Category Archives: Marikana platinum

Daily Maverick: 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. Continue reading

The Con: A Marikana Too Far

Bhavna Ramji and Philiswa Sithole, The Con

June 2013: The sun shining on Marikana in the North West turns the blood of goats being slaughtered into glinting rivulets of mercury. We’re at a government-sponsored mass traditional ritual performed by the 44 families that lost loved ones at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine during an unprotected strike in August 2012. The intention of the slaughter is to cleanse the area where people were killed of evil spirits.

Family members collect in pockets in front of the koppie where miners had gathered to demand a monthly increase to R12 500. Male elders slit the throats of the goats. The practised art of skinning and disembowelling the animal before charring the meat is under way.

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Daily News: Marikana a turning point for SA

New forces will ensure that there is no return to business as usual after the mine strike, writes Richard Pithouse. The Daily News

The name Marikana and the date August 16, 2012, have been carved into our history with the same brutality, blood and resolve that have shaped so many of the events that have brought us to where we are.

Around the world massacres and long and bitter strikes have often been decisive turning points in societies.

From Algeria to India and Zimbabwe, the first massacre after independence from colonialism has often come to mark the point at which the collective innocence about the claims of parties that were once national liberation movements to incarnate the national interest has begun to unravel. In many cases it has also begun a turn from above and, important, sometimes also from below, away from democratic modes of politics.

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Understanding Marikana Through The Mpondo Revolts

Sarah Bruchhausen

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.

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Understanding Marikana Through The Mpondo Revolts

We are the Women of Marikana and we will occupy Wonderkop Stadium Tomorrow on Human Rights Day, 21 March 2014.

Sikhala Sonke eMarikana Press Statement

20 March 2014

We are the Women of Marikana and we will occupy Wonderkop Stadium Tomorrow on Human Rights Day, 21 March 2014.

 

The women of Marikana have been denied the right to March to Lonmin. The protest permit was refused today because Lonmin refused to write a letter granting permission for the women to march tomorrow.

But we will still go ahead with our plans to hand over a memorandum of our grievances as a community and as the women of Marikana which we feel Lonmin should address. The public safety department was willing to allow us to march but it is Lonmin who has refused our call. What gives Lonmin the right to decide on our constitutional right to march?

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