SOUTH AFRICA – Giant water cannons circle the shacks of Marikana’s squatter camps. Lines of armed police form, preventing the mine workers from marching. Many stay huddled in their homes, too frightened to emerge, after the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets during the weekend. Soldiers arrive to help enforce a government order to settle disruption and end the intimidation of colleagues who want to break the strike.
The windswept meeting points on the hillside near the Marikana mine have fallen silent. For more than a month, it has been the scene of a so-called “worker revolution.” Thousands of men, some carrying machetes and sticks, have held frequent marches from the township where they live to the vast mine where they worked until they put down their tools several weeks ago.
It is here where this national crisis began, when police opened fire and 34 protesting miners were killed on August 16 — the worst security incident in South Africa since the end of white minority rule. Their actions will be the subject of an independent investigation.
Now, after weeks of wildcat strikes at this and other locations that threaten to cripple the mining industry, the government has launched a “security crackdown” at the giant Marikana mine close to the provincial city of Rustenburg. To many, the massive operation has come down with shades of South Africa’s apartheid past.
“Government has not and will never take away the constitutional rights of our people that they worked so hard for during the struggle for liberation,” said President Zuma, responding to accusations of heavy-handedness against the striking miners.
Yet, “Government cannot allow a situation where people march in the streets carrying dangerous weapons,” he said.
What started as a labor dispute involving a few thousand workers for better pay and conditions has exploded into South Africa’s greatest scandal since its miracle birth of democracy in 1994. Dozens have been killed in clashes with police as thousands have protested at seven mines.
Senior lawmakers believe that the country’s economy may now be under threat. “On Wednesday the world’s top platinum producer, Anglo American, suspended all of its operations in Rustenburg, South Africa due to ‘intimidation’ of its workers,” reports CNN. The mining industry is the nation’s backbone.
Political futures may also be threatened by the fallout from a crisis that appears to have exposed the failure of “The Rainbow Nation” to deliver better lives to millions of black people who are still struggling post-aparthied.
As if the echoes of the era of racial segregation were not great enough, during the aftermath of the Marikana shooting, prosecutors dusted off an apartheid-era law to arrest and charge 270 miners who had managed to dodge the bullets that killed their colleagues. The so-called “common purpose doctrine” had been used during the 1970s and 1980s to criminalize crowds of black protestors for what appeared to be the actions of a few people amongst them.
The charges were withdrawn after a nationwide outcry, but many South Africans had already been forced to consider whether the actions of the police and prosecutors had shown that parts of the state were regressing.
Enter Julius Malema, a controversial political firebrand, who has leant his voice to the frustrations of many mine workers. Aged 31, he was a child when apartheid ended, but he has become the country’s foremost critic of the enduring impact of poverty amongst black South Africans.
He was the leader of the Youth League of the ruling party, the African National Congress – a position once held by Nelson Mandela. But he was expelled for indiscipline, re-emerging as a vocal opponent of under-fire President Jacob Zuma.
“This is a violent government…. This is a murderous government,” Malema told NBC News from his Johannesburg home. “Jacob Zuma and his government are an embarrassment to South Africa. They embarrass us around the world.”
Some see Malema as a political agitator and a threat to the delicate racial harmony of South African society. He caused controversy when he was accused of publicly singing “Shoot the Boer,” a so-called “struggle song” that appears to call for the killing of white farmers.
Yet, he claims to speak for a generation of black South Africans who feel that the transformation of the economy during democratic times has been too slow.
“The conditions of our people are worsening. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened,” Malema explained. “One of the white chaps was trying to make a joke to me and said ‘had we known that it was going to be this nice for us white South Africans, we would have fought for this democracy long before 1994.’”
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. A list of the country’s twenty richest people, published in Johannesburg’s Sunday Times newspaper last weekend, showed an eight percent increase in their wealth compared to the previous year. Mining heir Nicky Oppenheimer, who is reported to have a 2.3 percent stake in Anglo American, was in fourth place on the list.
Malema has called for nationwide strikes to make the mines of South Africa “ungovernable,” unless employers give in to wage demands.
“It is a struggle the mineworkers are prepared to die for,” he said.
“We should be inspired by those comrades who were killed at Marikana to now begin to demand 12,500 [South African rand per month, or about $1,500] for each mine worker. That should serve as a source of inspiration to intensify the struggle for better salaries,” Malema continued.
Many see Malema as part of the problem – a member of the political elite who lives a life that is far removed from most South Africans. There is speculation that he may be arrested for inciting violence at the mines.
But the police will not end the frustration of those miners who refuse to return to work. More mines around South Africa may soon fall silent.
Malema summed up the strikers’ sentiment. “Make no mistake… We will not stop until we get what is due.”