Truth Is Like the Heat of the Sun

“Truth is like the heat of the sun”

Families of the Deceased & the Injured and Arrested of Marikana

The relatives of the Marikana deceased, the injured and the arrestedunderwent a rollercoaster of experiences following the Marikana massacre on 16 August, 2012. For most of them this journey is still not over. Many families come from the Eastern Cape from sending areas where their husbands, brothers, fathers were recruited through South Africa’s migrant labour system in gold, platinum, coal and so on. This report does not seek to analyse their experiences but merely to record their feelings, experiences and thoughts since the Marikana calamity. The injured and arrested have also been through a battery of traumatic and intense psychological and physical experiences and their views are similarlydetailed.It is clear in this account that despite the emotional trauma they have undergone they are able to engage in a more objective political narrative to make sense of why strikers were injured or killed which takes this account beyond pity and into the realm of understanding a deep systemic failure.

There is one group of people however who are not explored in this account and whohave been forgotten or ignored post the Marikana disaster. This group experience intense but hidden loss. Some of the migrant deceased had established strong relationships with women of Marikana. In many cases these women had engaged in ‘transactional’relationships with mine workersin order to survive and had managed the workers’ domestic lives in exchange for a portion of their earnings. The remainder of the salary wasremitted to at least one or two dependent families in the rural sending areas. These local women however had to remain hidden from the mineworkers’ families. They could not share their grief with the ‘official’ wives and relatives, could not attend the Commission, received no compensation or grief counselling and like the deceased workers’ relatives had to overnight manage life without the miners’ earnings. They too were responsible for a number dependents(sometimesthe workers’ children) but their grief, poverty and propulsion into a highly precarious existence can never be publically expressed. These second families of the Marikana deceased should be remembered – they are also victims and actors who are caught up in the migrant labour system.

Families attend Marikana Commission

Phumza Prestorious, a migrant from the Eastern Cape who lived in Nkaneng, Marikana with her father and boyfriend both working at Lonmin, recalled the chaos after the killings on the mountain where strikers had withdrawn beforethe massacre:

We stood in the first row of shacks at Nkaneng and looked from afar, but all we could see was the chaos, people running around and gun shots, some people were being carried, some were asking for cars to take the injured people to hospital… Fortunately my father had just went home to get something to eat, but I did not know the whereabouts of my boyfriend, I only managed to get hold of him the following day. Things were really bad, people had been killed, some were taken into ambulances. We went home on the day and switched on our televisions and we saw the tragedy that happened…

The following day on the 17th we woke and decided again as women that we will go back to the mountain and see what was going on - nothing made sense. We were not scared that we will get shot. All we wanted to do was to go to the mountain and show our dissatisfaction over the slaughter of innocent people; we did not care if the police would shoot at us. The surviving miners had gathered around the mountain again, and we joined them. My father also went back and I could not stop him because he also wanted to get the R 12500 so the only option was for me to go with him to the mountain to see what was going on. We sang songs and sat alongside the miners.

Things were bad because people did not know whether their loved ones were still alive or not, so we went to number one [shaft] looking for a list of names of all the miners. On our way we were stopped by the police at four shaft, who prevented us from passing. We then went to the hospital to check for list of names of people who were in hospital, but when we got there the hospital security prevented us from getting inside the hospital and we stood outside ‘till around 7pm. We sang songs like senzeni na - ‘what have we done?’

We went every day, and we started going around the community asking for donations from Somalian shop owners so that we could take the food to the miners, who gathered near the mountain day and night after the massacre… Nothing was good. The police were terrorising people in their homes, they went into people’s houses in the middle of the night looking for weapons and people. I am not sure what exactly, what kind of people they were looking for. We were scared; we were just grateful to wake up every morning.[1]

Thereafter families of the deceased were left in the dark. There was no preparation for them to understand the situation or to comprehendwhat they would face. The Marikana Commission, the families said, treated them ‘like trees or stones’ with nothing to say when confronted with the horrific events which ‘left a hole in my life, and in my heart.’[2]It was the support of organisations like the Socio-Economic Right Institution Seri), Khulumani Support Group, Legal Resources Centre (LRC), Human Right Commission, academic interventions and media attentionwhich lent these relatives - many of them widows - legal, emotional, financial and other support.

