Marikana then and now — a
The victims’ families nurse their pain away from the public gaze; officials and politicians grab the limelight and shape the narrative
They sat apart from the large stage and the performance of commemoration. Removed from the singing of gospel and trade union songs, removed from the public grieving and the beer drinking for amnesia or carousing.
Theirs was a silent remembrance of comrades falling, of torture and of horrors unimaginable. Men such as Ephrahim Plaatjie, Lesala Mpana and others. Miners who were at “scene two” or the “killing koppie”, where police hunted down and executed 17 of their comrades with impunity on August 16 2012.
On Wednesday, during the fifth anniversary ceremony to remember the Marikana massacre, some were sitting alone on the koppie, for hours, praying, or staring into a distance filled with ghosts and lived nightmares.
Others, in groups of two, in deep communion. Miners, men who had driven the demand for R12 500 a month during the week-long unprotected strike at Marikana, and on whose agency, resoluteness and trauma unions have been built, political parties emboldened, reputations enhanced and new mythologies created.
“That is not for me,” says one miner who asked not to be named, pointing to the thousands gathered a few hundred metres away from the top of the small koppie where he lay, a Basotho blanket guarding against the dusty wind. “What happened to us here was hard. Very difficult. I am here to remember what the police did to us and the men I stood shoulder to shoulder with,” he says with quiet gravitas.
He gets up and we walk across the clearing in the middle of the koppie. A vehicle with a water-cannon had driven in here to flush out the men hiding in the nooks and crannies of the rocks on the western side of this natural enclosure of boulders and bushes. Those miners fortunate enough to emerge from their hiding places alive were kicked into submission in this clearing, searched and arrested.
He had watched some of the strike leaders, like Mzoxolo Magidiwana and Mgcineni “Mambush” Noki, being mowed down at the cattle kraal near Nkaneng. The police’s Tactical Response Team line had blasted an eight-second fusillade at them. He had run for his life towards the smaller koppie. Dogs and cops had chased him and hundreds of others.
He points out a large rock on the small koppie over which he had scrambled that day in a panic — only to be arrested on the other side. Below this boulder is an opening that runs all the way through to the other side — a potential escape route from within to without.
There is a purple-and-blue blanket lying crumpled at the mouth of the opening. “That has been here for the past five years,” says the miner. “I remember the man who tried to go through that hole. He probably threw off the blanket to fit through. I do not know if he escaped. I do not know if he is alive.”
There are fragments of confusion and chaos, of horror and trauma, that permeate the memories of the men who stood up and refused to be treated as mere units of black labour. The men who insisted that their humanity be recognised and that their employers, Lonmin, should meet them and address their wage demands — something the company never did during the strike.
For some of the survivors of “scene two”, as it was described at the Marikana commission of inquiry, and where four of the 17 miners shot dead had bullet wounds in the neck and head and 11 others were shot in the back, their agency has yielded shrivelled fruit.
Shadrack Mtshamba tries to squeeze himself into a gap between two rocks where he had hid. It is a few metres from where the blanket lies and even closer to where he told the commission a miner was shot while trying to surrender to the police.
Mtshamba is a small, wiry man — unusual for a rock-driller — but he would have been unable to conceal himself completely in this gap. His legs and feet stick out. Close by, Mafolisi Mabiya was shot in the back of the head and Ntandazo Nokambo was shot through the chest, the R5 bullet lodging in his collarbone.
Mtshamba was one of thousands of miners who took Lonmin’s retrenchment package two years ago. He paid off his debts and moved on. Since then, he has worked on contract in Kuruman in the Northern Cape but last year he was unemployed.
His debts have accumulated again. The violent memories refuse to recede. He suffered dizzy spells and nightmares. He has always liked a drink, and now uses it to forget. “I take my medication with a few beers and, by eight o’clock, I am fast asleep. I can sleep without dreams, but then I wake up at about three in the morning and I am alone with all these memories,” he says.
On the stage, the VIPs, Lonmin’s chief executive officer Ben Magara, lawyers such as Dali Mpofu and the politicians from the various political parties (besides the ANC) are sitting in the front row. Behind them are the widows and family members of the 37 miners who were slain during the strike. At the first commemoration, the widows occupied the front rows.
Midway through the proceedings, Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) president Joseph Mathunjwa arrives. This is preceded by praise-singing for his role in leading the 2014 platinum belt strike; he is the “breaker of closed doors” and the man who has “filled the bellies of mineworkers”.
Miners, made rotund by age and spared hard labour underground by union leadership activity, shuffle and sing around Mathunjwa as he arrives and greets those in the front row — all are men.
Mtshamba, who was an Amcu member when employed, says: “In 2012, Amcu didn’t organise us; we organised ourselves.”
Mathunjwa is still addressing the crowd at 3.54pm — the time at which police had opened fire on the miners at “scene one”. The blustery wind, which has whipped up red dust all day, appears to grow stronger, wilder.
The Amcu president exhorts the thousands gathered to “Remember Mambush! Remember the Marikana 34!” — a number that excludes the three striking miners killed by police in a skirmish on August 13, one of whose father, Goodman Jokanisi, also