Film sheds light on Marikana

Documentary filmmaker Joseph Oesi watched in horror from London as 34 miners were gunned down by South African police in what became known as the 2012 Marikana massacre.

“I was devastated,” said Oesi, whose Black Lives Matter: Why Marikana can still happen again! was screened at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory on 9 September. “I returned that week and started shooting.”

Oesi was shooting with a camera, not a gun, and what he captured was the often insidious relationship between mining companies, the government and traditional leaders.

The 16 August 2012  bloodbath took place at Marikana mine, belonging to Lonmin, a primary global producer of platinum group metals. It was the single most devastating use of police force in South Africa since the March 1960 Sharpeville massacre, which left 69 anti-apartheid protestors dead.

No one has been held legally accountable for the killings, which took place in the context of South Africa’s longest-ever unprotected strike. All-in-all some 44 people were killed during the five-month strike, 41 of whom were striking miners. South Africa’s platinum group minerals mining sector lost US$1.5-billion during the strike.

Oesi said working on the film left him with a “heavy” feeling, because of all the raw emotion he captured on camera in many interviews with miners, activists, traditional leaders, mine security guards and members of bereaved families. “I feel pity for the editor (Nicci Bothma). She was weeping a lot of the time.”

Black Lives Matter explores the social effects of the strike and the killings, and delves into the context in which mining often occurs in South Africa. It criticises the common practice among mining companies of treating traditional leaders as representatives of their communities, either without taking into consideration that these leaders may have been imposed by the government on communities, or tacitly complicit in their imposition.

Nelson Mandela Foundation archive and dialogue director Verne Harris said before the screening that this was an area the foundation was looking into because it was one of the “fundamental fault lines” in South African society. It kept rural communities poor, he said.

In the documentary, Oesi points out that the Marikana massacre is just the worst incident in a long line of violent state actions by the government South Africans voted into power in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.

Oesi said one of the three platinum group metals mining companies mentioned in the film – Anglo American Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin – had tried to suppress the film, threatening legal action. They were in discussion. Mining company leaders do not feature in the film. Nor do police officials.

Oesi’s film makes the case that South Africa’s abundant mineral endowment – some say the country is the world’s most minerally rich – has been exploited by multinational companies without its people benefitting. South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal societies, with a Gini coefficient (representing the income distribution of a nation's residents) of 0,63 in 2011. A coefficient of zero means a country has complete equality, with all households earning exactly the same.

“This is a recipe for civil strife,” says Marikana community activist Chris Molebatse in the film. “The promises of 1994 have not been fulfilled.”

Complicit in this inequality are the traditional leaders, who too often have cosy relationships with government officials and mining companies, the film asserts. It goes into the details of the complicated contestation over the chieftaincy of the Bapo Ba Mogale people, who claim the land on which Lonmin is mining is theirs.

The allegation is that, during apartheid, a member of the Bapo Ba Mogale royal family, who authorities knew would be docile and could be paid off, was installed as leader. Oesi’s film makes the case that this is indicative of a pattern, going into other examples of similar machinations in the platinum belt.

Into this mix, in 2012, came the rise of Amcu, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, which tore into the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) member base. At one stage, NUM was the largest union in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) – one pillar of the alliance between it, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. By August 2012, Amcu had taken over NUM’s place as the union with the largest membership on South Africa’s platinum belt.

With nothing to lose, Amcu leader Joseph Mathenjwa was demanding a R12 500 minimum wage, leading almost 70 000 mine workers, many of whom were paid R5 000 a month, out on strike. This salary has still not been attained, and the strike cost mine workers R10.6-billion in wages, according to South African History Online.

In the second part of the documentary, Oesi looks at the shooting of protesters near an Ivanplats mine near Potgietersrus that took place after the events at Marikana, making the case that this gives the lie to the government promise that “Marikana will not happen again”.

Lawyer Oswald Mngomezulu also questions the relationship between mining companies and the government in general, saying that companies are allowed to operate without the requisite water and environmental licences. The government “leans towards” economic growth and job creation at the expense of social and environmental concerns, he says.

The audience welcomed the documentary, with Media For Justice’s Sipho Singiswa saying South Africa needed nothing less than a revolution to get rid of the current ANC leadership, none of whom had explained why they had “backtracked” on the 1955 Freedom Charter.

Journalist and activist Gillian Schutte said Black Lives Matter “humanised” the story of Marikana, while Hassan Lorgat and John Capel of the non-profit, faith-based Bench Marks Foundation also commended the film.