Hindsight and insights in new book on how we got to Marikana
PLATINUM, a collaboration between London-based writer Jack Shenker and British photographer Jason Larkin, seeks in both content and presentation of text and photographs to remind us that we are, after all, privileged observers of the events leading up to the massacre of at least 34 mine workers in South Africa’s platinum belt.
Platinum, the second collaboration between Larkin and Shenker, reflects these sensibilities. Larkin’s photographs accompany Shenker’s essay “Marikana”, a wide-ranging analysis of how South Africa got to Marikana, and how this event might come to define the country in years to come. Shenker is unflinching in his criticism of big business and the mining industry, and Larkin’s photographs offer a fairly dispassionate, but astute look at the people and the landscape of the platinum belt around Rustenburg.
Extract from Platinum by Jason Larkin and Jack Shenker
Since the Marikana massacre, each time miners have laid down their tools, strikes have also mushroomed elsewhere across other industries and workplaces around the country. Yet anyone with fulltime work does not count among the very poorest in the nation.
Statistically speaking, most platinum rock-drillers rank in the seventh or eighth income decile, actually making them better off than around two-thirds of the population.
Given the privations of Nkaneng, one of the informal shack settlements scattered around the mineshafts of Marikana, and other hardscrabble settlements like it, that fact speaks volumes about how grossly divided South Africa’s population has become.
But it remains the case that for a huge proportion of the black population, a full-time mining job and membership of a union would represent a staggering advancement of their status.
Instead, they are simply members of the precariat, living insecure, unstable lives with access to piecemeal, temporary work at best, or joblessness at worst.
Under neo-liberalism,
that category of citizen is growing in most developed countries, where enervated social rights and zero-hours contracts are increasingly the norm.
In light of the relatively privileged position of those lucky enough to have stable jobs on the platinum belt, it would be easy to dismiss strikes in Marikana as somewhat disconnected from the rest of the country’s strife.
An important struggle for the mineworkers themselves, no doubt, but hardly consequential to the millions of South Africans who are unemployed, or homeless, or fighting eviction, or just generally existing in a zone of uncertainty where each day teeters on the very pivot-edge of survival.
But any such dismissal would be dangerously shortsighted. To appreciate why unrest here matters, you only had to hang around in Marikana on the evening following the rally in Wonderkop stadium in 2014, where several thousand striking miners gathered, once the pitch had emptied out and dusk had fallen.
Behind the silhouette of the Rowland shaft machinery, fires soon appeared above the main road linking Marikana to the N4 highway. Residents of a settlement called Mmaditlokwe, who had been forcibly relocated there by a nearby platinum mine the previous year, were protesting at their continued lack of services and their apparent inability to get either the mining company or government officials to take their concerns seriously.
Sharp cracks echoed over the surrounding scrubland as demonstrators dragged burning tyres in circles across the asphalt and security forces fired rubber bullets into the air to try to disperse the crowd. At that same moment, police were also patrolling a few miles to the east, in the small towns of Bapong and Majakeneng, where local rebellions against economic deprivation had erupted several times in recent weeks. Residents say a three-month-old baby died in the unrest after inhaling government tear gas.
An 18-year-old youth in Majakeneng told me by the roadside: “The older generation have been hypnotised by the ANC. Our generation can think for ourselves.”