South Africa has entered a week of official mourning, occasioned by the deaths of thirty-four miners shot by the police during a wildcat strike at a mine near the town of Marikana, in the worst incident of state violence since the apartheid era. President Jacob Zuma, who ordered the observance, also called for the country’s flags be flown at half-staff and ordered a judicial inquiry—and lawmakers and politicians are flocking to the mine, which is a little over sixty miles from Johannesburg. The country has embarked on deep soul-searching, even as the crisis remains unresolved—Lonmin, the mining company, had demanded that the striking workers return by Tuesday or be fired, but relented after discussions with the government. Some thirty-three per cent of the twenty-eight thousand mine workers showed up on Tuesday, according to wire reports, as Parliament debated the issue in Cape Town.
The bloody episode in this eighteen-year-old black-majority democracy takes many back to the days of white-minority rule, when policemen routinely fired on and killed thousands of South Africans fighting for their freedom. Now, the question many are asking is, Freedom for whom?
The chain of events that led to the massacre at the Lonmin mine, one of the world’s largest platinum producers, began with the rock drillers. For their hazardous work far underground in the deepest parts of the mine, they are paid the equivalent of about $481 a month. A critical mass of the miners signed up with the upstart Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, thus breaking with the traditional miners’ organization, the National Union of Mines, which has three hundred and sixty thousand members and, in the words of the respected South African journalist Justice Malala, had “tied workers into years of meager wage increases.” The N.U.M., a strong force in the struggle to end apartheid, is now seen by many as being too close to the governing African National Congress it helped bring to power. As a member of the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions, it is itself part of the governing alliance, often referred to as “a broad church.” There are reports that the N.U.M. agreed with the mine owners about certain demands but didn’t tell the workers—something the N.U.M. denies. It didn’t help that the well-paid secretary of the N.U.M. recently got a wage increase of more than forty per cent, according to published reports.
The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union was, according to Malala, “organizing on the N.U.M.’s space”—holding out the prospect of a raise to around a thousand dollars a month, and gaining more converts to force the company to meet its demands. Management termed it an illegal strike. That strike led to the first violence between the two labor organizations: ten men hacked to death, including two policemen, with reports that the lips and ears of some of the dead were cut off. But little attention had been paid to what was happening until the two policemen were killed the previous week and the number of striking workers began swelling. Somewhere between two and three thousand strikers gathered last Friday on a hill in the shanty town near the mine, armed with traditional weapons—machetes and spears—and, according to several reports, were given potions by a sangoma (or traditional healer) to make them strong and invincible.
The exact sequence of events is still in dispute. Apparently, one of the strikers had a gun—allegedly taken from one of the slain policemen—and fired it at what was by then a throng of policemen who had assembled to disperse the growing and restive crowd of miners. The policemen loosed a two-to-three-minute barrage of bullets that left thirty-four dead and some seventy-eight injured. Two hundred and fifty-nine strikers were arrested.
Anton Harber, a professor of journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand and a prominent South African analyst, who watched the scene unfold over and over on television, told me that “the policemen looked like scared schoolboys.” Harber added, “Why did the policemen arrive with that kind of weaponry—automatic rifles, pistols, water cannon, tear gas, and stun guns?” He is among those who argue that the calamity that ensued was, in his words “the hard face of bad management—of the police, of labor conditions, the politically connected, and the political leadership.” The case critics make is that, because of poor pay and poor working conditions, the situation had been not so quietly brewing and should have been addressed before it reached the point of violence.
The National Police Commissioner, Mangwashi Victoria Phiyega, defended the police action. She is the first woman to hold the position, after two previous national police chiefs were fired—one over charges of corruption, the other over dishonesty and impropriety. Critics of her appointment complained that she had no police experience, having held positions in management and banking. (“You can’t blame her,” one critic said. “She’s only been in the job for two months.”) How any prosecutions that result from the inquiry are handled, and whether any police procedures change, will be part of South Africa’s test.
Others in South Africa see the mine massacre as not just a local or police failure but as an absolute turning point for the African National Congress, which will meet at the end of the year to choose its leadership for the next five years. A strong opposition to what has been regarded as the “party of liberation” has yet to emerge; without more decisive leadership, many insist, the A.N.C. may turn out to be its own worst enemy. “It’s not just that the anger is rising” at the Lonmin mine, one critic said. “It is rising all over the country over a whole range of issues, including the failure of the government to deliver on its promises to meet basic needs, i.e. clean water, decent sanitation, and among other things, but probably topping the list—jobs that enable South Africans to take care of their families.” There is another factor in the equation of want: a rising tide that has lifted only a few boats. As Justice Malala wrote of the shack settlement communities where most of these workers live, “This is a strike against the state and the haves, not just a union matter.”
There have not been enough workers to open the mine up to now. And while the mine had been suffering due to an economic downturn that has seen the cost of platinum plummet, with its stock value dropping more than twelve per cent, Reuters reported on Monday that following the violence, platinum prices hit their highest point since early July, peaking at $1,477.50 an ounce. The mining company may yet profit from this disaster; will the miners, and the rest of the country?
Photograph by Leon Sadiki/City Press/Gallo Images/Getty Images.
