Down the mine there is pain, oppression and the cold fear of never coming back. But worst of all, said rock driller Mbuzi Mokwane, is the day he gets his pay cheque. “My pay day is the most miserable day for me. At least during the week I’m working. But on the day you’re given a pay slip that says 4,000 rand [£300], you start calculating your outgoings and you can go crazy. There is daylight robbery in the mines.”

Mokwane works at Blyvooruitzicht near Carletonville in western Gauteng (“place of gold” in Sesotho) province, a place where workers go underground every day fearing it could be their last; where they complain of low pay, bad food and overcrowded single sex hostels; where they say they are still treated like animals by their white bosses. Their simmering resentment could seemingly blow at any moment.

South Africa‘s mines are the frontline in an increasingly ferocious battle over greed, inequality and economic liberation. The sight of angry workers confronting police with sticks and clubs has become a defining one. Strikes are raging above the country’s vast reserves of platinum, gold and, this week, coal.

On Wednesday, AngloGold Ashanti admitted that most of its 35,000 workers had downed tools in an illegal strike. At the same time industrial action continued at Gold Fields and Anglo American Platinum, whose Rustenburg mines are reporting less than 20% attendance. Many are spurred by last month’s uprising at Marikana, when 46 people died before rock drillers won a wage rise.

Eighteen years after the end of racial apartheid, workers’ patience is all but exhausted. Julius Malema, the fireband politician, has told them: “They have been stealing this gold from you. Now it’s your turn.”

An industry that has divided rich and poor for nearly 150 years, scarred by exploitation and violence, is facing an existential crisis. These are the world’s deepest mines and there were 123 deaths last year; this week AngloGold Ashanti announced that a mud rush had killed a shaft timberman who had served the company for 33 years. The incidence of tuberculosis in the mines is up to six times higher than in the general population.

Rock drillers have been described as a skilled elite among miners. But Mokwane, 33, told of the hardships his job entails once the cage snaps shut at Blyvooruitzicht.

“To me this work is like some form of torture. You always think, ‘Am I going to come out alive, am I going to die?’ If the rocks fall on you, you will be seriously injured or killed. It’s very dangerous because in most cases we get to the working point and discover it’s not safe, but we are told to work. We are afraid because it’s not safe and anything could happen at any time.”

When the men are drilling, he continued, they are inside a crevice 1.5 metres high so cannot stand upright. They must get on their knees or squat. “The challenge is that once you start drilling you have to balance the machine. It is shaking and taking energy from you.”

“The other problem is smoke that comes out of the machine. You can’t put on a nosemask because it easily gets wet. So you just have to breathe the smoke. There also difficulties when it gets too hot, like you are losing breath. When you ask the bosses for permission to go outside for fresh air, they say no, so you can hardly breathe.”

Last November, he recalled, his worst fears were realised when a colleague working close to him was “totally buried by rocks”. He survived but is confined to a wheelchair. “To this day,” Mokwane said bitterly, “he has not been compensated for his injuries.”

Racial politics are not left above ground, according to Mokwane. “The white bosses don’t respect us; they only respect each other. Sometimes the conditions are not safe but they don’t listen. The bad thing is that even our own black bosses are treating us like the white bosses do.”

Like many men here, Mokwane sends more than half his salary to his impoverished family living far away, in his case the rural village of Mqanduli in Eastern Cape province. Mokwane’s wife, three children, mother and three siblings are all depending on him to pay for their food, shelter and school fees. He misses his loved ones “constantly” but can only go back at Christmas and Easter.

Home for the rest of the year is within the mining compound. A visitor to his shared hostel room is assailed by the thick air and smell of stale sweat, cracked floor tiles, filthy walls and power sockets, windows covered with old newspapers, uninviting communal kitchen, empty beer bottles stacked in the corner and battered lockers daubed with red spray paint that are meant to hold all a man’s possessions.

“There’s nothing that makes me happy staying in this room,” Mokwane reflected. “The way we live here is just like we’re animals.”

Others start smoking drugs and, if you start complaining, they say, ‘It’s not your home.’”

Food is supplied by the mine company but does not go down well. Mokwane said: “In the morning you’re given a cup of tea and a quarter loaf. Sometimes you find the bread is long expired and so hard you can’t eat it. Our lunch is also not good. In most cases they just give us food cooked the previous day. The rice is so overcooked it is like pap [maize porridge].

“If you try to complain, they say find your own alternative. Sometimes we try to take these complaints through the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers), but there is no change.”

Last week he and his colleagues told the union they are demanding a monthly wage of 12,500 rand (£938), like their counterparts in Marikana. “If they don’t come back with it, we will put down our tools. My opinion is that all miners in the whole country should go on strike, then start negotiating. No one should go to work until our demands are met. What’s happening here shows that the bosses are very cruel. We were recently told the workers would share a 2m rand bonus; but I only got a black bag worth 20 rand (£1.50) in the shop.”

Mokwane’s room-mate, Vuyisa Maqundweni, 26, was lounging in a battered plastic chair, a cap pulled down tight on his head. He feels like a prisoner. “There’s nothing I can do in privacy but the situation is that I have no choice. I come back very tired and I need to rest, but others come in drunk and making noise so I cannot.”

Maqundweni says he sends 3,000 rand of his monthly 4,000 rand salary to his wife, small child, mother and other extended family members in Eastern Cape. He believes the yawning chasm between haves and have-nots can no longer go unchallenged.

“The most painful thing is knowing these companies make billions from what we do but they just give us 4,000 rand. This makes me very angry because I know the money is there and they won’t pay us. They should give us an increment before people start fighting and dying. If we don’t get an increase it’s likely people will do what happened in Marikana. They got a big increase but we still get 4,000 rand. How can people in Marikana get paid more than we do?”

There is widespread disaffection with the NUM, which is aligned to the governing African National Congress (ANC). Maqundweni said: “They are not helping us at all and we think most of them are crooks. They are the cause of us not getting an increase because they no longer respect our interests. The ANC and NUM are working together to make sure we don’t get what we want.”

Other miners expressed similar disgruntlement. All were migrant labourers driven from Eastern Cape or Lesotho by unemployment and poverty. They complained about meagre wages, hazardous working conditions, stale or overcooked food and hostel rooms often containing eight men in bunkbeds. They viewed Marikana as a watershed in the fraught contract between capitalist and worker and expressed a collapse of trust in the NUM and ANC.

