The Marikana women’s fight for justice, five years on
Marienna Pope-Weidemann meets Sikhala Sonke, a
grassroots social justice group led by the women of Marikana
October 13, 2017
Marienna
Pope-Weidemann is War on Want's press officer.
@MariennaPW
The women of Sikhala Sonke. Photo: Sikhala Sonke
The fatal police shooting of 37 striking workers at Lonmin’s Marikana
platinum mine in August 2012 was the worst recorded instance of police violence
in post-apartheid South Africa.
Five years on, there have been no prosecutions and no real improvements – no
compensation for the families living in grief and dire poverty.
There has also been no apology, although staggeringly Lonmin has
created
a commercial out of the incident. But as always with the Marikana story,
the most important characters were left out.
A few weeks after the massacre there was another death in the community.
Amidst a brutal crackdown Paulina Masuhlo, a powerful community leader, died
after being shot by police. Paulina’s death helped galvanise the birth of
Sikhala Sonke, a grassroots social justice group led by the women of Marikana.
As well as demanding criminal prosecution for the killings and compensation
for the families, Sikhala Sonke also carries forward the demands those workers
died for: a living wage and dignified conditions.
We cry together
It’s anyone’s guess how Lonmin accumulated its impressive collection of
corporate social responsibility awards. More than ten years after signing a
legal obligation to build 5,500 homes in exchange for mining rights, the
world’s third-largest platinum producer has erected just three show homes,
while the families of its workers live in shacks without electricity or running
water. This despite a staggering $15million loan from the International Finance
Corporation solely for the social development of Marikana.
Like many killings in black communities, wherever they occur, the horror is
not easily absorbed by white society. It will be a stretch for many in the UK
to imagine that a British mining company would rather let employees be shot and
killed than pay a fair wage. But is it any more unimaginable than cutting
corners to cut costs on the Grenfell tower blocks? Or fighting wars for oil
even as our dependence on them threatens millions of lives with climate chaos?
It becomes clearer every day that we live in a system fuelled by the
unimaginable.
Marikana might be far away, in a country very different from our own, but
the struggle at the heart of Sikhala Sonke is one we should be able to identify
with: the struggle of those hurt most by a powerful corporation to hold it
accountable for its crimes. In Britain
too, we are searching for ways to take back control of our lives and country
from elite interests that see us as expendable.
The documentary Strike A Rock tells
the Marikana women’s story
In August I met and talked with two of Sikhala Sonke’s leading figures,
Primrose Sonti and Thumeka Magwangqana. They explained that for five years, the
women of Sikhala Sonke have had to ‘fight with two hands’. With one, they fight
Lonmin on behalf of their community. With the other, they have had to fight for
their place within that community, to be recognised as social justice leaders
by a male-dominated union movement.
Sikhala Sonke means ‘we cry together’ and the name speaks to a pain older
and deeper than the massacre itself. Far from transcending the yawning
inequalities of the apartheid era, South Africa
has now become the
most
unequal country in the world. Though less than 10 percent of the
population,
white
South Africans still control the vast majority of the nation’s wealth.
As well as being highly racialised, this inequality is also highly gendered.
A third of women in poor households are
survivors
of gendered violence and young women are eight times more likely to be
affected by HIV/AIDS. They are far more likely to be in low-paid and unpaid
work, while in Marikana, the only compensation offered to grieving women is to
take up the jobs of their dead in the dark labyrinth of mines, where they live
under the
constant
threat of rape and assault. Look deeper, to where racism and patriarchy
intersect, and it is black women who bear the brunt of oppression in modern South
Africa and around the world.
The erasure of black women from political struggle
began
long before Marikana. While much is said of men who had to leave their
families to work in mines and cities or resist apartheid, what is less visible
is the contribution of women, both to the family and to the cause. Every dead
or absent father leaves a mother to carry the family alone: a lifetime of
unpaid labour alongside paid work to make ends meet. And while media coverage
of the commission into the massacre cast the women of Marikana as grieving
widows, that is only where their story began.
Keeping hope alive
In an economic system that sees value only in a wage, this inequality is
embedded in the logic of the system. The profoundly political nature of unpaid
family and movement support, without which no anti-apartheid movement in South
Africa or strike in Marikana would be
possible, fades into the background – along with the indispensable role played
by women of colour in the movement for global justice.
Black women live each day on the
intersection
of racial, patriarchal and class oppression. In this much complained about
‘age
of identity politics’, which is more broadly recognised amongst progressive
circles in the global north, it has become ‘polite’ to concede that women of
colour have a powerful role to play in movements for social change – but all
too often this is mere lip service, paid in the interests of meeting diversity
quotas or meant as ‘compensation’ for their experience, as though a slot on a speaking
panel could redress generations of oppression.
But beneath all that is a simple truth: that like all the most painful
experiences in life, oppression can be a great teacher. Being born on the
intersection is not an enviable position. However, as those of us lucky enough
to have learned from brave and brilliant women of colour in social justice work
will know, that pain can develop into a profound sensitivity towards unjust
applications of power; the sort that sneak up on those without the eyes to see
them and collapse our efforts towards equality from the inside. This kind of
leadership, too concerned with power over others, stifles the oxygen needed to
spark real change from below.
It is from intersections like this that our most powerful stories, inspiring
ideas and promising leaders emerge. Recognising that means stepping back to
seed spaces for that leadership but it does not mean stepping out.
Allies
too have a vital role to play and the difference between recognising
leadership from those most oppressed and reinforcing oppressive hierarchies by
leaving them to all that labour alone, is about whether we are prepared to stay
connected and above all, to listen.
Sikhala Sonke describe Lonmin and the ANC government as ‘twins’, both
responsible for the situation in Marikana. And now is a vital moment because
both are on thinning ice. Lonmin’s share price is at an all-time low and last
year, a five-month miners’ strike forced a basic pay rise of 20 percent.
Meanwhile the ANC, which has ruled South Africa
since apartheid, is losing its majority as the next generation of South
Africans feel they have sold out to white economic interests. It is hard to
think of a place where this is clearer than Marikana.
Exploited by Lonmin and abandoned by their government, the women of Sikhala
Sonke have kept the faith by refusing to abandon each other. It is that
solidarity, they say, that keeps hope alive.
War on Want has partnered with Sikhala Sonke to support their work. Click here to find out more
and help get the word out by joining
our Thunderclap. This marks the start of a renewed campaign supporting
Sikhala Sonke here in the UK.
The campaign is in memory of Marikana woman Paulinah Masuhlo, who died in
September 2012 after being shot by South African police.
