Source: The Nation
The Marikana strike in South Africa is finally over, but the legacy of the massacre that took place there two months ago may prove to be as enduring as that of the Sharpeville massacre more than four decades earlier. On March 21, 1960, the South African police fired into a crowd of demonstrators protesting the apartheid pass laws at Sharpeville, killing sixty-nine. On August 16, 2012, the South African police fired at a crowd of striking wildcat miners at Marikana, killing thirty-four. Not surprisingly, many in South Africa have labeled Marikana the Sharpeville of our times, all the more devastating because the fingers pulling those triggers were controlled by a government voted into power to realize the aspirations of the majority rather than to shoot them down.
In many respects, the Sharpeville reference is inappropriate. The protesters back then were fighting for basic rights to citizenship against a state that viewed them as subhuman; at Marikana, the protesters were fighting for a better wage against an employer with significant black ownership. In both instances the demonstrators were assembled illegally, but in the Sharpeville era the laws were unjust, while at Marikana they were merely being applied ineptly, albeit with equally tragic consequences.
Yet on a symbolic level the analogy is apt. Both massacres represent thresholds. After Sharpeville, the state clamped down as never before, banning the liberation movements and forcing them into exile and underground; the African National Congress responded by turning to armed struggle. The consequences of Marikana might be less dramatic, but the massacre will nonetheless come to draw a similar line between one era and another, with the suggestion of innocence lost at the crossing. There will be pre-Marikana and post-Marikana, just as there was pre- and post-Sharpeville.
President Jacob Zuma’s ANC has branded the current era the Second Transition: if the first, Mandela-led transition was about the transfer of political rights, this second, Zuma-led one, we are told, is going to bring socioeconomic uplift to millions who still live in poverty in a country with one of the world’s highest inequality rates. The major scandal in South Africa before Marikana was the revelation that an ANC “sweetheart” publisher had failed to deliver thousands of textbooks to South Africa’s poorest students for more than six months; the books have still not arrived. In this context, the Second Transition means something else: Marikana marks that tipping point when the liberation movement moved inexorably closer to becoming just another alienated party in power and the people lost faith in its transformative possibilities.
This does not mean that the ANC is going to lose the next elections, scheduled for 2014. There is not yet a viable alternative. The one serious contender, the left nexus around the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), has proven itself too implicated in state power to perform the job of the opposition; this is one of the root causes of the Marikana tragedy. And so into the vacuum step wildcat strikers, flash-fire protesters, unwitting anarchists, men who believe traditional medicine will protect them from bullets, men who need a living wage and dignified living quarters, each of whose meager paychecks supports an estimated twenty-six people in a country with an intolerable unemployment rate—people who will become increasingly susceptible to the rantings of dangerous demagogues.