Michael Molomo, 42, a driller whose right arm bears the scar of a rock fall, sometimes starts his shift at 3am and might not emerge until 3pm or 7pm. He says he is paid 4,000 rand and it is not enough to support his wife and eight children. “Every time I think of them, I miss them so much, but there’s nothing I can do.”

“The drilling is in a closed space that doesn’t allow you to breathe freely. You can’t stand up and you feel pains in your knees.”

Nomawule, from Lusikisiki in Eastern Cape, says he earns 5,300 rand (£397) per month. “People always say, ‘The money is not enough,’ but, if I look at the work I do and the money I get, it’s definitely not enough. It makes me very angry that the bosses are getting so much money and giving us so little. I’m not saying we should get equal pay to the mine bosses but we should get something reasonable.”

The wage makes it difficult to support his wife and 10 children, whom he can only visit twice a year. “Even as I speak now, I’m really missing my family but the situation is that I have to gather money to go home.”

Living in the compound offers little solace. “It’s a boring situation.

Of course there is electricity and we appreciate that, but the fact you have one bed on top of another is not good. It’s still like apartheid where people are not treated as human beings. My wife cannot even come here to stay the night.”

He added: “My collegues and I have a miserable life. I think the only solution to our problem of better wages is a national strike throughout the country. If all miners can put down their tools, I think people would listen and realise we’re serious.”

The Guardian contacted Village Main Reef, owner of Mokwane’s Blyvooruitzicht mine, with a list of the miners’ concerns. Cheryl Walton, a spokesperson for the company, responded: “I believe that some of these allegations have been raised by employees through the collective bargaining structures and are being addressed by mine management.”

She said: “The allegations which haven’t been raised before can unfortunately not be addressed through the media. Since Village took over the mine on 1 June 2012, we have engaged openly with all stakeholders of Blyvoor about legacy issues and challenges facing the company and threatening its future.”

In The Road to Wigan Pier 75 years ago, George Orwell observed: “More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins.”

Today, South Africa, rated the most unequal society in the world, stands accused of the same wilful ignorance towards the “poor drudges underground” who make lives of privilege possible. Charles Abrahams, a lawyer representing 3,000 former miners suffering lung diseases, said: “The same divide exists. The middle class have got absolutely no idea of what the ordinary life of a miner is on any single day.”

Mgcineni “Mambush” Noki

Mgcineni Noki (34)

Mgcineni from Thwalikhulu in Mqanduli, Eastern Cape, was “The Man in the Green Blanket”.

Mgcineni, although at the time his identity was not known, was a prominent leader known only by the green blanket he wore about his shoulders, He featured prominently in TV footage leading up to the shooting of 34 miners at Marikana.

When the guns fell silent, he was among the dead.

He was affectionately known as “Mambush” and his family say it was no mistake he was chosen by other miners to be their leader. It was an extension of who he was.

“Our parents died a long time ago. My elder brother and his wife had to take care of us, but they also later passed away. Mambush was the father here. He took care of us and this home. We have nothing without him now,” said his sibling Nolufefe Noki.

The 30-year-old miner had been working at Lonmin since 2007.

“He was a driven man who was promoted in a year and received training to become a rock-drill operator,” said his cousin Mbulelo Noki, also one of the striking miners.

“Mgcineni was a very caring young man who never gave the village any problems. He even used to buy his former teachers cold drinks when he was home,” said villager Nowathile Ngcangwe, who went to mourn with the Noki family.

“I want people to know that we are very hurt and broken by what happened. People now think my brother was a violent person.

He wasn’t,” said Nolufefe. “I remember he would be the one who would calm us down and ask that we always keep the peace among us,”
she said.

He was a great Pirates fan and also loved weightlifting. He was married and had a three-year-old child, Asive.

Mbulelo said the last time he saw his cousin was on August 13.

“He was different, I didn’t like the person I saw. We were supposed to go home to our cousin’s funeral, but he didn’t even want to speak about it.

“He was taking his role as the strike leader very seriously,” said Mbulelo.

– Athandiwe Saba, Abahlali baseMjondolo

The tragedy at Marikana reflects the loss of the vision of liberation and the onset of repression by default, argues Njabulo S Ndebele 

On the evening of Thursday, August 16, in Johannesburg, I returned to my hotel for a well-deserved rest. 
I would turn on the TV, watch the news and then settle back to enjoy yet another episode of Isidingo.

But the evening I imagined was not to be. As the TV flickered to life, a newsreader introduced a breaking news item, and I knew immediately what was being replayed before me.

Police officers opened fire, and dust rose as people in the line of fire collapsed.

I will never forget the rapid cacophony of firing weapons sounding like popping corn, but decidedly deadlier.

As the running commentary confirmed my initial impression of an escalating labour dispute that had been in the public eye for some time, I felt tears welling up in my eyes and I prepared to weep.

Had it come to this?

But my tears stopped short, even though I had not prevented them.

They simply stopped at the point where they would have exited to blind my eyes.

The brief intensity of firing was ended by the bark of a commanding officer: “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!”

When the smoke cleared, inert bodies on the ground emerged into view.

I had just seen shooting, killing, and death, as had millions of other South Africans.

But my mind was surprisingly clear and calm as it recorded my feelings.

I was not stunned. Neither was I outraged, nor angry, nor pained.

What did I feel?

What had got my tears going, yet also held them back?

Some 20 hours later, as I began to speak at the last segment of the Ruth First memorial colloquium at Wits, sharing the platform with Jacklyn Cock and Eusebius McKaiser, I still had no answer.

In the coming days, there would be several camera angles from which to piece together, from different news channels, some tentative narrative of an event the newspapers had begun to call “a massacre”.

One channel’s camera angle showed less smoke at the shooting.

The picture of a crowd of men charging at the police was clear.

It may have been the same footage as the one I first saw, they may just have been showing an earlier segment of it.

The sight of men collapsing in a cloud of dust as bullets tore into them was clearer.

At the end of the shooting, one wounded man in a red garment struggled to rise, accentuating the dead around him.

It did seem like a massacre, but it wasn’t.

Those killed had been armed, charging assailants.

From yet another angle, the police were seen stepping backwards as they discharged their weapons, even while some of their colleagues were ahead of them, out of the line of fire.

It seemed a dangerous moment of indiscretion.

They could have tripped and shot their own.

One more camera angle showed crowds of men fleeing in panic with police vehicles in pursuit.

They looked like a stampede of gazelles with lions in pursuit.

What could have been in their minds?

