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Behind the Marikana massacre

South Africa is not a country at peace with its people.

Miners sit together during a strike calling for increased wages
Miners sit together during a strike calling for increased wages at a platinum mine in Marikana. Photograph: Getty Images

Deep underground, men crouch in low galleries, eight hours a day. Their arms held straight ahead, they drive the 25kg drills into the rockface. The heat is stifling, the din unbearable. The miners at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana earn less than £350 a month. Their patience finally snapped, resulting in the clash last Thursday that left 34 bodies in the veld.

The National Union of Mineworkers headquarters in central Johannesburg is a world away. The air-conditioned offices of the general secretary, Frans Baleni, with black leather furnishings and glass coffee table, speaks of power and influence. He is a man used to dealing with mining bosses – the Randlords of old. He is a staunch ally of President Jacob Zuma, now fighting for his political life ahead of December’s ANC party elections.

Baleni rose through the union ranks, but today he’s accused of turning his back on his grassroots. When I met him it was about another dispute – the Aurora mine. Bought by Khulubuse Zuma (the president’s grandson) and Zondwa Mandela (Nelson’s grandson) they had left its 5,500 workers without pay for 18 months. When pressed to act, Khulubuse Zuma provided a one million rand donation to the ANC for election expenses.

The NUM had led protests through the streets of Johannesburg, but why didn’t Baleni take the case of the Aurora miners directly with the president, whom he meets regularly? He looked down and remarked that it was inappropriate. “We have avoided speaking directly to the president,” he said. “Interactions with the president are very limited.”

This is extraordinary - the NUM is one of the best connected organisations in the country. Its past leadership include the deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, and the ANC’s Secretary General Gwede Mantashe. The union has fallen foul of a corporatist culture. Unions are members of the Tripartite Alliance, running the country with the ANC and the South African Communist Party. The Alliance was vital in the fight against apartheid, but today the movement is distanced from the people it seeks to represent.

Describing South Africa’s massive inequalities as "very sick indeed", the leader of the Cosatu unions, Zwelenzima Vavi told his conference in 2010:

“Our belief is that if we were to confiscate all the medical aids, that most of us here have; if our cabinet ministers and MPs were forced to take their children to the public hospitals and be subjected to the same conditions as the poor; if we were to burn their private clinics and hospitals and private schools; if the children of the bosses were to be loaded into unsafe open bakkies (trucks) to the dysfunctional township schools; if the high walls and electronic wired fences were to be removed; if all were forced to live on R322 a month (£25), as 48 per cent of the population has to do, and if their kids were to die without access to antiretrovirals, we would have long ago seen more decisive action on many of these fronts.”

The alienation of ordinary men and women has allowed breakaway unions, like Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), to poach members from established unions. The NUM has spoken darkly about management backing AMCU to split the shop-floor. This may have a grain of truth, but it does not address the wider issue. Protests against the failure of the government to provide the basic needs of communities are a daily occurrence. As Paul Holden and I have shown in our book Who Rules South Africa, service delivery protests have brought more than two million people onto the streets every year since 2008. That is roughly 5 per cent of the entire population. The protests frequently turn violent and there are frequent losses of life. South Africa is not a country at peace with its people. 

Martin Plaut is the Africa Editor of BBC World Service News. Who Rules South Africa? by Martin Plaut and Paul Holden is published by Biteback Publishing. To get your copy please visit www.bitebackpublishing.com or call 0207 091 1260

 

10 comments

Jon Brawn's picture

Most of the black women have been raped at least once and lets not forget the Mandela 13 killed at a gold mine. Meanwhile wwhen the ex terror merchant Mandela dies the BBC will go ballistic before Israel does!!!

plain john smith's picture

Why has there not been a huge flurry of e mails defending the ANC? Why are the lefties so silent? Surely they know that South Africa is the best run country on earth, that Mandela is a siant and a demigod, and that the anti-aparthied struggle was the most noble in human history? Total quiet.

plain john snith's picture

Alex Newman, World Net Daily, August 18, 2012

The eyes of the world were on South Africa two decades ago as the apartheid era came to an end and Western governments helped bring the communist-backed African National Congress to power.

Last month, however, when Genocide Watch chief Gregory Stanton declared that white South African farmers were facing a genocidal onslaught and that communist forces were taking over the nation, virtually nobody noticed.

Few outside of South Africa paid attention either when, earlier this year, the president of South Africa began publicly singing songs advocating the murder of whites.

The silence is so deafening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t even publicly mention the problems when she was there last week. Instead, she was busy dancing, pledging billions of dollars and praising the ruling government.

