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South Africa: The Marikana Syndrome
AfricaFocus Bulletin
August 5, 2013 (130805)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"What took place on August 16th could just as conceivably have
occurred with similar violence at just about any mine in South
Africa - because of workforce similarities, common historical
residues inherited from apartheid and preserved so exactly in the
world of mineral extraction, similarities of geological conditions,
the nature of industrial relations nationwide, the appalling state
of safety in South Africa's "hard rock" mines or, perhaps most
importantly of all, because the local mining industry has, albeit
to differing degrees, experienced common discomfort in coming to
terms with the transformative demands being made upon it by a new
regime in the twenty years since apartheid. Perceived on this
landscape the Marikana massacre is but a symbol or outcome of wider
developments." - Philip Frankel
16 August will mark one year since the "Marikana Massacre" in which
34 striking platinum mineworkers were killed by police on one day
at the Marikana mine northwest of Johannesburg (see
http://www.africafocus.org/docs12/saf1209a.php - "The Marikana
Era?" and http://www.africafocus.org/docs12/saf1209b.php (The Price
of Platinum). A formal government commission
(http://www.marikanacomm.org.za/), is pursuing an investigation of
the events of that day and of the violence both preceding and
following it, including the deaths of police and mine security
staff as well as mineworkers (the website includes transcripts of
some 117 days of hearings to date).
The new book by Philip Frankel, Between the Rainbows and the Rain:
Marikana, Migration, Mining and the Crisis of Modern South Africa,
does not go into detail about the events at Marikana. Instead it
focuses on the underlying realities exposed by the event, namely
that, despite some improvements, the fundamental structure of the
mining system in South Africa remains based on that under
apartheid, and that the drive for "production" above all undermines
regulations and reproduces the marginalization and exploitation of
the mining work force, particularly those who do the most dangerous
work and are paid the least.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from the introductory
chapter. The full book is must reading for anyone who wants to try
to understand the gap between the promise and the reality of postapartheid
South Africa, which is most glaring in the mining
industry.
To order e-book or print edition of the Frankel book, or to contact
the author, visit http://www.marikanabook.com/
To order a Kindle version from Amazon, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?B00CWGGPX6
For a detailed description of events and eyewitness reports by
mineworkers, see Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to
Answer, by Luke Sinwell, Peter Alexander,Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang
Mmope, and Bongani Xezwi (http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?1909026255).
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on South Africa, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/southafrica.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
Philip Frankel, Between the Rainbows and the Rain: Marikana,
Migration, Mining and the Crisis of Modern South Africa.
Johannesburg: Agency for Social Reconstruction, 2013.
[The following excerpts, from the introductory chapter, are
reposted in AfricaFocus with permission of the author]
To order e-book or print edition, or to contact the author, visit
http://www.marikanabook.com/
To order a Kindle version
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?B00CWGGPX6
A print edition will be available soon outside South Africa from
African Books Collective http://www.africanbookscollective.com/).
Introduction: Democracy's Sharpeville
This historical moment has, from all accounts, irrevocably altered
South Africa's industrial and political landscape. Perhaps more
importantly in the longer term Marikana has become a moral
barometer against which future developments in mining and wider
South Africa will be measured for many years to come.
A government-appointed investigative commission has been at work to
examine the preconditions leading to the deaths on 16 August 2012.
I believe this legal mechanism will deliver at least some of the
proverbial "goods" on the agenda but by no means will that
investigation cut close enough to the truth and complexity of the
whole matter. This is precluded by its narrow terms of reference,
its legal orientation and hence is preclusion from venturing more
deeply into the underground sociology of Marikana, other mines and,
ultimately, post-apartheid South Africa. ...
About a decade ago I wrote a book about a comparable event - the
massacre at Sharpeville - which is at first sight a far more
prepossessing place than Marikana. This little town, east of
Rustenburg and north-west of Johannesburg, seems a most unlikely
place to stir world imagination. ...
From all accounts, even after the sinking of the first mine shaft,
Marikana was an entirely normal, small and relatively isolated
agricultural village in the surrounds of a still-standing but also
unexceptional Dutch Reformed Church. This, under apartheid was
patronised by the white farmer population. The arrival of the mines
on a large scale changed almost everything. Marikana then became
what it is now - a fairly shabby mining settlement no different
from the many others strung along the sides of what is currently
the N4 Pretoria-Rustenburg highway.
This is, not without reason, known colloquially as the "platinum
highway". Marikana is in fact an integral part of a vast string of
mines stretching through the bushveld from Rustenburg for hundreds
of kilometres northwards to the Zimbabwe border and then along the
outlines of the Kruger National Park. Together the eastern and
western limbs of this bushveld complex are the richest platinum
mines on earth, containing 80 percent of known deposits. Most of
its ore, when extracted and processed, is utilised as catalytic
converters in just about every car in the world.