It dawned on me that no camera angle presented a view of the entire event or even just parts of it from the perspective of the striking miners.

Many days later, it is clearer how I felt on the evening of the shootings: sad.

But it was sadness without pain, outrage, anger or even horror.

It expressed the clarity of a detached mind, free of judgement, scanning for insight.

On the afternoon of Friday, August 17, the radio announced that national police commissioner Riah Mangwashi Phiyega accepted responsibility for the previous day’s shooting.

I confess to having felt relief at this announcement.

I even felt a tinge of admiration.

A definitive leadership statement had been made.

Whether I agreed with it or not did not matter.

More important was a clear statement of responsibility for a complex and difficult situation by a senior leader of the ANC.

Later, I sought to ascertain exactly what the commissioner had said: “As commissioner, I gave the police responsibility to execute the task they needed to do.”

The statement was less definitive than what the radio had reported.

Indeed, the headline “I gave the order” in quotes by news.iafrica.com now seemed inaccurate.

The commissioner’s statement was more guarded, stopping short of admitting an actual order.

I was a little disappointed. I yearned for conviction and clarity of leadership.

What was at stake here?

Consider the commissioner’s words, as reported in the Mail & Guardian two days after the shooting: “Safety of the public is not negotiable,” she said at the funeral of warrant officer Sello Ronnie Lepaku, who was allegedly killed by protesting Lonmin miners on Monday, August 13.

”Don’t be sorry about what happened,” Phiyega counselled her colleagues.

They needed to hear that. They had lost many colleagues at the hands of criminals.

She was telling them to distinguish between inner personal turbulence and impersonal professional necessity.

Her directness was particularly refreshing considering that the safety of the public has not always been “not negotiable”.

The South African public has become used to the yearly show of public violence and the trashing of towns and cities, in particular by ANC- and Cosatu-aligned trade unions.

The official reaction to such lawlessness has generally lacked conviction and commitment, succeeding in placing the political needs of the tripartite alliance above public law and order.

Cosatu and some of its unions are so used to dominating the space of public demonstrations that they could not tolerate it being occupied by a DA that wanted to deliver, in a demonstration, a memorandum to the emperor of all unions.

They would teach the DA a lesson in violence.

Cosatu’s followers attacked the DA demonstrators with rocks and stones, drawing much blood.

President Jacob Zuma was compelled to condemn them: “It is … not acceptable that you become violent when people have a different view from yourself,” he said, adding: “You can’t produce a solution by fighting people who disagree with you.”

Refreshing!

I am hoping that the president and his police commissioner are setting a new trend in making unambiguous statements of leadership.

We need clarity and conviction in leadership if we are to derive lasting lessons from the tragic shootings and deaths at Marikana.

The trend they may be setting could have enormous positive implications for the Constitution, law and order, the strength and integrity of public institutions, and appropriate political conduct in the shaping of South Africa’s democracy.

But their statements must stand the test of a fundamental question: given that they seemed triggered by crisis, how grounded were they in principle and rigorous assessment?

Were they founded on conviction or were they the outcomes of desperate spins in crisis management?

What if Cosatu’s rock throwers against the DA had been carrying knobkierries, pangas, knives, and pistols?

Indeed, what if the striking miners at Marikana were members of the Cosatu-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)?

Would maximum force have been used against them?

Would the police commissioner have accepted, with the appearance of conviction, the responsibility for issuing the order to shoot down members of a tripartite-alliance union?

These speculative questions are more than academic, they are meant to lay the ground for the thoughts that follow.

It pays to remember that the striking miners who attacked the police at Marikana and got shot were members of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu).

Such a relatively new union still stands on the periphery of mainstream tripartite-alliance unionism.

The point here is that the greatest test of principle and conviction is for the ANC government to assert the rule of law even against those closest to it.

By the same token, the greatest test of fairness in law is in the defence of the rights of the perpetrator.

Friends can’t just expect leniency for wrongdoing and perpetrators can’t just expect harshness.

For friends to receive fair and corrective punishment and for perpetrators to receive fair consideration in a legal process that might lead to their punishment is to affirm the primacy of the rule of law and the integrity of the institutions that dispense justice.

That is why Justice Malala is correct in saying that Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu should have ensured Amcu was invited to the meeting of stakeholders she convened on the Saturday following the tragedy.

That would have been the first significant, if reconciliatory step, toward what her colleague, Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa, said should “not happen again”.

When the tripartite alliance seeks to engage in robust debate, they like to say “there will be no holy cows”.

In reality, though, cows tend to remain holy and ANC leaders cosy up to the “holy cows”.

In the matter at hand, the NUM may remain a holy cow guaranteed never to be shot at.

Sadtu will continue to do whatever it likes with schools, despite official unhappiness with the state of education in the country.

In this regard, Amcu may represent a historic notification.

They may very well be a nascent movement against a once-progressive liberation movement that has now gone mainstream and morphed into orthodoxy, despite its best intentions.

The shack-dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, whose leader, as far as I can remember, is still in hiding in our democracy, may be an organisational precursor to formations such as Amcu.

Disillusioned by a liberation movement from which they expected radical sympathy, Abahlali eventually took the ANC to court over illegal evictions and won.

What led a movement of 100 years of struggle to misinterpret the actions of the poorest of its followers and turn them into enemies?

Widespread “service delivery protests” may soon take on an organisational character that will start off as discrete formations and then coalesce into a full-blown movement.

Such a movement, perhaps the source of new energy for civil society, will owe little to the ANC and the tripartite alliance.

And that is the nub of it.

The Marikana tragedy may be read as a warning sign.

Could it be that when the crunch comes, dissident movements could be shot at by a political culture buttressed by accumulative wealth and conspicuous consumption; one which, having lost legitimacy, can only rule by force?

Could such a culture respect an electoral outcome that does not favour it?

Could the Marikana tragedy represent the onset of creeping repression by default?

It does not have to.

If the statements of Zuma and Phiyega, as quoted earlier, are founded on genuine conviction and principle, and that they signal a radical intention by the state to base a transformative activism on the Constitution of the republic.

The historic resonance of our first national development plan (NDP) could not be clearer in this context.

Recently presented to Parliament and supported by all parties, it calls for a new politics; fresh commitment to orderly, intelligent, disciplined governance; and a cohesive nation built on a foundation of constitutional allegiance, impersonal in its universal intent but caring in its effects.

Although all parties that spoke about the plan supported it, they were, without exception, sceptical of the commitment and capability of the ANC government to implement it.

