The ghost of apartheid walks

Iwas not on the frontline the day 34 striking miners were killed by police at Wonderkop informal settlement in Marikana, just over two years ago.

Two people close to me were though.

Together they had been covering the violent protests throughout.

hrough the news coverage we had already known police would begin their dispersal operations. But what most people didn’t expect was the bloodshed that would unfold on the day.

Just as the shooting happened – before even looking towards the television screens – I called one of them to check if he was okay.

I was greeted by a tremulous voice: “I think the police just used live ammunition on these people.”

Although I have not experienced the wrath of apartheid, his words made me feel as though he had been speaking from an orange-boothed tickey box back in the eighties. I was thankful both were okay.

Newsrooms scrambled as more and more footage of miners bleeding on the ground was screened. A former SA Press Association colleague counted the bodies and reported on it.

Then, later that evening, national police commissioner Riah Phiyega briefed the nation. Thirty-four lives were taken that day on August 16, 2012 – in what has been labelled the worst police shooting post-apartheid. All they wanted was R12 500. What I did attend for months on end was the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, tasked with probing the shootings.

There, the widows of the miners howled and fainted as they watched footage of the shooting on television screens – some for the first time. That was torment.

When Dali Mpofu first fingered Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa for his role, a sense of disillusionment fi lled the air in the auditorium. This was the same man who walked with Madiba when he was freed from prison; the same man who fought for workers when he built one of the most powerful trade unions in South Africa, the National Union of Mineworkers.

And there we were, listening to Mpofu reading from Ramaphosa’s e-mail to Lonmin mine bosses that “concomitant action” needed to be taken against workers. Concomitant action, when broken down, could be viewed as him requesting an appropriate response.

But to the miners’ families hearing those words, it simply meant death.