The Marikana mine owned by Lonmin is, in fact, the third biggest
platinum mine in South Africa with over 30,000 workers - of whom
3.000 were in the veld on the fateful day. Perhaps more importantly
the Marikana mine (with three working shafts) is not very different
in its operations and social composition from other huge abutting
mines owned by transnational companies, including Anglo-American,
Impala, Aquarius and Xstrata. ...
What took place on August 16th could just as conceivably have
occurred with similar violence at just about any mine in South
Africa - because of workforce similarities, common historical
residues inherited from apartheid and preserved so exactly in the
world of mineral extraction, similarities of geological conditions,
the nature of industrial relations nationwide, the appalling state
of safety in South Africa's "hard rock" mines or, perhaps most
importantly of all, because the local mining industry has, albeit
to differing degrees, experienced common discomfort in coming to
terms with the transformative demands being made upon it by a new
regime in the twenty years since apartheid. Perceived on this
landscape the Marikana massacre is but a symbol or outcome of wider
developments.
...
As we shall show in the next chapter, people died violently, not
only on the fateful Marikana day of August 16th, but long before.
Perhaps more significantly, people continued to die in brutal
circumstances with Marikana as the instigator for months
thereafter. Conceived in this way, Marikana, is once again, less
about a single massacre with all its horrible specifics, and more
about a fundamental degenerative process in mining and in civil
society in general. This encompasses not only the North-West
Province, where poor governance, exploitation and atrocities
against human rights are among the worst in South Africa, but all
of the other eight provinces that make up the supposedly new
democracy.
The mining industry continues to be in its worst crisis for decades
as we enter the first moments of 2013. Massive companies like Anglo
Platinum are threatened financially by production downtime, the
labour relations system is in tatters and the main unions, NUM and
AMCU, remain divided and at each other's throats. At least half a
dozen mines are expected to close, at least temporarily, during the
new year (2013) in the face of declining profitability and internal
conflicts within the workforce. The anticipated "unbundling" of
Goldfields is most likely to set off a disinvestment momentum that
will leave mining uncomfortably under-capitalised in local hands.
South Africa is, as inferred on our cover, nowhere near the
"rainbow" status it previously enjoyed on the international and
domestic front. Once the "flavour of the month", or even the icon
of political transformation, South Africa is now, two presidents on
from Mandela, a deeply troubled country. ...
As a major mining country we have, as one industrial journal
tritely puts it, "forgotten something". Indeed we have - and what
has apparently slipped our memory are the people in mining - the
(linguistically sanitised "human factor" in mining new-speak - the
vast numbers of often de-humanised mining employees outside
management, below supervisors, deep underground, down at the
rockface.
This does not, of course, apply equally and everywhere because of
the enormous diversity in the "mining industry", despite the
stereotypic tendency of people to reduce it to a large clutch of
powerful organisations whose core business is to blast, break,
process and then sell precious rock on the world market.
Some mines, especially the gold mines, run thousands of feet
beneath the earth at least partially because most of the easily
accessible shallow gold reef has been mined-out after decades of
extraction. Other South African mines are open-caste, on the
surface, including one of the largest platinum mines on earth in
Limpopo. Needless to say, the deeper the mine goes, the more
dangerous and greater the technological, organisational and, not
least, the human challenges.
...
Some of the older mines are truly dreadful operations, using
redundant, makeshift, unsafe and unproductive equipment. Other
newly commissioned mines such as the South Deep Mine at
Carletonville, near Johannesburg and owned by Goldfields, are
inevitably crisp, efficient, cutting edge and may consist of the
most advanced operations available for ultra-deep-level mining in
the world.
Otherwise, in many mines conditions can be primitive in terms of
mechanical integrity, human relations and compliance with health
and safety legislation. This was one of the findings of the
National Mine Health and Safety Audit commissioned a few years by
the Office of the President (then Thabo Mbeki) from the predecessor
that is currently the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR).
...
There are, I believe, three key issues or themes, each worthy of a
book in its own right, that we need to examine above all else in
understanding the specific violence of the Marikana massacre and
the dissemination of its "spirit" in fueling the worst industrial
disturbances in South Africa since 1994. These features reflect, in
turn, the character of a "post-miracle" South Africa twenty years
down the line, and its mining industry in particular.
Firstly there is the workplace, the mine.
The local mining industry is without doubt the most conservative
sector of the post-apartheid economy and, as we have already
inferred, most resistant to transformation. This means that the
dynamics of leadership, communication, culture and human risktaking
are all still relatively de-coupled from many core values
involved in driving the "new South Africa".
