from a Sundowns’ soccer player named ‘Mambush Mudau’. He was chosen since he had organised soccer games and always resolved minor problems in the workplace. He was particularly well known for having a mild temperament and for his conflict-resolution skills both at the workplace and at his home in the Eastern Cape. Others were chosen because they had previously dealt with emergencies that had occurred in the communities where the miners had originated, including the Eastern Cape, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and elsewhere. When someone passes away in Wonderkop, workers often show their leadership by taking responsibility for the process of alerting the family of the miner and organising to ensure that the body gets to the respective home and that miners are transported to the funeral. They also manage and collect donations from co-workers to give to the family of the deceased. The workers’ committee was reconstituted several times—some gave up, others were killed, while some remained on the committee from its inception on 9 August until after the strike.
This workers’ agency and leadership is no obscure radical rhetoric or theory of ivory tower academics or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Rather, it is the unfettered praxis of the working class—which could not be contained, even with national security, the ANC, NUM, and the ideology of the ruling class pitted against it. This book provides a history from below—a story of ordinary people who had previously been relegated to the margins of society. Here, we acknowledge them for their involvement in the strike and for their bravery during an extraordinary and tragic moment in time. The pain of the workers seeps through their stories. It is tangible, sometimes gut-wrenching. We hope you can understand the massacre through the lens of the victims, those who continue to mourn the deaths of their loved ones and colleagues.
In the core of the book, we let the Marikana workers speak for themselves. NUM leaders deny certain of the testimonies given. We undertook more than 30 formal interviews, joined workers’ and community representatives for their meetings, participated in protests, and engaged in countless unrecorded conversations. Finally, we were privileged to be able to meet with a reference group of 14 strikers, many of them part of the leadership, six representatives from the community and two AMCU leaders. We included interviews in this book that are largely representative of the workers’ voices. The interviews that we excluded do not challenge the narrative put forward in the book. Rather, they tend to confirm it.
A large number of the interviews were conducted under the mountain, where workers held meetings in the open air, others were on the streets and some were in people’s homes. Some of the interviews contain material that deals with personal biographies of mineworkers in order to help the reader to understand how and why they came to Marikana. We do not draw this out extensively, but rather allow the readers to form their own impressions.
In the beginning we engaged with almost anybody prepared to talk with us, but later were able to interview leaders of the strike. The people we interviewed stood a very real chance of being victimised by the police or Lonmin, so we have made them anonymous. Anonymity was an undertaking made to our interviewees, and it is one that perhaps contributed to gaining testimony unvarnished by public exposure. For the most part our research was completed before lawyers started taking statements, at which point narratives may have become formalised and less spontaneous. We do not know of previous academic interviews gained so soon after a massacre, and we hope that this contributes to the unique character of the volume.
For the book, space constraints compelled us to make a selection from our main interviews. These are preceded by three background interviews. The first of these is with the president of AMCU, a union that sympathised with the strikers and to which many of them belonged. We think the interview is important because the union’s voice has been under-represented and widely misrepresented in the media, sometimes maliciously so. A second interview is with an RDO, who talks about his job, and a third is with a miner’s wife. We then include sections of three speeches given in the days immediately after the massacre; the first two by strike leaders, the third by the general secretary of AMCU. Ten interviews with mineworkers follow the speeches.
Before the interviews and speeches, there is a narrative account of events leading up to the massacre. The five maps at the start of the book assist the reader in following the story. The reference group enabled us to correct important details, but any mistakes are ours and ours alone, and we apologise, to the workers especially, for any errors. The narrative is the beginning of a history from below, and will be expanded and modified by evidence presented to the inquiry (which will be valuable even if the commission interprets it in ways with which we and the workers disagree). Our main aim in this book has been to indicate what happened, and offer proximate explanations. A deeper history providing a better account of motivations and sociology will require, in particular, attention to life history. In the analysis and conclusion that complete the book we contextualise the massacre to propose a preliminary assessment of its wider significance.
We hope that by the end of the book the reader will have a clearer understanding of what happened in Marikana and why. We hope that you will share with us a sense of the strain and pain of the miners’ lives and labour, the bravery of their struggle, the cruelty tied to their boss’s drive for capacious profits, the corruption of NUM and, most awful of all, the unnecessary police brutality that resulted in the largest state massacre of South African citizens since the Soweto Uprising of 1976.
2
The massacre
A narrative account based on workers’ testimonies
Peter Alexander
On 16 August 2012 the South African police massacred 34 strikers participating in a peaceful gathering on public land outside the small town of Marikana. The workers’ demand was simple. They wanted their employer, Lonmin, to listen to their case for a decent wage. But this threatened a system of labour relations that had boosted profits for Lonmin, and had protected the privileges of the dominant union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). It was decided to deploy ‘maximum force’ against the workers. Our narrative includes brief accounts of events prior to 16 August, when ten people died, and offers insights into why workers were prepared to die for their cause. It draws mainly on interviews with strikers conducted in the six weeks following the event, and a selection of this testimony appears later in the book.
Some background to the strike
Poverty drove our interviewees to work at Lonmin, and fear of losing their jobs means they tolerate some of the most arduous and dangerous working conditions imaginable. The second background interview in this book provides a glimpse of work undertaken by rock drill operators (RDOs), the category of employees who led the strike. Other underground workers also perform heavy manual work, often doubled up, under the threat of rock falls and machinery accidents. Making matters worse, the air underground is ‘artificial’ and full of dust and chemicals. TB is widespread and illness is common. Of course there are safety regulations, but according to Mineworker 8, who was qualified as a safety officer: ‘We work under a lot of pressure from our bosses because they want production, and then there is also intimidation. They want you to do things that are sub-standard, and if you don’t want to do that and follow the rules... they say they will fire you or beat you, things like that.’1He recalled a worker who had lost his leg because he had been forced, through threat of a ‘charge’, to work in a dangerous place. Peer pressure, too, is a factor. Mineworker 7, a woman, told us: ‘When you start saying “safety, safety, safety”, they say “What should we do? Should we not take out the stof [blasted ore-bearing rock], and just sit here, because you don’t want to be hurt?”’. For the Marikana strikers, the fear of death, present on 16 August, was not a new experience.
In South Africa, a typical working day lasts eight hours, but Lonmin workers we spoke to said they could not ‘knock off’ until they had reached their target, which often meant working 12 hours, sometimes more (Mineworker 8 mentioned working a 15-hour shift). Mineworker 7 complained: ‘They do not even give you time to eat lunch. They just say your lunch box must remain on the surface’.
