Category Archives: National Union of Mineworkers

SACSIS: The Massacre of Our Illusions…and the Seeds of Something New

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1402

The Massacre of Our Illusions…and the Seeds of Something New

by Leonard Gentle, SACSIS

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.

Socialist Worker: How police planned and carried out the massacre at Marikana

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http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=29403


How police planned and carried out the massacre at Marikana

Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope and Peter Alexander investigate the scene of the killing

Strikers were surrounded by heavily armed police and soldiers, and killed while fleeing from gunfire. The state forces were not “protecting themselves”. They participated in well-organised, premeditated slaughter.

We interviewed surviving miners and looked at physical evidence on the site of the massacre. What we found is even more shocking than the story presented in the media, even here in South Africa. Follow numbered events on the map above.

1: On the day of the killing about 3,000 striking miners were gathered on and just below the “mountain” (actually a small hill). Joseph Mathunjwa, president of their union, the AMCU, came and pleaded with them to leave to avoid a police attack. The miners refused.

2: Within 15 minutes of Mathunjwa leaving, the police and army laid razor wire, separating the strikers from the Enkanini informal settlement, where many of them live. Casspirs (armoured cars), horses and water cannon moved up to encircle the workers.

3: Some workers walked down to the razor wire to see if they could still get out through a gap. Witnesses say police near the “small koppie” (hillock) opened fire on them, probably with rubber bullets.

Some workers fled through a five metre gap in the razor wire. They were met with a barrage of live fire from the police and many died. Images of this shooting were broadcast around the world.

4: Terrified strikers scattered in all directions, with a large number heading for cover by a koppie about 300 metres in the opposite direction from the wire. This “killing koppie” is where the largest number of strikers died.

No cameras recorded this slaughter. But evidence remained on Monday, four days after the massacre. There are remnants of pools of blood. Police markers show where corpses were removed. We found markers labelled with letters up to ‘J’.

5-8: Other strikers were killed as they fled across the fields. Some examples are marked on the map. Shots were fired from helicopters and some workers, heading for hillock, were crushed by Casspirs.

By Monday the whole area had been swept clean of rubber bullets, bullet casings and tear-gas canisters. We also saw patches of burned grass, which local workers claim are the remains of police fires used to obscure evidence of deaths.

Women march to support the miners

Sisters, wives and daughters of the miners marched to the “mountain” on the Saturday after the massacre. One woman told us, “The television is hiding the truth about the killings. It’s lying!”

Another said, “My husband has worked here for 27 years—waking up at 3am and returning at 2.30pm. “He earns 3,000 rand (£230) a month. What clown would earn so little and not protest?”

They told us about the shootings. “All we saw was a helicopter flying. We heard shots. Then we saw men running and cops picking up anyone running around the streets.”

Many have not seen their relatives since the massacre. Some didn’t know if they were in hospital, in prison or dead. They also face immediate practical problems. One said, “We have no money for rent, food, for our children’s schools. We expect no more income this month.”

Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope and Claudia Ortu

A political storm flows from strike

Workers’ determination to continue their strike against Lonmin has hardened enormously since the massacre. Two massive meetings on Saturday and Monday attended by 12,000 to 15,000 workers and their families pledged to continue.

They said it would be a betrayal of their slain comrades if they gave up. The strike has been presented as a sectional action by rock drillers. But we spoke to numerous strikers from other sections of the mine, and nobody we heard was appealing just to the drillers.

Lonmin management said any worker still striking on Monday would be sacked. It also maintains that it will only negotiate with the NUM. A striker speaking at one of the mass meetings asked his colleagues if the bosses intended the 80 people who lay in hospital, or those in prison, to return.

Even the government recognises that Lonmin has lost touch with reality. The minister of police told the company it could not fire workers during a week of mourning called by president Jacob Zuma. On Tuesday the company withdrew the sack threat.

Strikers remain defiant

AMCU is belittled as not being a serious union. But the reality is that while it is ignored by Lonmin, the NUM is doing deals without support from the workers.

There have been shock-horror stories about the strikers carrying traditional weapons, but they are no match for automatic weapons—and the strikers had no illusions that spears could beat Casspirs.

The issue that unites the workers is the demand for 12,500 rand (£960) a month. This is a massive increase—400 percent for some workers. NUM attacks AMCU for supporting such “unrealistic” demands.

But it forgets its own history. The main demand in the great 1946 African miners strike, which NUM glorifies, was for ten shillings. That represented a 500 percent increase. It was a powerful mobiliser, and eventually it was won.

