Abstract
This essay discusses four representations of the massacre of striking mineworkers that took place on 16 August 2012 at the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa: Aryan Kaganof’s unconventional documentary Night is Coming: A Threnody for the Victims of Marikana (2014); Rehad Desai’s Emmy award-winning documentary Miners Shot Down (2014); a performance of the massacre by the women of Marikana as recorded in Aliki Saragas’s documentary Mama Marikana (2015); and Ayanda Mabulu’s painting ‘Yakhal’inkomo: Black Man’s Cry’ (2013). Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s comments on strikes, police violence and democracy in ‘Critique of Violence’, the essay investigates what cultural texts about the Marikana massacre can tell us about post-‘rainbow nation’ South Africa after two decades of democracy. Bearing in mind the intertextual allusions that operate across semiotic media in texts such as Night is Coming and ‘Yakhal’inkomo’, and historical links between features of landscape and events, it asks what is suggested and/or occluded in different representations of Marikana. The essay concludes by focusing on the link between structural violence and the massacre, and on the importance of excavating a history of rural resistance in understanding key aspects of the Marikana strikes.
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