“I find that quite disturbing, as if Afrikaner lives do not count for the Obama administration,” Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, PRAAG, told WND.

He says the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

Genocide Watch, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization led by arguably the world’s foremost expert on genocide, has been sounding the alarm on the genocidal onslaught facing South Africa for a decade. The world media, however, has barely uttered a word about it.

Over those 10 years, thousands of white South African farmers, known as Boers, have been massacred in the most horrific ways imaginable.

Experts say the ongoing slaughter constitutes a clear effort to exterminate the whites or at least drive the remaining ones—now less than 10 percent of the population—out of the country. In other words, South Africa is facing a genocide based on the United Nations’ own definition.

More than 3,000 farm murders have been documented in that time period, representing a significant number considering the number of commercial white farmers is now estimated at less than 40,000.

Tens of thousands of whites have been murdered throughout South Africa, too, according to estimates.

As in neighboring Zimbabwe, once one of the wealthiest nations in Africa, the schemes have mostly resulted in failure. Under Mugabe, who gave the stolen land to his cronies, estimates suggest millions of people have died from starvation. Others fled, ironically, perhaps, to South Africa.

Now, the ANC wants to speed up the land reform process. Some elements within the government are even advocating forced expropriation without any compensation.

The farm murders, analysts say, are the early phases of what may be coming.

“More and more, the ANC regime’s supporters are turning to violence and revolution to achieve their aims of taking control over land and industry,” Roodt explained.

“Over the last few days there has been an increase in attacks on family owned farms with the intent of driving owners off their land,” he continued, echoing a widespread sentiment among South Africans that the situation is quickly spiraling out of control.

“Hit squads target specifically women and elderly farmers as they are seen as soft targets,” he added. The government also disbanded farmer self-defense groups known as “commandos” that formerly protected rural areas.

According to Roodt, South Africa, like every country during a communist takeover, is being deliberately destabilized. Ethnic and racial tensions are being purposefully stirred up as part of the scheme as well, he said.

“The ANC regime has failed completely to create jobs for its mass of supporters,” Roodt told WND. “So it is using the white minority as a scapegoat, blaming them for its own economic failures due to corruption, mismanagement, nationalization, racial preferences and so on.”

Roodt says the “revolution” could drag on, slowly, with a lot of talk but little action. On the other hand, there could be a sudden, radical shift such as what happened in Zimbabwe, where white farmers who refused to be driven off their land were tortured or murdered.

There could even be a Rwanda-type situation in which whites would be targeted for wholesale slaughter, Roodt warned.

{snip}

“Anything is possible,” he added, saying the ruling government was very similar to an organized criminal enterprise. “What is going on in South Africa today with the rape and killing of children, torture or farmers and racial violence, is tantamount to a sadistic society. We are ruled by sadists who encourage other sadists to go out to rape and kill.”

No matter how bad it gets, however, Roodt and other South Africans fear that the world will shut its eyes and wash its hands.

“To many people in the West, especially liberals and leftists, I think it is seen as normal for blacks to hate whites and oppress them,” he explained. “Because of their historical guilt associated with colonialism, whites are deemed to deserve punishment, even of the most extreme kind such as torture and mass murder.”

vanderkaffirbasher's picture

Some 90% of farms redistributed to South Africa's black population from white farmers are not productive, the government has said.

Land reform minister Gugile Nkwinti warned the land might be repossessed if the farms continued to fail.

Almost 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq miles) have been redistributed under policies aimed at benefiting black people who were left impoverished by apartheid.

The land was bought from white farmers who sold up voluntarily.

The BBC's Pumza Fihlani in Johannesburg says some black farmers are likely to argue that they have been struggling to get the resources and skills to develop their land.

And repossessing the land would provide a whole new problem for the government, our correspondent says, as any move to return the land to its former white owners is bound to be controversial.

Sensitive issue

The government had set a target of 2014 to redistribute one-third of white-owned land back to the black majority.

But Mr Nkwinti acknowledged that the deadline would not be kept.

He said the focus would now shift to helping the black farmers make their land productive.

"The farms - which were active accruing revenue for the state - were handed over to people, and more than 90% of those are not functional," he said.

"They are not productive, and therefore the state loses the revenue. We cannot afford to go on like that... No country can afford that."

At the end of apartheid in 1994 almost 90% of land was owned by the white community, which made up less than 10% of the population.

Land reform is a sensitive issue in South Africa and has been brought into sharp focus by the decline of agriculture in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where many white commercial farmers have been violently evicted.

vanderkaffirbasher's picture

Letter from the Telegraph, albeit a few years back.