Such scepticism is not confined to Parliament.

It is broad based in civil society.

I wished the president’s response would inspire with resolve and conviction.

It fell short.

How, then, will South Africa transition from its current precipitous politics?

How do we move towards a restorative politics that will draw nourishment from the immense creative possibilities of the NDP, that will save the plan from being another unachievable promise, and that will recognise the antidote to self-complacent and corrupted orthodoxy is radical fairness whose source of activism is the Constitution?

Another unachievable, monumental promise will surely lend further fuel to the combustive restlessness of our poor millions.

We should all not allow that to happen, but to do so we must find the answer to those final questions.

One thing should be clear: there would be no room for the politics of bad faith in which a governing party commits to rendering another part of the country ungovernable simply because they did not win an electoral mandate there.

This can only be the actions of a party that lacks confidence in its own legitimacy and power, despite having won eight out of nine provinces.

This is an example of what constitutes a fundamental threat to the NDP. It does not take much to spot more such threats in the current political climate.

We learnt that some of the striking miners were medicinally fortified by a sangoma with the assurance that bullets would not harm them.

A tragic delusion!

But their delusion may not be substantively different from the delusions of the beneficiaries of intoxicating greed in the new orthodoxy who believe that with the power of government behind them they are invincible and undiscoverable, and thus beyond accountability.

Having abandoned the visionary drive of the liberation struggle, even as it is embodied in the Constitution they once made, they compromise the integrity, sustainability and security of the republic.

Strangely, the miners of Marikana, armed and fortified with belief, lived and died with their honour, while their adversaries must pray that they have not lost theirs.

If they have, they will have to commit to work to restore it through a radical renewal of South African politics and public life.

The suggestion, presented with a sprinkling of muti, is that the 34 miners would not have been shot dead if some unseen hand had not been at work.

The Marikana dust appeared to have just settled on the bodies of the 34 dead miners last week when the spin machines started whirring out the spectre of a “third force”, whispering of “agents provocateur” and “criminal elements” at work.

The suggestion, presented with a sprinkling of muti, was that the 34 miners would not have been shot dead by police if some unseen hand had not been at work, manipulating miners’ away from the organized neatness of the National Union of Mineworkers (Num) and the tripartite alliance towards an illegal strike and a nefarious – but undefined – end.

Lonmin, Num, the ANC and government, despite being painfully absent in the days immediately after the massacre, still collectively managed to awaken the spectre of something uncertain, but counter-progressive, behind the deaths. Their panicked, heavy, silences, punctuated only by scrambled attempts to fend off Julius Malema’s presence, reassure markets or suggest that an un-named Svengali was at work.

According to grassroots activists the accusations of “criminality” and “third forces” are familiar: used to delegitimise and dismiss dissent and grievances – and perpetuate the notion of a society homogenously content with an ANC-led government.

Mnikelo Ndabankulu of the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo noted police’s ramped up presence, arrests and intimidation at their marches compared to “Cosatu marches”.

Fighting for a living wage
“Treatment by the police is ten times worse than for someone like Satawu [the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, a Cosatu affiliate] who go to the streets and destroy it and chase all the traders away,” said Ndabankulu.

Ayanda Kota, chairperson of the Unemployed People’s Movement, said these allegations “take the agency away from us. It’s the same argument used for the mineworkers fighting for a living wage: they are being used by some ‘third force’… Poor people…apparently can’t organize. It was the same with Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement – the CIA were behind them.”

It is a depoliticisation of discontent that McGill University academic Jon Soske suggested in an online piece this week introduced a “new politics of grief” where “counterfeit mourning” and the packaging of “tragedy and condolences” by those in power “attempts to rob these deaths of any political meaning”.

Nigel Gibson, professor at Emerson College and author of Fanonian Practises in South Africa said: “Criminalization is absolutely essential to dividing a movement. It hamstrings it. But also it is an important tactic to dissipate support from outside, just as was done after the attacks on Kennedy Road [informal settlement in Durban, the former Abahlali headquarters]. Immediately the media focus – strategically promoted by the ANC of course – was to accuse Abahlali members for the murders and thereby not only criminalize the whole organization but create confusion among potential supporters in civil society. That the case was later thrown out of court and the accused acquitted is less important. The criminal label has already done its work.”

The 2009 attacks on Kennedy Road left two people dead and allegations continue to circulate that the ANC was involved in an attempt to eviscerate the uppity social movement.

Over-reaction

Richard Ballard, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s school of development studies, and co-editor of Voices of Protest: Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa, noted in a chapter of a volume entitled Democratising Development that the ANC has a “somewhat hysterical response” to the various social movements that emerged post-1994 that “may initially be seen to be an over-reaction” in light of its large electoral majority.

“Yet they can be read as a shrewd attempt to monopolise the definition of legitimate expressions of citizenship,” continues Ballard.

This monopolistic impulse, combined with paternalism derived from an electoral majority and increasingly authoritarian tendencies by state security apparatus expressed itself most extremely in Marikana.

Rhodes University’s school of journalism’s Jane Duncan, said the violence could not “simply be attributed to the militarization of the police” but also reflected a global policing trend that “has moved away from a facilitative, rights-based approach to protest to something more authoritarian”.

The replacement of Public Order Policing units by police untrained in crowd control and leadership’s shoot first messaging where also contributing factors she added.

Academics like Ballard suggest that events like 2002′s World Summit for Sustainable Development, when civil society mobilized more numbers than the “official” ANC-organised march, thus “upstag[ing] it” were pivotal moments in the ANC’s response to dissenting voices. The ANC’s hold on popular mobilization and its mantle as the majority’s representative was threatened.

Mainstream press
This while ANC demagogues attacked the tripartite alliance’s “ultra-left” opposed to government’s Growth, Employment and Redevelopment macro-economic policy.

In 2002, SACP deputy secretary-general Jeremy Cronin was humiliated for warning against the “Zanufication” of the party. Cronin in an interview with Helena Sheehan talked of the conjuring of the “spectre of the [ultra]left”, a tendency with “quasi-treasonable” intent according Thabo Mbeki’s pitbulls.

The growing sense in civil society was if there was a clamp down on dissent within the tri-partite alliance, there was also less space outside it.

Duncan noted the emergence of dynamic social movements in the early 2000s twinned with “increasing abuse of activists [away from the barricades] that has been inadequately documented by the mainstream press.”

