The recent public release of the Farlam report that explores the causes and possible remedies of the Marikana massacre, has brought to the fore the stark realities and choices facing South Africa.
Commentator, Brad Cibane, has lamented the failure of the report to address the deep structural issues that gave rise to the massacre. Perhaps unfairly so, given the limited scope of the inquiry.
This conversation is nevertheless critical if we are to overcome the sphinx problems before us. The Marikana tragedy and its mining backdrop could hardly be more symbolic, given the dominant role the mining industry has played in the modernisation of South Africa, for better or worse.
The South African economy, as we have come to know it, was literally built on gold. Platinum, its successor, only belatedly came to take pre-eminence, following the gradual decline of the gold industry subsequent to its apogee in the 1970s. It is now the country’s leading earner of foreign exchange.
The true societal cost of developing the gold industry is truly unquantifiable. Much has been said about the induced migrant labour system and the trail of fatherless communities it left in the so-called homelands[1]. So, I will say less about that.
Much less has been said, however, about the corresponding psychosomatic impact on the socially dislocated men who found themselves in strange new environments, hundreds of miles away from their families. It is easy to see how violence came to define the dormitory township environment. After all, there is much to be said about the trauma of coping with the resultant cutthroat culture of the emergent sprawling settlements, in distant and foreign settings, ripped apart from their ancient communal socio economy.
Black South African society and by association the entire country continues to bleed from the cruel edge of the nexus of colonialism and capitalism that buttressed the rise of the South African mining industry. The Marikana tragedy is a timely reminder of the deeper challenges confronting post-apartheid South Africa, which we ignore at our own peril.
There has been much talk about the “ticking time bomb” supposedly implied by the sea of the unemployed that has characterised South Africa for many decades. What is surprising about this analysis is its apparent ignorance of the devastation it has been reaping for decades already.
What is the violent crime that has tormented us for decades, if not a direct consequence of the sea of angry and desperate men characterised by the pernicious status of having nothing to lose? Have we been imprisoned so long behind our high security walls that we have forgotten that they exist?
Black Townships have lived with this scourge for decades. Its spread into broader society is a newer reality that reminds us that there is no sowing without reaping. As with the natural pattern, what is reaped is usually much greater than what was sown.
Ironically, the surplus of black labour that was close enough to the city for accessibility to burgeoning industry but not too close to “dampen” property prices, served Apartheid society well for decades. The “surplus” labour ensured that wages remained low enough to serve the interests of industry and white society. What was then advantageous “surplus” labour is what we have come to call the ranks of the unemployed. The difference is that they have now become human.
[1] Feinstein. C, H. “An Economic History of South Africa, conquest, discrimination and development” (2007). Cambridge University Press
(2) Terreblanche, S. “A history of inequality in South Africa, 1652-2002” (2002). University of Natal Press