Now, the demand for 12,500 rand is a threat to the system, to profits and to industrial relations machinery. Just as in 1946, the ruling party has united behind the bosses. A victory for Lonmin strikers is a victory for workers everywhere. A defeat will encourage more massacres.

Anger has built for a long time
Chris Molebatse is a local monitor for the Bench Marks Foundation, which looks into conditions for miners. He told Socialist Worker, “Last year a white man died underground. People were told not to go into work.

“Not long after a black man died. Miners wanted to stop work, but were told to go on as normal. This anger has been building for a long time.”

He said bosses at the Lonmin firm take a lot of miners on as subcontractors, rather than employing them. “Living conditions are terrible. People are housed in camps with no sanitation or running water.

“And these are people who mine for platinum! Meanwhile Lonmin officials drive in from Sandton, South Africa’s most expensive suburb.”

Amandla: Echoes of the Past: Marikana, Cheap Labour and the 1946 Miners Strike

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http://www.amandlapublishers.co.za/blog/1534-echoes-of-the-pastmarikana-cheap-labour-and-the-1946-miners-strike

Echoes of the Past: Marikana, Cheap Labour and the 1946 Miners Strike

by Chris Webb

On August 4, 1946 over one thousand miners assembled in Market Square in Johannesburg, South Africa. No hall in the town was big enough to hold them, and no one would have rented one to them anyway. The miners were members of the African Mine Worker’s Union (AMWU), a non-European union which was formed five years earlier in order to address the 12 to 1 pay differential between white and black mineworkers. The gathering carried forward just one unanimous resolution: African miners would demand a minimum wage of ten shillings (about 1 Rand) per day. If the Transvaal Chamber of Mines did not meet this demand, all African mine workers would embark on a general strike immediately. Workers mounted the platform one after the other to testify: “When I think of how we left our homes in the reserves, our children naked and starving, we have nothing more to say. Every man must agree to strike on 12 August. It is better to die than go back with empty hands.” The progressive Guardian newspaper reported an old miner getting to his feet and addressing his comrades: “We on the mines are dead men already!”[1]

The massacre of 45 people, including 34 miners, at Marikana in the North West province is an inevitable outcome of a system of production and exploitation that has historically treated human life as cheap and disposable. If there is a central core – a stem in relation to which so many other events are branches – that runs through South African history, it is the demand for cheap labour for South Africa’s mines. “There is no industry of the size and prosperity of this that has managed its cheap labour policy so successfully,” wrote Ruth First in reference to the Chamber of Mines ability to pressure the government for policies that displaced Africans from their land and put them under the boot of mining bosses.[2]

Masters and Servants

Mechanisms such as poll and hut taxes, pass laws, Masters and Servants Acts and grinding rural poverty were all integral in ensuring a cheap and uninterrupted supply of labour for the mines. Pass laws were created in order to forge a society in which farm work or mining was the only viable employment options for the black population. And yet the low wages and dangerous work conditions kept many within the country away, forcing the Chamber of Mines to recruit labour from as far afield as Malawi and China throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sordid deals between Portuguese East Africa and Apartheid South Africa ensured forced labour to be recruited for the mines and by 1929 there were 115,000 Mozambicans working underground. “It has been said,” wrote First in her study of migrant Mozambican miners, “that the wealth of Reef gold mines lies not in the richness of the strike but in the low costs of production kept down by cheap labour.”[3]

When AMWU was formed in 1941 black miners earned 70 Rand a year while white workers received 848 Rand. White miners had been organized for many years, but there was little solidarity between the two groups as evidenced by the 1922 Rand Rebellion led by the whites-only Mine Workers Union. White miners went on strike against management’s attempt at weakening the colour bar in order to facilitate the entry of cheaper black labour into skilled positions. Supported by the Communist Party of South Africa under the banner of “Unite and Fight for a White South Africa!” the rebellion was viciously crushed by the state leaving over 200 dead. The growth of non-European unions in the 1940s was dramatic and for the very first time the interests of African mineworkers were on the table. Their demands threatened the very foundations of the cheap labour system, and so in 1944 Prime Minister Jan Smuts tabled the War Measure 1425 preventing a gathering of 20 or more on mine property. Despite these difficulties the union pressed on and in 1946 they approached the Chamber of Mines with their demand for wage increases. A letter calling for last minute negotiations with the Chamber of Mines was, as usual, ignored.

