The Left Hand's Thoughts and Prayers - Empty Gestures to the Victims at Marikana
Listening to the Oxford-sweetened tones of Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh as he guided the conversation on Marikana on 702 talk radio this morning, I perceived a fracture between the narrative of the intellectual elites and that of ordinary South Africans. Nobody among the enlightened classes appreciates thoughts and prayers any more. But that they are perfectly happy with empty left wing slogans is painfully obvious. While many ordinary South Africans pray for peace, even if it comes at the cost of unresolved injustices, the intellectual classes pray for revolution, even if it comes at the cost of poorer people's lives.
The upper-class South Africans invited to the show shared a synopsis with the host, who sees the heart of the tragedy as a struggle between the working class, represented by the wildcat strikers, and a capitalist state apparatus represented by the police. They proceeded to fall over each other to paint the most vivid manichean dichotomy between the innocent heroes slaughtered by the evil, callous policemen. When talking about the culture of impunity, instead of referring to the omerta of the revolutionary movement clinging like a leech to the veins of power, they repeated the old canard that it is a continuity from the apartheid era, all one big Punch-and-Judy show, strings pulled by a "predatory capitalist class" that is "anti-black". Unsurprisingly, those on the ground disagreed with this simplified neo-Marxist frame.
Several people called in from North West, irritated by the deliberate elision of the murder of security guards, policemen and non-striking workers which preceded the violent massacre. They have lived with the protest culture in South Africa, which is inherited from the strategy of a Peoples War, wherein bystanders are made guilty of collusion by virtue of their neutrality. They also could not understand the incredible effort to simplify the narrative that the intellectuals on the radio and in the newspapers were engaging in. In the violence of modern South Africa, many people side with the police, since they have to live with both violent crime and political intimidation, and believe that politicians are muzzling the police. The pampered elites, isolated in the protected suburbs, can wax philosophical about it.
Neo-Patrimonialism
Missing from this conversation has been an understanding of the institutional environment - its far too easy to just blame it on some nebulous inference to "capitalism" or "the system". There is a system, but it is by no mean nebulous; it is based on clear quid pro quo arrangements. To maintain political control in the region, where the bureaucracy has not been empowered and consolidated to any great degree, the ANC resorts to a form of neopatrimonialism. The deal goes something like this - the corporation will hand over 26% of its shares to ANC-affiliated black politicians or traditional leaders. In exchange, the ANC promises to ensure that there will be no unpredictable strikes, by monopolising union membership under tripartite-alliance unions, in this case NUM. On top of this arrangement, local traditional leaders are given both BEE shares, as well as priority hiring - their tribal affiliates and members get first pick of jobs. This ties together the mining tragedies from Bapo ba Mogale to Xolobeni.
But as pressure mounts for certain demands, the shop stewards will refuse to engage. In Marikana, it was inevitable that mineworkers would break away. Rock drill operators will, virtually guaranteed, suffer from arthritis by the time they retire. South Africans do not in general, and mineworkers do not in specific, have the means to support themselves when made unfit for work from middle age. Furthermore, many mineworkers have multiple children from multiple wives. Taking these facts into account, the pressure to acquire the means to support themselves and their families is rather understandable.
But the neopatrimonial infrastructure is inflexible, and the freedom to work outside the grip of the great octopus is severely limited. Something had to give, and as the strikes gave way to intimidation to coerce coworkers into joining, violence was inevitable. Mixed with the rhetoric of revolution, calls for negotiation led to inflexible demands, and strategy grew into hubris. People were beaten, then some were shot. Security put down protests using their own forms of violence, and the roaring cavitation in the kettle gave way to a wild boil. Even before the shots were fired on the day in question, the size of the police deployment was remarkably large considering the size of the crowd. Undoubtedly, the state wanted the problem to disappear, the ducks to get back in a row.