Secondly, there are the workers themselves. This refers to their
working conditions, remuneration and behaviour, both on-the-job and
in an extramural context.
At Lonmin, for example, this involves life in the mine hostels and
in the sprawling informal settlements around Marikana shanties
where most miners prefer, or are obliged, to live. ...
Thirdly, but by no means lastly, we need to scrutinise the "exit"
point from the mine at the interface with the community.
Here we need to look at the impact of extraction activity on
communities, especially adjacent communities that service the mine
with labour and whose social problems are, in turn, transmitted
back into the workplace itself. Especially important in this
context is what mines do, don't do, or can't do for a range of
people from workers to their dependents, in promoting sustainable
development.
These key issues largely correspond to the organisation of the book
that follows:
The first descriptive chapter deals with the dynamics of the
violence that led to the massacre. Much of the methodology in this
section is based on my own previous experience with massacre
dynamics from the time of Sharpeville.
Chapter Two looks at the deeper issues in the typical South African
underground mining workplace that, in my opinion, fuelled the
killings of 16 August and the subsequent industrial violence that
cost many more lives of miners, police and ordinary members of
North-West province communities in the last few months of 2012.
Chapter Three goes beyond the social geography of Marikana to
examine the recruitment process in the platinum mines (and to a
lesser extent in other mining sectors), i.e. the dynamics under
which migrant labour enters mines through a complicated system of
labour brokers. ...
The ease with which these industrial transactions are carried out
by not only Lonmin but also the other big mines in the nearby
Bojanelo District owned by Anglo Platinum, Impala Platinum, Xstrata
and Aquarius is enabled by the increased and often irresponsible
use of contracted labour in the entire industry.
Most of the big companies around Marikana violate the principle
agreed with the traditional authorities that workers should
originate within 50kms of the shafts. At Marikana about 40 percent
of workers are human imports. There are allegations of collusion
between mine management, labour-brokers and corrupt brokers-cumtraditional
chiefs who ask, and are asked, no questions in the
provision of workers. Exchange of sex and money is common in return
for placement on the mine lists.
The fourth part of the book examines what we see as the final
element, or ingredient, in the Marikana "syndrome", i.e. the
environmental and social impact of extraction activities on
communities not only in the North- West province but in other areas
across the country that have been seriously degraded by mining
activity. ...
The concluding chapter is a kind of "whither-to-now SA mining", now
that the much vaunted South African experiment has run into
stalemate, if not worse. We are clearly somewhere over the rainbow
but there is no pot of platinum at its end. Gold, the mineral that
once defined South Africa is also a "sunset" industry. Outside
mining everyone, even government, accepts the need for fundamental
change.
...
Take Nkaneng, Marikana's "township", which is only one of many vast
informal settlements dotting the bare veld around the gold and
platinum concentrations mines stretching far afield through the
North- West Province and beyond into Gauteng near Johannesburg.
Entering it and similar settlements in the platinum belt is to
veritably confront "the wretched of the earth". There are many
reasons behind this seemingly extreme statement.
Most of the structures glorified as "houses" are, for example,
little more than jerry-built constructions of iron, paper, mud and
waste materials highly susceptible to social pathologies associated
with household over-crowding, disease, cold, heat and the summer
storms that strike the Highveld area with brute force. Some
habitats housing Lonmin workers are no more than tiny sheds or lowslung
kennels more appropriate for housing pigs or dogs. Yet they
are shared by up to a dozen miners who sleep and work on a rotating
basis according to the weekly shift schedule. Women and children
also inhabit the larger of these dwellings designated, perhaps with
irony, as "family units".
The whole "town" is a lethal, breathing health hazard, foulsmelling
and foetid with transmittable disease. In the course of my
work with translators- cum-research assistants we frequently
ditched our high-rise vehicle in knee-deep mud and then trudged
delicately on islands of unknown material through a sickening
mixture of sewerage-run off, animal excrement and mounds of garbage
in order to reach the interview sites of various miners and
community influentials. ...
The water table is in any case dangerously polluted by cavalier and
largely unregulated mining activity all along the "limb". Water is
unpotable so that many people resort to slaking their thirst with
cheap home brews leading to diarrhoea and chronic stomach or
colonic illness.
...
Mine labour of course attracts the least skilled South Africans who
are, for the most part, people otherwise unemployable in the
market. Those who work under the most arduous underground
conditions are also migrants from Lesotho, Mozambique, the Eastern
Cape and other poverty nodes in the country, following in the
footsteps of their forefathers. Most of this large lower-end group
come to the mines for purely survivalist reasons and few have,
despite the public relations of the mining houses, a vocational
appetite for a hard, hazardous and poorly paid underground
existence.