By August 12th tens-of-thousands of black miners were on strike from the East to the West Rand. The state showed the utmost brutality, chasing workers down mineshafts with live ammunition and cracking down on potential sympathy strikes in the city of Johannesburg. By August 16th the state had bludgeoned 100,000 miners back to work and nine lay dead. Throughout the four-day strike hundreds of trade union leaders were arrested, with the central committee of the Communist Party and local ANC leaders arrested and tried for treason and sedition. The violence came on the cusp of the 1948 elections, which would see further repression and the beginning of the country’s anti-communist hysteria.

National Union of Mineworkers Poster on Fortieth Anniversary of 1946 Strike.

While it did not succeed in its immediate aims, the strike was a watershed moment in South African politics and would forever change the consciousness of the labour movement. Thirty years late Monty Naicker, one of the leading figures in the South African Indian Congress, argued that the strike “transformed African politics overnight. It spelt the end of the compromising, concession-begging tendencies that dominated African politics. The timid opportunism and begging for favours disappeared.”[4] The Native Representative Council, formed by the state in 1937 to address the age old ‘native question,’ disbanded on August 15th and ANC president Dr. A.B. Xuma reiterated the demand for “recognition of African trade unions and adequate wages for African workers including mineworkers.”[5]

The 1946 mineworkers strike was the spark that ignited the anti-apartheid movement. The ANC Youth League’s 1949 Program of Action owes much to the militancy of these workers as does the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s and the emergence of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) in the 1960s. It is too early to say what sort of impact the current Lonmin strike will have on South African politics, but it seems unlikely that it will be as transformative as those of the past. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), arguably the heirs to the 1946 strike are currently engaged in a series of territorial disputes with the breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). Meanwhile COSATU’s muted response has echoed the ANC’s line of equal-culpability and half-mast public mourning. The increasingly incoherent South African Communist Party has called for the arrest of AMCU leaders with some of its so-called cadres defending the police action. Former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema’s plea for miners to hold the line and form a more militant union reek of political opportunism.

Still Dependant on Cheap and Flexible Labour

What no one has dared to say, aside from the miners themselves, is that the mining industry remains dependant on cheap and flexible labour, much of it continuing to come from neighbouring countries. This has historically been the source of most miner’s grievances. A recent Bench Marks Foundation study of platinum mines in the North West province uncovered a number of factors linked to rising worker discontent in the region. Lonmin was singled out as a mine with high levels of fatalities, very poor living conditions for workers and unfulfilled community demands for employment. Perhaps most significant is the fact that almost a third of Lonmin’s workforce is employed through third party contractors.[6] This form of employment is not new in the mining industry. In fact, since minerals were discovered in the 19th century labour recruiters have scoured the southern half of the continent for workers. The continued presence of these ‘labour brokers’ on the mines and the ANC’s unwillingness to ban them – opting instead for a system of increasing regulation – is the bloody truth of South Africa’s so-called ‘regulated flexibility.’

There are a number other findings from the Bench Marks study that are worth mentioning as they illuminate some of the real grievances that have been lost amid photos of waving pangas. The number of fatalities at Lonmin has doubled since January 2011, and the company has consistently ignored community calls for employment, favouring contractors and migrant workers. A visit by the Bench Marks Foundation research team to Marikana revealed:

“A proliferation of shacks and informal settlements, the rapid deterioration of formal infra-structure and housing in Marikana itself, and the fact that a section of the township constructed by Lonmin did not have electricity for more than a month during the time of our last visit. At the RDP Township we found broken down drainage systems spilling directly into the river at three different points.”[7]

In fact, the study predicted further violent protests at Marikana in the coming year. The mass dismissal of 9000 workers in May last year inflamed already tense relations between the community and the mine as dismissed workers lost their homes in the company’s housing scheme.