North West Nowhere
When I lived in North West Province, not far from Marikana, I spoke occasionally with the district police commissioner for Groot Marico. He was a hard man, and a serious authoritarian. His opinion of the violent strikes he saw on a weekly basis in the mining townships was that they needed to be put down with lethal force, to teach a lesson in civil behaviour. But contrary to the contemporary assumptions of our intellectual culture, this man was no apartheid apologist. If anything, he was a chauvinist for his own race - he hated Boers, and told me so in no uncertain terms. When I demonstrated animosity toward the culture of segregation and racism among the white people in the area, he praised me by saying "you may be a white man, but you have a black heart".
It made me feel uncomfortable, since I have always been averse to racialism, but I understand what he means. And by my judgment, the ambush on Mambush and his cohort that crisp August seven years ago was not "anti-black", whatever the black nationalist elites may say. Police in South Africa are a fraternity of men who risk their lives in an environment as dangerous as the Afghan war, and their sense of common struggle is fierce. The murders of police officers before the climactic protest was bound to result in a vicious and heart-felt vengeance against a crew of rebels who had killed their brothers. In North West, sparsely populated, hot in the day, freezing in the winter night, police are stretched thin, and often under-tooled for the protests and riots they are called to control.
It has been over a decade since Thabo Mbeki abandoned the commando system, which in the post-apartheid era had seen the arming and training of police reservists in the sparsely populated countryside, to handle spaces too large for regular police patrols. His reforms also saw the closure of a large proportion of the rural police stations, further truncating the already not-so-long arm of the law. Coming on the heels of a Mandela-commissioned report into farm murders, this drew a lot of ire. But black people die in in the countryside too, and for the sake of spiting the Boers, their complaints are equally ignored, except when it serves public debate. Police who are under-equipped and understaffed have little patience for lofty talk of human rights, and neither do those in the lokasies.
The post-apartheid population forgets that even the apartheid state had restraint on police violence. Only a handful of incidents saw the use of live ammunition as crowd control, preferring the use of attack dogs, teargas and rubber bullets. This is true today - it requires special permission to even deploy live ammunition. The police as whole clearly wanted revenge. And as the forensic evidence shows, what began as 17 deaths in crowd suppression led to a second scene, where a further 17 execution-style deaths added to the toll.
Hold the line, please...
When protests break out, looting, targeting of immigrants, and coercion of the unaffiliated, intimidation of the neutral is common. The chattering classes will talk of the right to protest, but where does a conversation of rights fit in here? Whose rights proceed first? These abstract liberal philosophies are going to come up hard against the frustrations of ordinary people and police alike. This is of course why, when speaking with any caller who was frustrated with the lack of attention paid to the victims of the wildcat strikers, Sizwe shepherded them back to the focus on the working class martyrs. The blunt question tickling the back of their throats is, what do you do with people who terrorise their neighbourhoods and workplaces to consolidate action for vested grievances?
In a deft yet predictable manoeuvre, the speakers tied the use of police force in Marikana to its use during the Fees protests at the universities. My experience touring the Cape university protests was that several of those whom I marched alongside revealed that they were marching under duress, and that those who failed to get out of their dorms when the leaders demanded were dragged out and beaten. Often, shell casings from rubber bullets were used as evidence of the use of live round ammunition. This was a sign of ignorance, but correcting the narrative was counterrevolutionary, so most kept their mouths shut when inconsistencies surfaced. Looking over what is remembered by those who feel they have the right to speak for the movement, it is quite clear that much was lost in the fog of war.
It is much easier to talk about martyrs and tyrants, than to describe the retaliatory murder of desperate criminals with a justified goal, trapped by corrupt institutions. These complications of means and motive reduce propaganda power for all parties and force us into empathy with decisionmakers from both sides of the picket line. It is clear from his efforts to shepherd his callers that Sizwe had little time for such nuance. But it is not as if he or his guests had any answers; the same old tired rhetoric about strikes and sticking it to the "system" came to nought, because like the rest of us, they don't know what to do to reform our authorities - the EFF, or any other revolutionary, is even less likely to deliver clean governance, and Africans know this better than anyone else.
Until we have concrete, actionable choices in front of us, these calls to action and these admonitions of power are equivalent in impact to thoughts and prayers, only with less capacity to reassure.