From Sharpeville to Marikana, an Unchanged Reality.

"The Commission finds the former state and the minister of police directly responsible for the commission of gross human rights violations in that excessive force was unnecessarily used to stop a gathering of unarmed people. Police failed to give an order to disperse and/or adequate time to disperse, relied on live ammunition rather than alternative methods of crowd dispersal and fired in a sustained manner into the back of the crowd, resulting in the death of sixty-nine people and the injury of more than 300” From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol 3, Chapter 6, October 1998

But this could easily have been from the Farlam Commission of enquiry into the massacre of 34 people in Marikana on the 16^th August 2012. 

Why then the connection between Sharpeville and Marikana and what is the significance for South Africa today?

According to Alistair Boddy-Evans, “What caused worldwide condemnation (Of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960) was not so much the deaths (such killings are more common than we would like to think: Frank Welsh in his History of South Africa⁶ compares it to 'Bloody Sunday', Londonderry January 1972, and the shooting of Kent State University students, Ohio 1970) but the callous way in which the Apartheid government put the blame squarely on the dead and injured”. In April 1960 the only UN member not to condemn the event was South Africa itself.

The complete lack of response from the ANC to the massacre of 34 people at Marikana in a “Democratic” South Africa was highlighted by the Daily Maverick when it reported that “Five days after a wildcat strike at the Lonmin platinum mine resulted in police shooting at mineworkers, killing 34 and injuring 78, there has been no sign of the ANC in the area.”  

However when government did muster a response  it was one that could just as easily have happened in 1960 post the Sharpeville massacre by an Apartheid government.   Justice Malala, reported that “Fouteen days after 34 striking miners were mowed down by police gunfire in just three minutes at Lonmin's Marikana mine, the National Prosecuting Authority hauled out the "common purpose" doctrine – last used in 1989 against activists by an embattled apartheid government – to charge the 270 arrested mineworkers with the murder of their own colleagues.”

President Jacob Zuma in his State of the nation Speech in February 2013, referring ever so briefly to the events at Marikana, went on to, like the Apartheid government, blame the dead and injured for the brutal and despicable acts of a government that is increasingly acting against the interests of the people, and asserted that, “We are duty bound to uphold, defend and respect the Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic. We will spare no effort in doing so. For this reason, I have instructed the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security (JCPS) Cluster to put measures in place, with immediate effect, to ensure that any incidents of violent protest are acted upon, investigated and prosecuted.”

The similarities are frighteningly familiar and obvious.

The events at both Sharpeville and Marikana are similar in another way. Both events came at a time when the increasing impatience of the ordinary people was overtaking the political organisations of the day. As early as the 1940`s the Communist Party of South Africa lamented the fact that “ African people have been frustrated by a Congress leadership which does not organise mass support nor carry on mass action to improve their living standards(Marias 2011). By 1949 the ANCYL Programme of Action had captured the imagination of the people and included the 1952 Defiance Campaign and culminated in the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.  At the height of the campaign, ANC membership grew from 4000 to 100 000(Mbeki 1992). However, by 1953 the ANC membership was down to 28 000(Marais 2011) after the euphoria of the militant Defiance Campaign had not been followed through by the leadership of the ANC.  This lack of militancy, together with other ideological issues prompted the split between the ANC and the PAC in 1959 a year before the seminal events of Sharpeville in 1960. 

It was apparent then that the people were anxious to take a more militant approach towards the struggle for freedom and were becoming increasingly frustrated by the political organisations who claimed to lead this struggle.  In Cator Manor, a couple of months before Sharpeville, a mob had set upon a contingent of police who had come to raid for liquor, killing nine police officers in the process. The need to harness the people’s militancy subsequently became a dash for the lead with the PAC trumping the ANC by calling its Pass Campaign a couple of weeks before the ANC could launch its own campaign in April of 1960.

So too today, the parties that claim to represent the people most affected by the ongoing and increasing poverty and inequality, have failed to understand or harness the impatience of the people leading to the tragic events of Marikana on that fateful day in August. 

Sharpeville, as Marikana does today, represents the collective effort of the people to resist their continued oppression and exploitation, it represents the consciousness of the working classes who know that their greatest weapon is their solidarity, it represents the call by the people for organisations to put aside their petty differences and to unite around the issues that matter to the people. It’s not ideology that drove people to respond to the PAC campaign or to the Strike Committees strike in Marikana, it was their material conditions which informed and led to their collective and united action.

The need for a new coalition of the left is urgent and requires less focus on the ideological differences that keep us apart, and more focus on the material issues which face the people and the vision of a society in which the wealth is shared by all.