Marikana: when the massacre was over . . . the terror began
On August 16 2012, a contingent of the SAPS opened fire with R5 assault rifles on a group of miners striking at Wonderkop near Marikana platinum mine in North West. By the time the dust had settled, 34 miners were dead and 78 more had been wounded. But, f
THOLAKELE “Bhele” Dlunga is impassive as he pulls the plastic shopping bag over his head to show the torture he endured. His hands do not tremble as he mimics how police officers clamped their hands over his nose and mouth when they thought he was somehow managing to get enough air to breathe despite the black bag. That was just the start of the beatings and torture that would last for days.
The terror began when five plainclothes policemen broke down the door to Bhele’s one-room shack at dawn on October 25 2012, a little more than a month after the strike ended. After suffocating and beating him, they found the pistol that he kept next to his television. Arrested on charges of possessing an unlicensed weapon, he was taken to Phokeng police station, where the assault continued throughout the day. He was then transferred to another police station, where he was again tortured.
In a voice raspy and constrained from being choked, Bhele claimed he had not used the pistol, but kept it with him as he feared for his safety in the dangerous mining settlement. The police’s interest in the firearm, with its distinctive red-coloured slide on top, had been fuelled by their secret informer from among the strikers known only as Mr X. As his testimony would later show, Mr X worked with the police to fabricate evidence about many of the strike leaders, woven with incidents that he had perhaps witnessed or that police had gleaned and fed him from other sources. The police also had hours of video of the strikers shot by police cameramen and Lonmin security, as well as publicly available news material. In the aftermath of the massacre, and the launch of the Marikana commission of inquiry the month before, the police and the state were frantic to shift attention from their actions onto those of the miners.
The information that Bhele’s tormentors sought was the whereabouts of other strike leaders, and those who had guns. The police, he says, had photographs of “everyone”.
After relating his experiences, Bhele slips out of the shack and goes to a nearby Somali-owned grocery store. Recognising Bhele, the owner offers him the basic food items for free, as he has been doing for affected miners throughout and since the strike. Despite being, as he puts it, “broke, broke, over-broke”, Bhele refuses. He pays for the bread, tea and eggs with cash borrowed from moneylenders.
By the time he returns to his shack, one among more than a dozen ramshackle structures erected in the backyard of a Tswana homeowner in Wonderkop village, other miners are waiting outside. The group reflects key elements of Bhele’s world — one is a fellow church member, another a man from his home region in the Eastern Cape, and two others fellow strikers. One of the strikers is a baby-faced man in his twenties who appears disoriented. Bhele expertly prepares scrambled eggs on bread and a pot of tea for his guests, showing no hint of resentment at sharing the little he has.
He then puts the kettle back on to heat his bath water. When it has boiled, Bhele strips off and steps into a plastic basin to wash. His small frame while clothed belies the musculature of his body, his powerful buttocks and thighs.
It is the physique of a man who lives by the sweat of his brow, drilling at the rock face deep underground hour after hour. Still in pain from the beatings a week before, Bhele washes gingerly. The men, now finished with their breakfast, unabashedly watch him, now and then making a joke about his discomfort.
Drying off, he slips on boxer shorts and then mops the floor. While setting up his ironing board, he speaks gently to the young miner, encouraging him to tell the tale of his arrest. Anele Zonke, 26, was arrested by plain-clothes cops two days before Bhele. The young man appears dazed, his face trembling from time to time. He is in obvious discomfort as he sits on a plastic chair that has lost its back, shifting to relieve unseen pain. He too was beaten and suffocated.
The other men keep their eyes on Bhele as he meticulously irons his grey wool trousers, even though their creases are already perfectly sharp.
They are all, however, listening attentively to Zonke. The young man tries to gloss over some of the details of his torture, but Bhele gently prompts him from the ironing board. It was while being suffocated by a plastic bag that Zonke lost control of his bowels and soiled his clothes.
He was unable to get other clothes, as police played hide-andseek with the men, keeping them away from their lawyers. He washed his reeking trousers in the basin and waited, naked, for them to dry. He did not wash his underpants — keeping them in the hope they could be used as evidence of his torture.
When Zonke finally appeared before a magistrate, he wore his still-stinking trousers without underwear. The court ordered Zonke released, yet as he emerged from the doors, he was rearrested by the same policemen.
He is unable to say exactly what he was charged with. Murder and a few other crimes, he stammers uncertainly. He also can’t specify whose murder he was charged with.
Zonke is experiencing pain deep within his abdomen, and he says that his bowels work constantly. He is just a husk of the energetic, bright young man of two weeks before. The torture he suffered has left him ashamed.
Ashamed that he was rendered powerless, at the mercy of his tormentors; ashamed that he undoubtedly gave the police many of the answers they sought, and more besides.
It is a while after Zonke completes his story that Bhele is finally done with ironing. He applies roll-on deodorant and then rubs cream into the skin of his hands and throat as the men watch him patiently and not without amusement at his fastidious preparations.
Bhele secures his shack with a padlock and chain, and leads the group of men out of the yard to meet with other miners who were arrested and tortured. As they pass a neighbouring house, a group of women undergoing spiritual training in a combination of Christian and animist traditions call out that they had prayed for Bhele every day of his arrest. They prayed that he be released, if he was indeed innocent. The women’s teacher says that they regularly pray for those arrested by the police, believing many to be innocent.
The months after the massacre were marked by a police campaign to round up the strike leadership. Some had managed to evade or defer arrest by going on the run, but they were hampered by having to go to work at Lonmin every day once the strike ended. One of them went by a false name and slept at a different girlfriend’s home each night to throw the police off his trail. He would evade capture for more than a year, until the campaign ceased.
Another of the strike leaders was Thembele Sohadi, who was known to everyone as Rasta because of his long dreadlocks. He had been
Mr X worked with police to fabricate evidence about strike leaders, of incidents he had perhaps witnessed He is unable to say exactly what he was charged with. Murder and a few other crimes, he stammers
readily identifiable in the early days of the strike, and had been one of the first targets.
When Rasta clocked in at the mine after the strike ended, his card alerted mine security, who had been asked by police to detain him. Mine security called him over, and Rasta saw the police waiting just outside the main entrance, off mine property, so he called on other workers to help him.
The miners rallied swiftly, refusing to go underground unless Rasta was released.
By the end of the shift, Lonmin’s miners had again downed tools, and returned to Thaba in an attempt to stop Lonmin from hunting down the strike leaders. It did little good, and the police picked up the leadership one by one.
Rasta was finally detained and, he says, severely tortured— he affirms that his eardrums ruptured from being repeatedly slapped. Rasta previously exuded a militant, aggressive demeanour but is now a changed man; he is nervous and desperate to return to work. He has even shaved off his dreads. The number-two strike leader, Xolani Nzuza, was also arrested on two murder charges. All of those arrested were released after a few days, the police having little evidence and instead trying to coerce confessions and statements that damned other strikers.
“Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre”, by Greg Marinovich, is published by Penguin Random House South Africa, R250