Zed Books South Africa's Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. South Africa's Insurgent CitizensOn Dissent and the Possibility of PoliticsBy Julian BrownZed Books LtdCopyright © 2015 Julian BrownAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-298-8ContentsAcknowledgements, x, Introduction, 1, 1 Country of Protest, 11, 2 Politics after Apartheid, 33, 3 Citizenship and Insurgency, 53, 4 From Discipline to Repression, 77, 5 Political Ambiguities, 105, 6 Making Politics from and in the Courtroom, 127, Conclusion: The Possibilities of Politics, 148, Notes, 165, Bibliography, 187, Index, 203, CHAPTER 1Country of ProtestOn the sixteenth of August 2012, armed units of the South African police confronted several hundred striking mineworkers on a hill near a mine in Marikana, about forty kilometres outside Rustenberg, the nearest city. That afternoon, the police opened fire and killed thirty-four of the mineworkers.At first, South Africa's political elite — politicians, administrators, academics, and commentators — struggled to know how to talk about the massacre. In the days immediately afterwards, facts were hard to come by and few outside of the circle of those affected quite knew what had happened. South Africa's President, Jacob Zuma, and the national Commissioner of Police, Riah Phiyega, appeared on television to minimise the effect of the 'tragic event': they told the country and the world that the event was regrettable, that no one should point any fingers or apportion any blame, but that — nonetheless — the police had merely been defending themselves from a mob.For a few weeks, their version of events seemed plausible. Newspapers reported on the statement, and avoided investigating its substance. Newsreaders followed suit. And around these silences, an official story continued to develop: the strikers had sought to bypass official channels and to negotiate outside collective bargaining structures. They had held the mine to ransom. They were probably encouraged to do so by a rogue union, or by agitators, or by political troublemakers. On the day itself the strikers had charged down from their hilltop — violent and confrontational, armed and aggressive — and the police were forced to act in self-defence.This was the official story.In the last week of August, academics, activists, and journalists sought to draw public attention to gaps in the official story, and to evidence that seemed to contradict it. Greg Marinovich was the most prominent and most effective of the journalists; in a series of pieces, he revealed that there were two different sites in which the police had killed mineworkers. The first had been seen in television footage, but the second had not. This second site — a smaller outcrop, several hundred metres away from the main hill — was so crowded by rocks, and so lacking in clear sight lines, that the police's story could not be true. The workers who had been killed there could not have been charging the police, and the police could not have killed them in self-defence: the only plausible story was that the workers had been hiding among the rocks. The police followed them in, in the hour after the first shootings, and chose to kill them — intentionally, in cold blood.These articles ignited public interest in the shootings — and inaugurated a wave of investigations and re-interpretations. Once scrutinised, the official story fell apart. Over the course of two years, a Commission of Inquiry provided the site for a detailed examination of these early allegations — and, although not without its own controversies, clearly disproved these first reactions. The miners had not been exceptionally violent on the sixteenth, and the police did not act in self-defence. In place of the first story, a new one developed, as it became clear that the miners had been protesting on their own account, without any encouragement of support from any union, political party, or agitator; that the gathering on the hill had been orderly; and that the min