Once again, these facts are hardly new in the world of South African mining. Behind the squalid settlements that surround the mineshafts there are immense profits to be made. In recent years the platinum mining industry has prospered like no other thanks to the increased popularity of platinum jewellery and the use of the metal in vehicle exhaust systems in the United State and European countries. Production increased by 60 per cent between 1980 and 1994, while the price soared almost fivefold. The value of sales, almost all exported, thus increased to almost 12 per cent of total sales by the mining industry. The price rose so dramatically throughout the 1990s that it is on par with gold as the country’s leading mineral export.[8] South Africa’s platinum industry is the largest in the world and in 2011 reported total revenues of $13.3-billion, which is expected to increase by 15.8% over the next five years. Lonmin itself is one of the largest producers of platinum in the world, and the bulk of its tonnage comes from the Marikana mine. The company recorded revenues of $1.9-billion in 2011, an increase of 25.7%, the majority of which would come from the Marikana shafts.[9]

For risking mutilation and death underground workers at Marikana made only 4000 Rand, or $480 a month. As one miner told South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper that, “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.” These expressions of frustration and anger could be from 1922, 1946 or today. They are scathing indictments of an industry that continues to treat its workers as disposable and a state that upholds apartheid’s cheap labour policies. •

Chris Webb is a postgraduate student at York University, Toronto where he is researching labour restructuring in South African agriculture.

Endnotes:

1. Monty Naicker, “The African Miners Strike of 1946,” 1976.

2. Ruth First, “The Gold of Migrant Labour,” Spearhead, 1962.

3. Ruth First, “The Gold of Migrant Labour,” Spearhead, 1962.

4. Monty Naicker, “The African Miners Strike of 1946,” 1976.

5. Dr. A.B. Xuma quoted in Monty Naicker, “The African Miners Strike of 1946.”

6. The Bench Marks Foundation, “Communities in the Platinum Minefields,” 2012.

7. The Bench Marks Foundation, “Communities in the Platinum Minefields,” 2012.

8. Charles Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 211.

9. Marketline Advantage Reports on South Africa’s Platinum Group Metals, 2011.

Mahlala: Umshini Wam

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http://www.mahala.co.za/reality/umshini-wam/

Umshini Wam

by Chris McMichael

“There’ll be civil war, said Johnny. Civil fucking war, that’s what there’ll be. I said, What you think we got now? Not a fucking picture is it?”- GB84, David Peace’s harrowing novel of the 1984-1985 UK Miners’ Strike depicts how the Thatcher government threw the weight of the security state (millions of pounds spent on riot police, intimidation and illegal surveillance) against the National Union of Coal Miners. But as violent as at the Iron Lady’s yearlong campaign against organised labor was, this pales in comparison with the massacre of Marikana on Thursday. In one week the Lonmin strike went from an (admittedly violent) industrial dispute to one of the worst recorded mass killings in South African history with at least 34 miners dead and scores injured. 34…. In the next few days, weeks, months there will be much discussion about the ‘complexities’ of the situation and on whom or what to appropriate blame, but it can’t change the brute fact of that number. In ostensibly peacetime, ostensibly democratic South Africa, the state attempted to ‘disperse’ a volatile gathering by killing 34 of its citizens. This is a figure which wouldn’t be out of place in Syria, a number that would make the old apartheid ministers smile nostalgically.

Any self-respecting modern war pays attention to PR and psychological operations, and the government has already embarked on a massive campaign of rationalisation, dissemination and perception management, which to a large degree has simply been echoed by the media. As Jon Soske points out there has been a great deal of earnest handwringing about ‘complexity’ (inter-union conflicts, rumors of outside agitators), attempts to pathologise the miners (evidence of magic rituals, discussions about the apparently violent culture of rock drillers) and efforts to explain the police actions as the result of either fear or bad training.

All these combine to de-politicise the events, to treat “the miners strike and police repression” as if they were “natural disasters” or “vengeful acts of some incomprehensible god” and to evade simple facts: “the police were there to break a strike; the miners refused to disperse and appear to have tried to defend themselves when attacked; the police killed them with government approval”.

The state’s efforts to turn the shooting into a legitimate case of self-defense has been aided by the circumstances surrounding the strike. Because 10 people had already been killed by Thursday afternoon, including two policeman and two security guards, it has been relatively easy to present the officers as being outnumbered by hordes of deranged miners. And because the police were allegedly fired upon first (the comprehensive evidence of which has yet to be presented), the current narrative holds that they had no choice but to defend themselves in extreme circumstances. Under this moral calculus, the state is apparently synonymous with public safety and even the threat of violence against its security apparatus renders lives forfeit. But despite mawkish sentiment about our ‘men and women in blue’, the police at the site were not simply ordinary officers faced by a malign army waving traditional weapons. Instead they were made up of elite units, including the paramilitary Tactical Response Teams from various precincts around the country and immediately recognisable by their distinctive berets. What the police may have lacked in numbers was certainly made up for in the arsenal at their disposal: armoured personal carriers, horses, helicopters (which according to one report may have sprayed offensive chemical agents), body armour, water cannons, barbed wire barricades, rubber bullets, teargas, R5 Rifles. And there is little indication that police management were interested in finding a resolution to the strike that did not involve a violent clampdown. Before the shootings, national police spokesperson Dennis Adriao claimed that Thursday was “unfortunately D-Day” and that the strike would be broken up by force, while Police Commissioner Phiyega has been candid in acknowledging that officers were allowed to use “maximum force” in “self-defense”. Ominously, on Wednesday it appeared that the police had declared the area as a “security zone”. It is unclear exactly what the official definition of this zone is, but it appears to bear a distinct resemblance to the declaration of “unrest areas” during apartheid era States of Emergency, which gave the police and military carte blanche to restore ‘order’.