Random arrests and torture appear commonplace: Kota said UPM meetings were regularly disrupted by ANC members and that he was publically undressed and beaten in a police station earlier this year. Goaded by police for being the Grocott Mail’s ‘Newsmaker of the Year’.

When international eyes focus on South Africa, the response is insidious. At a civil society march on Cop17 in Durban last year, the Democratic Left Front’s Rehad Desai remembers municipality volunteers disrupting it.” Stones and blows were exchanged. One “volunteer” told the M&G they were there “to defend the president [Jacob Zuma]“.

From state intelligence infiltrating social movements to the murder of Marikana miners, there appears a greater intolerance towards dissent.

At least 34 people were shot dead and 80 more were injured when police opened fire on striking workers at a platinum mine in Marikana, in the North West province of South Africa last Thursday [August 16].

The mine, operated by the private London-based company Lonmin, is one of the largest sources of platinum in the world, and yet many of the workforce live in shacks built on top of it. On Friday 10th August, 3,000 rock drillers took strike action demanding a wage increase to R12,5000 [€1200; £960] a month.

The strike took place in the context of increasing frustration at poor wages and dangerous working conditions, and also a growing anger at the role of the National Union of Mineworkers [NUM], the established union for mineworkers with close links to the tripartite alliance of the ANC, South African Communist Party [SACP] and Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU]. All also have a close relationship with the bosses at Lonmin. Former NUM leader and ANC executive committee member Cyril Ramaphosa is a non-executive director of the company.

Many of the workers who began strike action last Friday sill belong to the NUM, but many have left that union in favour of the more militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union [AMCU]. NUM officials denounced the strike, but it nonetheless spread throughout the mine with thousands more joining the action. As the strike grew, there were clashes between strikers and the mine’s private security as well as workers who refused to support the strike.

As the strike continued throughout the week, various spokespeople from the tripartite alliance did their utmost to demonise and criminalise the striking workers, and the independently-minded AMCU especially. On 15th August Lonmin representatives withdrew from planned negotiations and the following day the South African Police Service were sent in to clear the strikers from a hilltop near the mine entrance and ultimately to break the strike.

In the space of a few minutes the police had shot dead more than 30 workers, injured 80 more and arrested another 250. Almost as quickly, official propaganda began to spread that both sides has been engaged in a ‘gun battle’ and that police had only open fire in self-defence – something that will undoubtedly strike a chord with anyone aware of the history of British state violence in Ireland.

In the aftermath of the massacre, the NUM, ANC, SACP and COSATU all accepted the police version of events. SACP spokespeople went a step further and called for the arrest of the leaders of the AMCU. The day after the massacre, Lonmin issued a threat to strikers that if they did not report to work the following Monday they would be fired.

In the face of this ultimatum, the company could only claim that around a quarter of the workforce turned up this past Monday. Indeed, the demand for a pay increase that began at the Lonmin mine a fortnight ago has begun spreading to other mines in the region. Lonmin has backtracked on its threat and negotiations have begun, though the AMCU has claimed that mine management and the NUM are attempting to exclude it from the talks.

The events in Marikana, in the run-up to and in the aftermath of the police massacre of striking workers, has once more exposed the deep schism that exists in South Africa between ruling elites and the working class. The richest ten percent of the population take 58 percent of the income, while the poorest ten percent make only 0.5 percent of the income. The bottom half of the population take only 8 percent.

With unemployment standing at 6.8 million, one-third of the labour force, traditionally powerful unions such as the NUM have been bleeding members. That union, which once played a leading role in the struggle against apartheid, is now seen as being closely attached to the capitalist class and to the South African government, a government that has been firmly wedded to a neoliberal economic agenda since it first came to power in 1994.

Many workers have joined upstart unions such as the AMCU that are not as shy about challenging the country’s ruling elites. The workers are turning toward unions they think will fight for jobs and for improved wages and working conditions.

The growing resistance of the working class has taken other forms as well. In the past decade numerous mass social movements of the poor have come to life all over the country. Organisations such as the Abahlali baseMjondolo shack-dwellers’ movement, the Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Landless People’s Movement fight for decent social housing and health services for the poor, and they resist evictions and water and electricity cut-offs.

Protests are a daily occurrence in South Africa, and so is state repression. The events in Marikana are a stark reminder of the likes of the Sharpeville massacre during the darkest days of apartheid. Working class organisations and trade union movements internationally must throw off its blinkers about the tripartite alliance. Whatever about its historical struggle against apartheid, the alliance now unabashedly upholds an economic apartheid under which millions of South Africans struggle to eke out an existence.

The task now is to support these movements of workers and poor who dare to challenge the economic and political status quo. Amandla Ngawethu!

The story of Marikana runs much deeper than an inter-union spat. After the horror of watching people being massacred on television, Marikana now joins the ranks of the Bulhoek and Sharpeville massacres, and the images evoked by Hugh Masekela’s Stimela, in the odious history of a method of capital accumulation based on violence.
But this is not just a story of violence and grief. To speak in those terms only would be to add the same insult to the injury perpetrated by the police on the striking workers, as many commentators have done – seeing the striking miners as mere victims and not as agents of their own future and, more importantly, as the source of a new movement in the making.

The broader platinum belt has been home to new upsurges of struggle over the last five years. From the working class community activists of Merafong and Khutsong to the striking workers of Angloplat, Implat and now Lonmin, these struggles, including the nationwide “service delivery” revolts, are a sign that a new movement is being forged despite the state violence that killed Andries Tatane and massacred the Lonmin workers. Rather than just howl our outrage, it is time to take sides and offer our support.

After Marikana, things will never be the same again.

Firstly, the killings mark the end of the illusion that the ANC has not been transformed into the party of big capital. For some while now the ANC could trade on its liberation credits in arguing that all criticism came from those trying to defend white privilege. The DA was perfect to be cast in this role because it always attacked the ANC for not being business-friendly enough.

But Marikana was an attack on workers in defence of white privilege, specifically the mining house, Lonmin. Lonmin epitomises the make-up of the new elite in South Africa: old white capital garnished with a sprinkling of politically connected Blacks.

In this, the ANC steps squarely into the shoes of its predecessor, apartheid’s Nationalist Party, acting to secure the profits of mining capital through violence.

Secondly, the strike and the massacre also mark a turning point in the liberation alliance around the ANC – particularly COSATU. Whereas the community and youth wings of what was called the Mass Democratic Movement became disgraced after 1994 by their association with corrupt councillors, and eclipsed by the service delivery revolts of today, COSATU’s moral authority was enhanced. Within what is called “civil society”, COSATU continued to be a moral voice. So anyone who had a campaign sought out COSATU as a partner. This moral authority came because COSATU was simply the most organised voice amongst the working class.

