Marikana 5 years on

SOUTH AFRICA is a country where a substantial portion of the male population historically bonded in a violent and highly militarised context.

In many cases it is also culturally acceptable to use violence to resolve conflicts and tough, aggressive, brutal and competitive masculinity is promoted and weakness regarded, with contempt, as “feminine”.

Through this process many South Africans, especially men, live out a culture of violence, or at least accepts violence as inevitable under certain circumstances, said Statistician-general Pali Lehohla on releasing the Victims of Crime Survey earlier this year.

We see this aggression daily, with men like Deputy Minister Mdudizi Manana asserting their supposed masculinity by resorting to violence. Some women, like Manana’s victim, get to live to tell their story. But others, like 30-year-old Mpumalanga primary school teacher Kate Chiloane, lose their lives at the hands of these men. Most of these women, as Lehohla’s report indicated, were likely to be killed by people they knew. In this case, Chiloane was gunned down by her husband.

Then there’s the other kind of violence we mark in shame today. Five years ago at Marikana on August 16, 2012, the death toll was 34. Seventy miners were injured.

For those who saw it live on television, it’s a sight that can never be unseen. Policemen, our policemen, shooting into a crowd of striking miners in full view of the assembled media cameras.

The shooting went on and on. Automatic fire that was so sustained, so chaotic, it remains a mystery why none of the policemen shot their own colleagues as they advanced on the miners.

The strike had already claimed 10 lives, including two policemen cruelly butchered by strikers before the massacre on the koppie.

But nothing can ever explain away the police brutality or the complicity of their officers – all the way to the highest office in the land. Nobody has taken responsibility. For the families of those slain, life has not just been harder; it has been full of unanswered questions with only one possible answer: No one really cares.

And that is perhaps the worst tragedy of all.