As the industry has sought to cut costs and undermine the labour
movement the proportion of total labour who are contracted workers
has increased. This migrant-contractor group enters and leaves the
mines on a periodic basis from a few months to many years during
which contracts are renewed - or, more ominously, workers are laid
off under the pressure of organisational restructuring aimed at
rendering local mines competitive in the global industry.
The mines have few responsibilities for this in- and ex-filtration
because a very good proportion of the messy business of recruiting
labour has been hived off to brokers. Some of these brokers are
legally registered, but as we shall point out in a later chapter,
some use practices akin to human trafficking. Most contracted
labour - about 30 percent of those at Marikana - live in a
troglodyte netherworld punctuated by breaks in appalling rural
slums, or adjacent to mine property just beyond the line of vision
from the shafts or - to use a more evocative term - the pitheads.
Much of this dismissiveness of human beings, their needs and
rights, derives from the driving requirement for cost containment
(particularly labour costs), the lingering viciousness of apartheid
in social relations, the profound economic inequality to which we
have referred, and the moral degeneration that has become embedded
in South Africa down the line since its "miraculous" rebirth. ...
The safest mines in the world are almost inevitably the most highly
productive, while the most productive are those which ensure that
work takes place in a low risk environment. Yet, South African
mines have done relatively little to address this problem, other
than a few safety programs for safety incentivisation among their
most progressive members. Production remains "king" and this means
that our mineworkers function in severely dangerous conditions. It
is this combination of low rewards for high risk which ultimately
fuels situations like Marikana.
Marikana is, at least on the surface, about poor pay, police
brutality and the temerity of people working in atrocious
circumstances to demand what amounts, in South African
circumstances, to a lower middle class wage. It is, at its
simplest, about people who are abysmally rewarded for doing work
that no one other than the desperate will do. Yet, as the recent
study by the Benchmarks Foundation has indicated, it also clearly
about many other complex factors including an unequal and
unsustainable system of production and distribution, environmental
disaster with multi-generational impacts, exclusion of people
living on the bare margins of existence, and denial of human rights
to life and freedom.
I have pretensions to be a mine safety expert, not only through
moral conviction and a sense that what we see in South African
mines represents only one facet of the extreme exploitation of
people despite a regime change in the country of my birth, but also
because I am appalled that most mining companies have not, cannot
or will not, absorb the simple universal fact that mining safely is
inextricably good for production and world-class entrepreneurial
performance.
... In no mine, way beyond Marikana, can it be said that any worker
or supervisor can feel reasonably sure that he will return home
with life and limb intact at the end of each the working day - as
is the case in, for example, the Canadian or Australian mining
industries.
This continuous dread is worse as one goes deeper down the mining
hierarchy and into the stopes where most people work under the
worst - and worstpaid conditions. Many of those on the veld at
Marikana cannot "live safely" as mine leadership admonishes,
because everybody on the mine, their peers, shift bosses and even
managers, are prisoners of a production mania in which the
preservation of human life is not necessarily the primary
component.
...
In the following chapters I examine this ongoing lack of concern,
this zeal to produce at any human cost, or as they say in the
industry, to "mine at risk". This means that many of those who
populated the Mountain at Marikana up to, and during, the massacre
are simply fodder in an enormous machine where it is ethically
acceptable to kill per ton. If I might be exceedingly more
generous, then the following chapters are about the inability of
the mining industry to find the right formula for preventing
deaths, injuries and organisational conflicts in a global market
where their competitiveness depends to a large degree on cheap
labour. This occurs in a society where we have one of the most
developed systems of human rights and some of the most progressive
mining laws - some of which apply some of the time.
I must admit that much has been done at the tactical and
operational (but less so at the strategic) level to alleviate
conditions on and around the mines. Lonmin and the other big
companies have also taken steps, if totally inadequate and often
misguided, to address community under-development both in near-mine
communities and labour-sending areas in the countryside.
The industry is not often given credit for what it has achieved and
this is dealt with in the final chapter which refers to some of the
annual reports and sustainability reports of the major mining
companies. These reflect huge investment amounts supposedly being
pumped into corporate social investment (CSI), corporate
responsibility (CSR) and interventions to reduce accidents and
injuries. Unfortunately much of this money for environmental
assessments, feasibility studies and the social and labour planning
required by law (SLP's) has little discernible impact, (least of
all sustainable impact) either on the ground or under it.
This book is purposely pitched at a high level of generalisation
and will no doubt generate protest from some companies in this
diverse sector of economic activity. But when readers or
shareholders respond "this does not happen in our mine", they
should bear in mind that it is probably happening at the mine down
the road which works in the same or another mining sector.
...
It goes without saying that this book is dedicated to those who
lost their lives at Marikana and Marikana-related conflicts post-16
August 2012. In the end most of these people derived little to
nothing from the advent of the rainbow nation.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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