As terrible, as unnecessary as the police response to the strike has been, the ferocity of the state’s actions is not completely unexpected. The armed units and equipment marshaled at Marikana were at the cutting edge of the SAPS experiments with re-militarisation: hyper masculine war-talk, new SWAT-type units, “shoot to kill”, “chest out stomach in”. This high-intensity policing has amounted to a war on the poor, from increasingly brutal evictions to the killing of protesters. Moreover, the sheer ruthlessness of the shootings seems to be the logical conclusion of the authoritarian drift of the Zuma years. From the increased power of state intelligence to the SANDF dusting off counter-insurgency tactics from the 1980’s as a guide to handling community protests in the present, it’s clear that there is little the current ANC will not do to ensure its grip on power. Rather than an aberration, this massacre was merely a borderline waiting to be crossed. High intensity policing for a low-intensity democracy.

However, focusing exclusively on the state-centered dimensions of what happened ignores which interests the bullets of the police were defending: Lonmin Plc itself. A company so venal, that in response to the massacre it issued a self-congratulatory press release noting all of its good works in the community. A company so callous that it issues ultimatums demanding that drill operators return to work regardless of what just happened and implies that as the strike was “illegal”, the dead had it coming. A company much like other mining operations throughout the country, and the continent, which extract vast profits from the dangerous jobs of their wage slaves, which wreck environments and communities, which sponsor cheap ‘upliftment’ projects to salve executive consciences, which cower behind the shield of the state when things explode. And this is further buffered by the expediency of corporatist unions like the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), who in a bid to score points over their AMCU rivals, issued a vague statement of regret and hopes that “the perpetrators will be brought to book”. As a responsible member of the mining world, NUM has a tough task having to negotiate between token sentiments for the dead and protecting its shares and investments in various mining houses.

And after the mayhem of Thursday now comes the push for a return to normalcy: commissions will reconcile and exonerate, further disorder will be stopped, investor confidence will be restored. But what is more normal, more quintessentially South African than the tooled up security state racking up a body count for the mineral-energy complex? The 1922 Rand Revolt: aerial bombing and artillery shells in the East Rand. The 1946 miners’ strike: workers forced back into the pits at gunpoint. The general brutality of the compound system created by the colonial and apartheid authorities. 2012: embedded journalists watch the SAPS war party at work in Marikana.

The government is now calling for a national week of mourning and memorial services to “promote a violence free society”. Flags at half-mast will join the ritualistic legal spectacle of inquiries and the attempts by political and business leaders to find evidence of a ‘third force’ and other malignant powers. As if a system where men risk their lives in stygian darkness for resources they can never hope to afford is not violent by nature. Where blood and bones in Marikana are the price for jewelry and record turnovers in Johannesburg, London and Beijing. As if a country in which the ostentation of the middle class and the rich is overlaid on the more consistent reality of millions freezing, sweating and starving in townships, informal settlements and transit camps.

There is no mystery that building a paradise for some on the back of purgatory and hell for others is always on the verge of atrocity, and that it brutalizes and cheapens the lives of both its victims and its managers. And as the events of the last week have shown, it is no mystery that assassination and terror are sometimes needed to maintain this fine state of affairs.

The Marikana Mine Worker’s Massacre – a Massive Escalation in the War on the Poor

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8 August 2012

The Marikana Mine Worker's Massacre – a Massive Escalation in the War on the Poor

by Ayanda Kota

It’s now two days after the brutal, heartless and merciless cold blood bath of 45 Marikana mine workers by the South African Police Services. This was a massacre!

South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. The amount of poverty is excessive. In every township there are shacks with no sanitation and electricity. Unemployment is hovering around 40%. Economic inequality is matched with political inequality. Everywhere activists are facing serious repression from the police and from local party structures.

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