Today COSATU’s links with the working class are only very tenuous.

It is almost intuitive that we consider the notion of a worker as someone working for a clear employer, on a full-time basis, in a large factory, supermarket or mine. Indeed classical industrial trade unions were forged by workers in large factories and industrial areas. This was the case in many countries where such unions won the right to organise and was also the case in South Africa, when a new wave of large industrial unions emerged after the 1973 Durban Strikes.

Going along with this structure were the residential spaces of townships. From the 1950s, the apartheid regime increasingly came to accept the de facto existence of a settled urban proletariat and built the match-box brick houses in the townships of the apartheid era: the Sowetos, Kathlehongs, Tembisas.

So the working class was organised by capitalism into large industrial sites and brick houses in large sprawling townships.

Since the 1980s, the neo-liberal phase of capitalism has changed this.

Neo-liberalism has not only been about privatisation and global speculation. It has also been about restructuring work and home. Today casualisation, outsourcing, work from home, labour brokers and other forms of informalisation have become the dominant form of work and shack dwelling the mode of existence of the working class. The latter is in direct proportion to the withdrawal of the state from providing housing and associated services.

Twenty years ago the underground workers of Lonmin would have lived in a compound policed by the company. Today the rock drill workers live in a shantytown near the mine.

Also, mining itself has changed. Much of the hard work underground is now done by workers sourced from labour brokers. These are the most exploited workers, working the longest hours with the most flexible arrangements. Today it is even possible to own a mine and not work it yourself but to contract engineering firms like Murray and Roberts to do the mining for you. Into the mix can be added so-called “illegal miners” who literally mine with spades and their own dynamite and then sell on to middlemen with links to big businesses.

Lonmin has exploited these divisions – using the old mining industry strategy of recruiting along tribal divisions. The rock drill workers are Xhosas who are railed in from the Eastern Cape to heighten the exploitation at the coalface.

Add to this the toxic mix of mine security, barbed-wire enclosures and informal housing, as identified by the BenchMarks Foundation, and a picture of institutionalised violence emerges.

By way of contrast, the dominant trade unions in South Africa have largely moved up upscale towards white-collar workers and away from this majority. Today the large COSATU affiliates comprise of public sector white-collar workers, like the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union. The lower level blue-collar workers are now employed by labour brokers and are in services that have been outsourced, like cleaning, security and so on. They don’t fall within the bargaining units of the Public Sector Bargaining Council.

The Lonmin strike was the second in the last three months to hit the platinum sector. It was preceded by a strike at Implats. Both involved the Association of Mining and Construction Workers’ Union (AMCU) as workers sought an outlet for their frustrations.

The mining trade journal Miningmix published this story in 2009:

(A) gradual change had taken place in the profile of the NUM membership over the last 15 years; one that nobody had taken notice of. The NUM was originally borne out of the lowest job categories of South African mineworkers, mainly from gold mines. More than 60% of its members were foreigners, mostly illiterate migrant labourers.

Nowadays that number has dropped to below 40%. On the other hand, an increasing portion of the NUM’s membership comes from what can be described as white-collar mining staff, who had previously been represented exclusively by Solidarity and UASA. The local NUM structures in Rustenburg, like the branch office bearers and the shop stewards, are dominated by these skilled, higher level workers. They are literate, well spoken and wealthy compared to the general workers and machine operators underground.

So while the NUM remains the largest affiliate of COSATU, it is changing from a union of coalface workers to a union of above ground technicians. It is these developments that led to the formation of a breakaway union. Whatever the credentials of AMCU, its emergence is a direct challenge to the hegemony of NUM and of COSATU. As such, the federation has embarked on a disgraceful campaign of slandering the striking workers and their union.

In this they have been joined by the media.

With the notable exception of the Cape Times, the media’s culpability in demonising the striking workers has been reprehensible. In addition to only quoting NUM sources for information, or focusing on Malema, there have been no attempts to dig beneath the idea of manipulated workers and inter-union rivalry. They all depicted the rock drillers as uneducated, Basotho or Eastern Cape Xhosas, whilst flogging the idea of an increase to R12 500 as “unreasonable”.

Then there is the notion that workers went to AMCU because they were promised R12 500. This fiction is repeated endlessly by the media. Journalists are of course happy to source this from “unnamed” NUM sources. The slander here is that workers are so open to manipulation that they will believe any empty promises. This plays to the prejudice repeated by Frans Baleni of NUM from his Nyala that rock drill workers are uneducated, and it bolsters the idea that AMCU is some kind of slick willy operation that must take responsibility for the massacre.

Anyone with any experience of organising knows that trade unions don’t come to workers like insurance salesman. In the main, workers form their own committees and then send a delegation to the union office demanding that an organiser come and sign them up. Or, they simply down tools forcing their employer to contact a union organiser.

Nor is any strike decision, let alone a strike such as this one – unprotected, under the umbrella of an unrecognised union, in a workplace with mine security and where the workers themselves are far from home in a strange region – ever taken lightly. Wildcat strikes are probably the most conscious act of sacrifice and courage that anyone can take, driven by anger and desperation and involving the full knowledge that you could lose your job and your family’s livelihood.

In normal times, trade unions can be as much a huge bureaucratic machine as a corporation or a state department with negotiations conducted by small teams far from the thousands of rank-and-file members. Strikes change all that…suddenly unions are forced to be conduits of their members’ aspirations.

Whatever the merits of AMCU as a democratic union or as one with any vision of transformation; whatever the involvement of the Themba Godis, the workers of Marikana made their choice: to become members of AMCU and risk everything, including their lives, for a better future.

For that we owe them more than just pious sympathy. There is a job of mobilisation and movement-building to be done.

Almost 40 years ago, in 1973, workers from companies around Durban came out in a series of wildcat – then really illegal – strikes. Today this event is celebrated by everyone as part of the revival of the anti-apartheid movement and the birth of a new phase of radical trade unionism, culminating in the formation of COSATU.

But in 1973, the media highlighted the threat of violence and called for the restoration of law and order. The apartheid state could not respond with the kind of killings that happened at Marikana because the strikes were in industrial areas, but they invoked the same idea of ignorant misled workers (then they were seen as ignorant Zulus) and had homeland leader Mangosutho Buthelezi send his emissary, Barney Dladla, to talk to the workers.

