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Notes from Marikana, South Africa: The Platinum Miners’ Strike, the Massacre, and the Struggle for Equivalence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2013

Daniel Magaziner  and
Sean Jacobs
Daniel Magaziner
Affiliation:
Yale University
Sean Jacobs
Affiliation:
The New School
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Abstract

This note reflects on the August 2012 miners' strike at Marikana, South Africa in light of a century long history of violence associated with worker actions in that country and elsewhere in the Global South. It suggests that the breakaway union's allegedly ‘illegal’ strike fits within a long tradition of radical worker activism in South Africa, which is best understood in light of anticolonial efforts to short-circuit the chronologies of imperial power. The Marikana strike, like anticolonial rebellions during the early twentieth century and, critically, white worker struggles following First World War, was an effort to speed up the process by which the value of workers’ lives and labor might be made equivalent to those in power.

Type
Report from the Field
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 83: Strikes and Social Conflicts , Spring 2013 , pp. 137 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

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References

NOTES

1. Cooper, Frederick, “Labor, Politics and the End of Empire in French West Africa,” in Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question (Berkeley, 2005).Google Scholar

2. See Carol Paton, “Marikana Strikers may have been ‘in Muti-induced trance,’ Business Day, August 31, 2012. Accessed on October 8, 2012, at http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/labour/2012/08/31/marikana-strikers-may-have-been-in-muti-induced-trance; SAPA, “Rabbit Blamed for Lonmin ShootingReport,” City Press, August 25, 2012. Accessed on October 8, 2012 at http://www.citypress.co.za/SouthAfrica/News/Rabbit-blamed-for-Lonmin-shooting-report-20120825

3. In general, see Crais, Clifton, Poverty, War and Violence in South Africa (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Bullhoek, prophecy, and violence, see Landau, Paul, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar and Wenzel, Jennifer, Bulletproof: The Afterlives of Anti-Colonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The classic account of Bullhoek is Robert Edgar, Because They Chose the Plan of God (Johannesburg, 1988)

4. Jon Soske, “Marikana and the New Politics of Grief,” HistoryMatters.co.za. August 20, 2012. Accessed on October 8, 2012, at http://historymatters.co.za/marikana-and-the-new-politics-of-grief-by-jon-soske/

5. Fields, Karen, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, 1985).Google Scholar

6. Piot, Charles, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa the Cold War (Chicago, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferguson, James, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Heinrich Böhmke, “Marikana: A Lesson in Late Liberal Democracy,” Africa Report, August 22, 2012. Accessed on October 8, 2012, at http://www.theafricareport.com/news-analysis/marikana-a-lesson-in-late-liberal-democracy.html

8. Krikler, Jeremy, White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (Manchester, 2005).Google Scholar

9. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, 29.

10. This point is elegantly—and devastatingly—made by Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Mike Schussler, “Lonmin's ‘Poor’ Workers are not as Poor as They Think,” Business Day, September 3, 2012. Accessed on October 8, 2012, at http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2012/09/03/lonmins-poor-workers-are-not-as-poor-as-they-think

12. Accessed on October 8, 2012, at http://m.news24.com/CityPress/SouthAfrica/News/New-dawn-breaks-over-Marikana-20120922