When the Commission opened Judge Farlam, the chair, invited everyone to stand up and remember the dead as their names were read out. It became obvious that most of the deceased’s relatives were not present and the Commission was deeply embarrassed. Families were sitting grief stricken mainlyin rural areas and manywere not aware that the Commission had started. EasternCape families on learning of its existence via the media labelled the Commission ‘ignorant’ and ‘lacking humanity’. Nomkhitha Sompeta from Lusikisiki whose brother, Mzukisi was killed, told how the family had only heard about the inquiry the day before it began, “What do you call it if we are not there?.. My father is very sick, he has been crying out for closure, to get to know what happened. Only big name lawyers are there to make money – but what about us? We need the truth.”[3] Dumisa Ntsebeza who represented 20 Eastern Cape families of the deceased noted that families in Lesotho and Swaziland had even less knowledge. The Commission arranged for the Eastern Cape government to pay for transport and to assign social workers to the families while the justice department after initial support explained that it had no legal obligation to fund families of victims beyond initial hearings.[4] Thus began the relatives’ fight to get a presence and a voice at the Commission.

The Commission’s insensitivity continued. Videos of relatives being mown down combined with detailed close ups of blood, brains and other trauma spilling into the dry soil and images of police grasping guns and standing over the deceased or dragging bodies away were relentlessly exhibited during cross examination. Betty Lomasontfo Gadlela, a Swazi married to deceased Sitelega Gadlela, recalls,

I cannot bear looking at the pictures, at the video about the terrible situation, the way they killed our husbands, shooting them even after they were dead…. I do not want any more of those things that I hear, that I can see happening, when the police are defending themselves here…they keep talking about the police that were killed, but I don’t care even how many police were killed. What I know is: …on sixteenth, our husbands were running away, and the police came after them. They never went to attack the police… I saw even that the wound is in the back…it shows he was running away.[5]

Ntandazo Nokamba also died at Scene two. His body was in a clearing between rocks and bushes, brushing up against the body of Fezile Saphendu. He died from a high-velocity gunshot wound to the back of the chest, from someone on a rock at a distance or in the cross fire, posing no threat. The details were replayed in detail. Such images meant families broke down, one was hospitalised and again the Commission was stopped in its tracks. Thereafter familieswere warned in advance of distressing images so they had the option to leave. Some relativesspoke of a tangible fear they experienced when implicated police were testifying whilst others at times were lost in a morass of legalise. Regular briefings from lawyers became essential and over time familiesassisted by translationsbecame familiar with Commission proceedings.[6]

It was Khulumani that made critical interventions however. It had arisen as a support and counselling group during the TRC (Truth & Reconciliation Commission) hearings and now offered its services to the families and injured. However access was initially difficult as lawyers for the deceased ring-fenced the families and allowed no contact with outsiders. National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) lawyers and the Department of Justice similarly wanted them isolated fearing access would jeopardise their case or reflectthe state in a poor light. Khulumani’s NomarussiaBonase recalls entering a lawyers’ briefing under false pretences to make contact with families. Grateful relatives were then offered counselling, translationand a contactperson. “In the end the lawyers said, ‘Thank goodness we really didn’t know what to do.’ Ntsebeza had previously worked with Khulumani at the TRC so he knew our strengths.” commented Bonase.[7]

Khulumani was able to alert the Commission to areas of fundamental neglect. During hearings families received calls from their children running households in rural areas [the Commission convened over two years] complaining that there was no food. Songstress Notukile Nkonyeni, sister to deceased Phumzile Nkonyeni who supportedhis wife, five children, sister and mother complained, “…here [at the Commission] we are treated in a good and respected manner, we are sleeping in a hotel and eating. But our concern is our children at home.”[8] Some received food parcels from social services but this was infrequent and haphazard in its distribution. Many found counselling deeply helpful and empowering allowing them to regain their strength and permitting them to know their rights.[9] This allowed them to force the Commission to recognise them and they began to experience themselves as a collectivewhich could return and report to families and communities.