While in exile, the SACP questioned the bona fides of the strikes, invoking the involvement of Buthelezi to perpetuate the fiction of “ignorant Zulus” because they were not called for by the liberation aligned union body, SACTU. Some in SACTU circles raised the spectre of liberals and CIA involvement in the new worker formations with an agenda to “sideline the liberation movement”. This separation of the ANC and its allies from the early labour movement was to lead to the divisions between the “workerist unions” and the “populist unions” in the labour movement and was to continue within COSATU.

How easily people forget this when workers forge new movements today.

For a long time now the ongoing service delivery revolts throughout the country have failed to register on the iPads and Blackberries of the chattering classes. This is because of the social distance of the middle classes to the new working classes.

Now the sight of the police shooting striking workers on TV has brought the real world of current struggles right into the lounges and bedrooms of public opinion.

So far the strikers have stood firm not only against the police and Lonmin, but also against the media labelling their strike “illegal”. Strikes are not illegal in South Africa; they are only protected or unprotected. Meanwhile NUM and COSATU are rallying behind their ally, the ANC, to stigmatise the strikers and their union as “paid by BHP Billiton and the Chamber of Mines”.

In the midst of our outrage at this brutality let us acknowledge that a new movement is emerging. Such early signs do not as yet indicate something grand and well organised. Movements are notoriously messy and difficult to assign to some kind of predetermined ideological box. We do not know what ups and downs people will go through, but when the seeds of a new movement are being planted, it is time to ask what the rest of us can do to help it to grow.

“Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar `fall of rock` and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners’  phthisis and pneumonia.”

- Sol Plaatjie, first Secretary of the African National Congress, describing the lives of black miners in 1914

Last week’s massacre of 34 striking workers in Marikana, marks perhaps the lowest point in post-Apartheid South African history. Poor, black working class miners were shot down like animals, killed for profit. South Africa remains possibly the most unequal society in the world – the black majority still faces a life of poverty and toil, if they are lucky enough to even find work; while the still largely white elite, enjoy a life more familar to the suburbs of Atlanta or Los Angeles, than a country in which over the half the country’s citizens live below the poverty line, without access to basic services. As a wave of community protests which has arisen the townships of the country over the last few years intensifies South Africa has been dubbed the protest capital of the world. In the last three years, there has been an average of 2.9 “gatherings” per day resulting in a 12,654 “gathering” incidents during 2010.

The violence needed to sustain the profit-margin in the South African mining industry has a long and sordid history — it was one of the principle reasons for the implementation of Apartheid, principally the mines of the Witswatersrand’s need for cheap migrant black labor, from the rural Eastern Cape and Kwazula-Natal. The miners of Marikana principally came from the former Bantustan of Transkei, one of the underdeveloped and impoverished areas in the country. Violence was consistently used by both the Apartheid and colonial states against attempts to organize mineworkers, events such as the 1946 miners strike- which saw 70 000 workers go on strike and the murder of 12 miners, are an all-too common feature in South African history. Apartheid was built upon a two-tiered labour market in which white labour and white unions were actively nurtured by an interventionist state, while black labourers were disposed of their citizenship- in the form of the Bantustan system and the denial of  their freedom of movement in the form of the pass laws and their ability to organize in the form of the banning of trade unions. Violence was used in many other key moments of SA labor history including the 1973 Durban Strike and countless battles between labor and the state which occurred in the 1980s which saw the formation of both the trade union federation COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and NUM (the National Union of Mineworkers).

The fact that a multinational corporation was at the center of the massacre shouldn’t surprise us either. Anglo-American, the largest corporation in South Africa, was one of the principle funders of the slaughter in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the capuability also extends to President Jacob Zuma and his cronies in NUM, figures such as the chairperson are directly implemented in the murder of the 34 workers both in the deployment of police at the mine and NUM’s attempt to break up the strike..

The strike has continued into this week even after Lonmin issued an ultimatum to the workers, demanding that they  return to their jobs or face being fired. At least 3 000 strikers refused to comply and the ultimatium was later rescinded .  Furthermore, as of today, workers in the nearby Anglo American Platinum’s (Amplats) Thembelani mine and the Royal Bafokeng’s BRPM mine issued similar wage demands to management and downed their tools, giving management until Friday to respond. Lonmin’s manage failed to properly respond to the one essential demand of the striking workers, which was to meet with them. The following account clearly shows that the negotiating team was not comprised of Lonmin management and was prevented from intervening by the police. as this report clearly shows. 

”However later they agreed to a meeting provided the workers committed to three conditions: surrender their weapons, elect a small representative group to engage with management and disperse from the mountain … On leaving the briefing area to report back to the miners, the SACC team was told they could not go back to the camp as the place was now a security risk area under the police. Bishop Seoka said they saw two helicopters taking off and assumed that they were going to the mountain where the workers were camping. ‘As they left the area a call came through from the man we spoke to telling us that the police were killing them and we could hear the gun shots and screams of people’, says the Bishop. ‘The man covered with green blanket lying dead was the last person we spoke to who represented the mine workers.”

Clearly, it was the police’s intent to break up the strike. It’s unclear how much political pressure they were under but rather than letting the negotiating team do its work over 500 police surrounded the striking workers with armoured cars and officers on foot carrying assault rifles. A report from University of Johannesburg academic Peter Alexander suggests that the killing was possibly premeditated, as the police erected razor wire fences around the area in which the miners were located. Later tear gas and water cannons were used to disperse the crowd, forcing them to flee towards the police lines which greeted them with live ammunition.

A City Press editorial asked 5 basic question:

*  Why did police use live ammunition after an order was issued last year forbidding the use of even rubber bullets during public protests?

*  Why did Lonmin bosses refuse to negotiate with representatives of the Associated Mining and Construction Union (Amcu) after initially agreeing to?

* Why didn’t the country’s intelligence services pick up
on the brewing tension at the mine and take the appropriate action?

* Who supplied the newly made traditional weapons carried by thousands of
angry miners?

*  Do platinum mines discriminate in favor of certain categories of workers when it comes to wage negotiations?

So far none of the country’s political and civil society leaders have offered anything besides shameful banalities about a future inquiry and mild to enthusiastic support for the police and NUM. The silence of liberal NGOs and civil society organizations has been remarkable. The absence of real leadership on the issue, or strong showings of solidarity for the ongoing strike is a profound statement of the extent of the failure of post-Apartheid South African civil society, which has been largely monopolized by NGOS.

