Fiction, Reality and Contested Memory in God’s Bits of Wood and the “Marikana Commission Report”

Abstract

SummaryReportage of violence against workers is often compromised by age-old tendencies in oppressive states to control narratives on epochal events considered potentially disruptive of existing exploitative economic relations through excision of uncomfortable truths from the official memories of states. Thus memory, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, has been a contested terrain, especially in the relationships between the state-aligned businesses and labour. There are parallels and contrasts in the remembering of violent labour-related events in Sembene Ousmane’s Gods Bits of Wood and the “Marikana Commission Report” which this article considers to be essential in preventing cyclical violence in the labour market. Hence this article comparatively discusses the treatment of history and memory as narrated in Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood and in Judge Farlam’s “Marikana Commission Report” on the Marikana massacre and argues that where memory is disputed and contested, the resultant submerging of truth for self-preservation reasons results in open-ended and recurrent violent events.