Abstract
Despite its title, this book does not look exclusively at the massacre that occurred at Marikana on 16 August 2012, when South African police officers shot and killed 34 striking mineworkers and wounded 78 others. Rather, it places that event in the context of a longer, larger struggle for dignity and economic freedom by the working class in South Africa. The authors did not do this to trivialise this significant event but to implore the reader to recognise that it was one moment, one particular incident in a long history of struggle and conflict, one that is not necessarily more important than another. As such, it pursues what George Lipsitz has called the ‘long fetch’, looking into the past and identifying the forces that slowly shaped what may otherwise appear to have been sudden and inexplicable.1 The book does this by attempting to describe the tensions between the various ‘ordinary’ individuals – the striking employees of Lonmin’s platinum mine at Marikana – and their relationships to the labour collectives they started, helped lead, or held to account. It attempts to show how understanding these tensions is crucial to understanding the events that occurred at Marikana, and understanding South Africa as an economic project.
Highlights
This book tells the stories of the how and the why of the platinum belt strikes that started in 2012, and the associated responses by the police, government and mining companies that culminated in the Marikana Massacre
Reading this book reminded me of a book taught in first-year sociology classes at UCT: Robert Michels’s Iron law of oligarchy
In describing the emergence and influence of independent worker committees, the second major union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), and the manner in which workers demanded their collective voice be their mandate rather than being dictated to by their union, the book serves as a possible counter-example to the ‘iron’ law
Summary
This book tells the stories of the how and the why of the platinum belt strikes that started in 2012, and the associated responses by the police, government and mining companies that culminated in the Marikana Massacre. By describing the manner in which one of the two main labour unions at Marikana, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), had become separated from the control of the workers it was meant to serve, the book hints at the replication of Michels’s iron law.
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