Over time a strong network of solidarity was built between the grieving families - the widows of deceased police, permanent and contracted mineworkers and Lonmin security became mutually supportive. “This was important” recalls Nomarussia, “because they had not felt they could input to the process – they felt disempowered.”[10] Indeed some of the widows showed extraordinary levels of forgiveness and a sharp understanding of the situation. Elizabeth Monene Maubane and Mrs Fundi, wife of Hassan Fundi, one of the security officers killed on the 12t August, both laid the ultimate blame for their loved ones’ deaths at Lonmin’s door. Mrs Fundi stated that her husband had been ‘left exposed by his employer’[11]and Elizabeth Monene whose policeman husband WO Monenehad been ‘killed so brutally’[12] by unknown strikers on 13 August said: “I would like to say… my deepest sympathy to all the people that were killed in Marikana.”[13]

Some of the wives who lived in Wonderkop[Marikana] with their husbands had talked to their partners the morning before the massacre and believed their testimony would have clarified the strikers’intentions as workers demanding a living wage and not people with criminal intent. However theCommission decided that cross examination would have overly burdened the grief stricken families.[14] Removing agency from these women was resented as some would gladly have taken the pressure and explained their husbands’ motives.[15] Bonase contrasted this with the way the victim centred TRC structured its processes,

[Marikana] Families told how workers were anticipating a reportback from Amcu on the day of their death.Some husbands really explained to families and explained what they were involved in. But at the [Marikana] Commission families just listened and could not talk about what was communicated during thestrike between families and miners. After the killings they were silenced whereas TRC victims and perpetratorstold their stories and they were listened to and given centre stage. It was a victim centred process. At Marikana [Commission] it was not a true version of what happened. It was about winning the case.[16]

There were moments however when the families’ solidarity fractured. Widows of contracted workers were disregarded by the company contracting to Lonmin and Lonmin took no responsibilityfor these workers orfor former Lonmin employees fighting for reinstatement, or for non-South African nationals. Thus the widows of Lonmin permanent employees, mine security workers and the widows of the police received company and state death benefits respectively whilst the former received nothing. Agnes Makopano Thelejane whose deceased husband,Thabiso Johannes, was contracted complained that, “I was victimised by Lonmin. Lonmin …have refused to pay out my husband’s employment benefit, although they have paid other family members of the deceased miners… The company claims my husband was not a permanent employee…Lonmin…are forcing me to go to a contractor about whom I do not know anything, who they claimed was his employer for all those years. Lonmin…refuse to admit that mine companies are under one boss, one umbrella.”[17] Contractors or labour brokered employees frequently don’t receive benefits so the company would probably not pay out a death benefit to Makopano Thelejane anyway The widows of permanent workers did however protest Lonmin’smiserlyresponse in a statement made at the end of the Commission which although not mentioning contract workers specifically stated: “We note that not all families of the deceased have received benefits, depending upon decisions made by Lonmin and the Government about the situation of the deceased person (for example, some benefits were not provided to those families who were not resident in SA, or where the deceased worker was not employed at Lonmin at the time of the strike).”[18]

Another divisive moment was when Mr X, a police mine worker witness, gave evidence to the Commission. His depiction of strikers as ‘muti’ crazed murderers and criminals offended the majority of strikers’ relatives whilsthorrifying the widows of the police and Lonmin security members who had died at the hands of strikers. Bonase commented , “The Mr X testimony was very divisive of the women whereas before they were getting along. Security and police and mine widows were very distressed by Mr X’s descriptions and with the strikers’ wives there was a strong feeling that police were coming forward with a pack of lies.”[19] Mr X’s testimony was strongly discredited at the Commission but he planted poisonous seeds. It thus became the task of the families in their personal statements to the Commission on each of the deceased to show that the strikerswere not barbarians or criminals, but ordinary human beings who were demanding a living wage in the face of an employer indifferent to their suffering.[20]These testimonies provided by the widows or family representatives of the mine workersinsisted onthe workers being considered as individuals who whose death seriously impacted on near destitute dependants in the sending areas.

Despite such tensions in the final days of the Commission all the families of deceased victims were able to release a united statement which placed the responsibilities for the deaths at the feet of Lonmin and the state and which clearly outlined what they expected of these two parties (see Appendix 1 for full statement).

Women gain confidence

Jim Nichol a lawyer at the Marikana Commission commented on how the widows over time gained in confidence and asserted their voices.[21] This became evident when some of the widows took up Judge Farlam’s invitation to speak directly to the Commission; or when they participated in the production of a book recording their experiencesillustrated by themselves[22]; or in interviews with the author and the Mail & Guardian which produced a supplement on their lives and struggles since the loss of their partners and breadwinners.[23] In all these forums which gave voice to the widows their message and consciousness of howgovernment and mine capital colluded and how the poor are the losers in this alliance was never diluted.