Perhaps the most strident apologist for the massacre has been the South African Communist Party (SACP), a party already deeply comprised by its support for the neoliberal policies of the ANC and its own Stalinist history. Take this appalling bit from Domnic Tweedie of the Communist University: “This was no massacre, this was a battle. The police used their weapons in exactly the way they were supposed to. That’s what they have them for. The people they shot didn’t look like workers to me. We should be happy. The police were admirable”. Not even the bosses of Lonmin and the most reactionary strata of the South African press are so bloodthirsty. This type of disgraceful rhetoric has sadly become all too-common among the once-admirable SACP.

The only exception to this rule was ex-ANC youth league president Julius Malema, who was expelled from the ANC earlier this year primarily because of his opposition to Jacob Zuma.  Malema, a figure who is best described as Hugo Chavez meets Kanye West, accused Zuma of having “presided over the murder of our people “ and called for the nationalization of ‘the British owned’ mines to a crowd of thousands of cheering workers. He further accused Lonmin of having “ a high political connection [… which] is why our people were killed. They were killed to protect the shares of Cyril Ramaphosa,” Cyril Ramaphosa being an ex-communist, the ex-chairperson of NUM, and the current owner of the McDonald’s franchise in South African, as well as a Lonmin board member

The mainstream press has found others to blame, however. The newspaper Business Day ran a shameful editorial which referred to Lonmin’s workers as being “[...driven by antiquated beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery, [… and believing] in the powers of ‘sangomas’ (traditional healers) to make them invincible. Try reasoning with that.” Hence the perceived suicidal charge at the police lines with officers armed  with R4 assault rifles and the suggested narrative of police defending themselves from primitive black miners clinging to superstitions which resulted in their deaths. The miners were not stupid enough, except in the racist imagination of white South Africans and the apologists of the massacre, to charge at policemen armed only with clubs. These sorts of images revert to classic colonial stereotypes.

The blame is placed on hubris brought on by black magic, rather than the fact workers are being paid less than $500 a month. And obviously it couldn’t have been the tear gas and stun grenades used on the striking miners  that made them run towards the police clutching spears, pangas and knobkerries. Some reports have even accused the police of firing from helicopters and later driving over the still-living bodies of those shot.

On the other-hand the same Business Day editorial praised NUM. “The NUM is the thoughtful, considered heart of the union movement here, one of the two rival unions involved in the dispute there. Cyril Ramaphosa and Kgalema Motlanthe, for instance, come out of it. As a union it is a powerful voice of reason in an often loud and rash movement.” A more damning indictment of the true loyalties of NUM’s leadership is harder to find, than such praise in the country’s leading pro-business (and anti-union) daily.

I accuse Zuma and NUM of colluding with the bosses at the Lonmin mine as part of Zuma’s re-election campaign. The blood spilled on the dirt of Marikana is on the hands NUM and Zuma, not just Lonmin and the police. Zuma’s favoured union and principle support base within COSATU is NUM and they could not afford to look weak in the build-up to Zuma’s re-election bid at the ANC’s Manugang conference in November, in which he faces a strong challenge from deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe, who draws support from several of COSATU’s strongest union, most notably the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and their radical socialist leader Irwin Jim.

If they were to have been shown up by a bunch of upstart, wildcat striking workers at one of the largest platinum mines in the world, in a country where platinum has replaced gold as the principle source of profit for extractive capital, it would have constituted a serious obstacle to Zuma’s re-election campaign. Furthermore the South African mining industry is in its last days, as gold reserves- historically the foundation of the South African economy- and platinum prices continue to drop. This is the real reason for the intensification of extractive mining practices, without workers being compensated for the added risk with any rise in wages

This precarious situation involving the primary industry in South Africa has led to NUM working with the mining capital in order to protect the jobs of their members and attempting to ensure that these companies secure the requisite profits needed to keep the mines open, leading them to view any threats to their position with these companies as a threat to their very existence. Zuma on the other-hand can’t afford to face any more job losses, in the build up to his re-election campaign, unemployment in the country is unofficially at over 40% and youth unemployment is over 60%.

Forget the media propaganda about the union battle between NUM and AMCU. The majority of the strikers were not AMCU members, they were non-unionized workers or NUM members. AMCU was trying to recruit workers who were already involved in the strike rather than organizing it. The background to this, something that none of South Africa’s reflexively anti-union media explicated in their initial coverage, was a strike that occurred in February-March of this year at the Implants mine located close by. During this strike, wildcat strikers affiliated to AMCU, were subjected to similar violence  as NUM attempted to protect their position as the dominant union in the mining sector and the favoured union of the mining industry. The difference is the the wildcat strikers won over a 100% increase in wages from the bosses. The average return after deductions 4000 rand a month or 500 USD for some of the most degrading, dangerous and depressing work imaginable. This in a country with one of the highest costs of living for the poor striking workers at Implants managed to get the bosses to give them a 5500 rand  (660 USD) increase. This opened up space for the AMCU to appeal to the miners of Lonmin.

The real underlying scandal of the strike was well put by Chris Rodrigues from Rolling Stone:

But what still embitters them is their understanding that they would have to be reincarnated many times over to earn what the CEO of Lonmin did in one single year. Comparing their salary of R48 000 per annum with Ian Farmer’s (2011) earnings of R20, 358, 620 amounts to an, approximately, 424 years discrepancy. Taking a recent estimate of average male life expectancy in South Africa (49.81) and deducting just 18 childhood years from that would mean even if they worked every day of their adult life – they would have to do so over 13 unlucky lifetimes!

Such is the normalization of this capitalist metaphysics that the rival union has been universally rebuked for wanting to reduce it to a ratio of 1 year: 4.26 life spans. No wonder these strikers then entrusted the magic realism of a sangoma, for nothing today needs to be more urgently remedied than “reality”.

As a worker told the Mail & Guardian’s website: “It’s better to die than to work for that shit  … I am not going to stop striking. We are going to protest until we get what we want. They have said nothing to us. Police can try and kill us but we won’t move.”

This massacre highlights the degeneration of the dream of post-apartheid South Africa into a nightmare of capital, patronage, corruption, and repression.  Now is the time for displays of real solidarity with the miners and a full exposure of the truth behind this awful crime.

Benjamin Fogel is a writer and activist in Grahamstown, South Africa.

Please note that this article has been lightly edited to remove a few typos in the original published at CounterPunch.