the fact that businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, board member of the company that operates the Marikana mine, was elected to deputy president of the country’s largest political party, the ANC. If only she had kept her mouth patriotically clasped about social and economic inequality in South Africa.