SIR – I have been waiting for an authoritative comment on the article by Roger Highfield and Charles Clover (Science, Feb. 1) suggesting that Aids began as a result of people in Central Africa eating certain chimpanzees. As none has been forthcoming, your readers – and perhaps the medical profession – might like to know of my own experience.

In 1957, as a student nurse, I was working at the Fever Hospital in Johannesburg. Patients were sent to us from all over Africa. Few could speak English, so could not describe their symptoms in detail or tell us how they might have contracted their particular illness.

I remember clearly the first patient who came in with very odd sores. A lot of tests were done – saliva, tears, blood, etc. – but we could not identify it's problem, and he died. Suddenly there was a spate of similar cases, all from Central Africa and all ending in the patient's death. The hospital asked a mission station in the Belgian Congo (as it then was) to send someone down to tell us more about their lifestyle and what they ate.

We were told that in the Congo there was an endearing little monkey, grey but with a green sheen to its coat. While other chimps and monkeys were hunted and eaten – as they still are all over Africa – these were adopted as pets and even venerated, as people believed that the green sheen had mystic powers. Despite this veneration (or perhaps because of it), I was taken aback to learn that men copulated with them, some apparently picking up some sort of virus as a result.

When we realised that we did not know how to cure these very ill men, we decided there was no point in admitting any more. They simply stayed at home and died. We called it green monkey disease; some time later our professor, Jock Gear, said he was sure they were the first cases of Aids to come to official notice.

One question remains to be answered. Presumably humans had had sexual relations with these monkeys for a very long time. So why was it only in the 1950s, and only in a relatively small area of Central Africa, that the monkeys contracted the virus, and passed it on? Where did they get it from?

Mrs POLLY KIRK
Millom, Cumbria

Charlie Naylor's picture

Sorry state of affairs, but an inevitable result of the neo-liberal constitution drawn up by Nelson Mandela. It was a sad day when that constitution was drawn up with Clinton. So many had hopes for a fairer future, but the corruption was past on from previous rulers to the new apartheid rulers.

vanderkaffirbasher's picture

Er, how exactly is this a result of a neo liberal constitition?

john woods's picture

“Our belief is that if we were to confiscate all the medical aids, that most of us here have; if our cabinet ministers and MPs were forced to take their children to the public hospitals and be subjected to the same conditions as the poor; if we were to burn their private clinics and hospitals and private schools; if the children of the bosses were to be loaded into unsafe open bakkies (trucks) to the dysfunctional township schools; if the high walls and electronic wired fences were to be removed; if all were forced to live on R322 a month (£25), as 48 per cent of the population has to do, and if their kids were to die without access to antiretrovirals, we would have long ago seen more decisive action on many of these fronts.”

Before the white man came to South Africa, there were NO hospitals, private or otherwise, NO retrovirals, No schools, NO trucks, and they lived on a lot less than £25 a month. They will soon revert to this situation.

john woods's picture

A senior ANC member who became a whistle-blower over corruption surrounding the upcoming World Cup games was shot dead in front of his home Sunday evening.

Jimmy Mohlala, speaker of the Mbombela municipality in Nelspruit, charged Mbombela municipal manager Jacob Dladla, with a wide range of corruption and abuses of power relating to the building of a billion-rand football stadium built especially for the World Cup.

Instead of punishing Dladla, who is well-connected within the ANC, Party officials instead recommended the firing of Mohlala and municipal mayor Justice Nsibande, another whistle blower. Mohlala refused calls by the ANC to step down.
Police say Mohlala was gunned down by two men wearing balaclavas and lying in wait. Mohlala’s son was also wounded in the shooting and is recovering in hospital.

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john woods's picture

South Africa is one of the few places in Africa which are advanced enough to have mines or trade unions, due to the fact that the place was run by competent white people for a long time. South Africa has, entirely predictably, gone the same way as every other country in Africa following transition to black rule: i.e. it has collapsed into barbarism. tribalism, corruption, incompetence, violence and criminality. Highest homicide rate in the worls. Highest rape rate in the world. Highest AIDS infection rate in the world. Economic backwardisation. The collapse of a once highly productive farming econmoy. The virtual genocide of the Boer farmers (studiously ignored by western leftists and our media)

African societies appear to be incapable of self government. For an excellent summation of modern South Africa, read "Into the Cannibal's Pot" by Ilona Mercer.

Why am I not surprised to learn that mines are now "expropriated" by the relatives of Mandela and Zuma? What has the blessed Nelson got to say about this blatant nepotism? How many "Anti Apartheid" demonstrators will ever take him to task over this?

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