Tragedy that keeps unfolding
a miner at Marikana, had addressed the crowd earlier. That violent confrontation also left two policemen, Tsietsi Monene and Sello Lepaaku, dead.
The number 34 also excludes other Lonmin employees: the security guards Hassan Fundi and Frans Mabelane, killed by striking miners on August 12; non-striking miners Julius Langa and Eric Mabebe, who were on their way to work after Lonmin had sent out messages via radio that their shafts were still open; and Isaiah Twala, who was killed for allegedly being a Lonmin spy.
The Marikana narrative has always been contested. First, the government and the police sought to own it with disinformation to cover up their culpability. Forensic revelations created another narrative of what happened during the strike, and an emergent agency among the widows of Marikana has led to more intimate and personal stories of the tragedy being told.
They have slowly moved away from grief and into new lives. Many work at Lonmin, mainly as cleaners, a job they find deplorable but essential to provide for their families. Others have entered new relationships and have had children. Most have developed a living politics that embraces their autonomy and their decision-making power as a collective.
There are also other stories, of the 34, rather than the 37, or 44, who died, and how this excludes a recognition that there was no proof presented at the commission that any of the dead were responsible for the deaths of others.
This is a narrative that prevents all the families from recognising and sharing their common loss and grief — and the shared humanity invested in that.
It prevents people like Mary Sigwegwe Langa from coming to Marikana to mourn her dead husband. While the commemoration ceremony was winding down in Marikana, Langa sat crying on the cement floor of her home in Tonga, near the Mozambique border — the news bulletins on television, with fuzzy reception and the sound turned up, connecting her to the events at Marikana.
In an earlier interview, she had talked about not having had legal representation for much of the commission, and of still not knowing what its report says about the death of her husband.
About the commemorations that have increasingly focused solely on the events of August 16 2012, she says simply: “I don’t know why no one cares about us. Mr Langa was just going to work to provide for his family.”
The Economic Freedom Fighters partially built its nascent reputation on the Marikana massacre. Likewise, Amcu has stepped into the breach created by the miners’ unhappiness with the National Union of Mineworkers in 2012, which led to the nonpartisan nature of the strike. Amcu is now the largest union on the platinum belt and is making inroads into other mining sectors.
At this week’s anniversary, the stage and surroundings are festooned in Amcu green. The merchandising on sale has ballooned from just a few vendors in 2013 to an informal mall of caps, overalls and T-shirts.
The messaging on commemorative T-shirts has also shifted from recognising the dead men’s attempts to reclaim their humanity to more overtly mainstream political sentiments. The 2015 T-shirt stated: “Our lives were taken for demanding our dignity”. This year’s iteration states: “We were massacred for radical economic transformation by the state”. It’s a reference to the ANC’s sloganeering.
Although the strike was characterised by collectivism, Noki, the “Man in the Green Blanket”, has emerged as an omnipresent symbol for Marikana, the strike and the massacre.
Photojournalist Leon Sadiki’s powerful image of him, clenched fist rising at his side as he roars to his comrades, is hung in large banners down either side of the stage. The image is also reproduced behind those on stage and on innumerable T-shirts.
Amcu has set up a trust to build houses for all 44 Marikana families; they completed the first one earlier this year and it was for Noki’s family in the Eastern Cape.
Fellow strike leader Xolani Nzuza addressed the crowd in a green blanket reminiscent of Noki’s and similarly knotted. But he appeared dwarfed by the knot — as if wearing someone else’s clothes.
Noki’s wife, Veronica, was not at the commemoration. Her sister had died the previous week and she was preparing for the funeral. In an interview earlier this year, Veronica, who works at a mine in Carltonville, described “the pressure of being Noki’s wife” and spoke of miners coming up to her and professing their admiration for her husband.
But she says the man she knew was more complex than the one who “represented the workers and the poor, for whom he died. To them he was a strong man, a leader and a hero, but he was my husband too. He was also soft and caring, and always considerate about how I was doing.
“Everyone, Amcu, the miners, his family, they all pull Noki in different directions and sometimes I just want to be left alone with him,” she says.
Amid the tension and tussle over who is remembered and who is not, and what parts of the 2012 strike at Marikana are discarded and what parts are retained, the families attempt to move on.
Although many extended families remain in financially precarious positions, the haunted look of distress that dominated so many widows’ eyes for years after the massacre is slowly receding.
But it is a trauma that will dominate the lives of those affected — and the psyche of a country — for generations to come.
Since 2012, there have been three suicides by members of the 44 Marikana families.
Last year started with the suicide of Ayabonga Jokanisi (15), the son of Semi Jokanisi, who was killed by police on August 13. Stelega Gadlela’s mother, whose age her family estimated to be anywhere between 90 and 110, hanged herself this year. And Sandisa Zimbambele (22), the daughter of Thobisile and Nokuthula Zimbambele, poisoned herself. Her mother had taken a job at Lonmin and Sandisa was left in charge of the household in the Eastern Cape. Now her young child is also in Nokuthula’s care.
All three deaths are linked to the bloody events of 2012.
Nokuthula, who works underground at Lonmin, has carried a heavy loss. A year after the massacre, it was a grim memento on her phone: a photograph of her husband’s body limply hanging from the grip of a policeman establishing that he was dead — a certainty Nokuthula was well aware of from having to feed and clothe their extended family without his remittance.
In 2016, silently staring at her daughter’s coffin while mourners’ prayers rose up to the grey, swollen clouds above Lusikisiki, there was the nagging question: What could she have done differently? It was clear in her eyes.