Fighting For Their Rights

"I don't know where my husband is, whether he is in jail, among the dead or the injured.  Our husbands were only fighting for their rights, but the police are killing them."  Mbalenhle

Crime and lawlessness in South Africa is rampant.  A product largely of inequality, for people live in squalid poverty in South Africa, unemployed and resentful of promises never met.  There is plenty of wealth in the country, and there are ample opportunities for advancement and to acquire the good things life promises.  The rankling injustice of Apartheid is a thing of the past.  South Africa is now governed democratically by the liberation party of Nelson Mandela.

No longer are whites dominant in the political arena, society, business and education.  Everyone is free to endure, to suffer equally, or to surmount obstacles and become an entrepreneur.  Although those who are born to poverty are generally shackled to it.  For them, the wholesale changes that were promised with the end of white rule and the ascension to power of the African National Congress that would call an end to the ills that beset native South Africans simply did not materialize.


How successful that transition did become, headed by Nelson Mandela, overseen by Bishop Desmond Tutu, now governed by President Jacob Zuma, is debatable.  South Africa is the future economic jewel in the crown of the continent, and it is set to become a power within the developing world with its great store of natural resources, its authority, its aspirations coming to life.  But in many ways it hardly seems to have made a difference to those for whom the opportunities have never trickled down.


And if the white government was belligerently disinterested in lifting up the lives of the poor and the disenfranchised, so too has the black government been lax at managing what has been promised.  The housing that was promised to meet the needs of the people has never materialized, nor have the jobs.  And South Africa's backwardness in handling the scourge of HIV/AIDS, its rate of violent crime, the insecurity of women with a depressingly high rate of rape of women and girls does it little credit.


And now, a strike by miners at Marikana pitting a 'radical' new union with its demands for higher wages and better living conditions from a foreign-owned mine has brought shame to the country with the military firing live ammunition against workers whom neither the platinum mine British owners of Lonmin, nor government agents have been willing to bargain with.  The upstart splinter union separated from the country's largest union to demand justice and fairness for the mine workers.


The original union, the oldest and largest in the country, the National Union of Mineworkers, allied with the African National Congress, is more invested with furthering the interests of business and the government, infinitely less concerned with any advantages for the miners themselves.  Miners walked off the job, demanding a tripling of their wages, spurred on by the new splinter union that claims workers are underpaid and oppressed.


The workers were warned to cease their protests and return to work, and they refused.  A force of 500 police repelled a surging crowd of strikers armed with machetes, spears and cudgels, firing rubber bullets, water cannons and stun grenades.  The protesters broke through the two police lines of defence, and the police turned to using live bullets, killing 34 people outright, leaving another 78 wounded during the wildcat strike.


The bloodbath was caused, claimed a police commissioner, by thousands of miners rampaging: "The militant group stormed towards the police firing shots and wielding dangerous weapons", the police claimed, presenting six guns from the protesters as evidence, one of which was claimed to have been taken from a police officer hacked to death by workers on a previous occasion.


There are always two sides and many nuances between conflicts.  "They started shooting at us with rubber bullets", said a mine employee, among the striking workers.  "I never thought this would happen.  We thought the police were there to protect us."