The New South Africa

South Africa has gained the dubious distinction of ubiquity and frequency of public crime.  Sociologists always point first and foremost to societal dysfunction having its roots in poverty and discrimination, in segments of society that are disadvantaged, uneducated and prone to acting out their anti-social desperation in acts of violence.

Yet South Africa is, in its way, one of the social aristocrats of Africa.  Much was expected of the country following apartheid, when the long-suffering and anti-violent nobility of Nelson Mandela, was freed from his prison stronghold at last, to become president of his country and Bishop Desmond Tutu initiated his Truth and Reconciliation process, and the African National Congress stood proudly as a political party that would see its way to transforming the country's inequalities.

Those inequalities are stubborn social inequities that refuse to be set aside and make way for a celebration of ease of misery and privation.  Moreover, since the continent is mired in its traditional heritage of tribalism and its inbred paranoia of the other tribe seeking advantages that should be one's own, the propensity for tribal- and ethnic-based violence is always present, shuddering on the cusp of release.

The racial past of master and slave, the colonialist attitude of superiority and inferiority based on racial suppositions of the order of society may have departed, but the issues that informed that past still thrive.  And as in any society there are pockets of ultra-wealthy and the larger majority of those getting by, with the truly downtrodden on the bottom rung.

The bottom rung are those who labour in a quasi-slave environment for inadequate wages; a reflection of mining communities dating back in the historical record to all countries with such natural resources.  In Africa, while violence stalks the streets in random criminal acts and desperate attempts to escape murder, the police too demonstrate their penchant for violence.

In the classical scenario of them-and-us, each protagonist group views the other as the enemy, for each stands as an obstacle to what the other wishes to achieve.  On August 16, 2012 South African police opened live fire on striking miners, killing 34 of the wildcat strikers, in the Marikana Massacre.  The police had their own alibi; spurred by fear due to previous deaths caused by miners.

When the police restraining force came up against the reality of miners in strength of numbers and indignation at their poorly paid status as indigent, helpless labourers whose union was a tool of government and a foreign mine owner whose Lonmin Marikana platinum operation and foreign investment favoured government interests and not that of the people who laboured there, they insisted they had no other option.

And here's a delicious irony; the attorney-at-law who once was Nelson Mandela's lawyer, is now representing the families of the victims of the deadly police-miner confrontation.  He declared before an inquiry into the deadly incident that he could identify a "prima facie case that there was a deliberate attempt to defeat the ends of justice."

A clumsy one, readily detectable, by comparing photographs of the scene, presented as evidence to the government-initiated inquiry.  Police Captain Apollo Mohlaki, investigator of the crime scene, was asked to explain how it could be that early photos of dead miners showed no weapons in their possession, but later photographs of the same dead had them in possession of weapons.

"I don't have any idea at all", he commented.

"We have had 18 years of democracy and the South African Police Service has gotten to the stage where they are planting evidence to try and clear themselves and warp investigations", charged Dianne Kohler Barnard, shadow minister of police for the opposition Democratic Alliance.

The man handpicked by president Jacob Zuma to reform the police force and cleanse it of its corruption and brutality appears to have failed in his commission.  Victims' lawyers, aided by the reports of witnesses to the slaughter when police fired hundreds of live rounds into the menacing group of miners have accused police of shooting a dozen of the strikers as they attempted to flee.

But of course the police defend their actions; they had little other choice.  The force they used was relied upon as a last resort by police fearing for their own safety at the hands of the ravening mob.  The situation was dire, and becoming more threatening by the minute as the outraged miners demanded their right to bargain their pittance of a wage a trifle higher under a new, empowering union, to more adequately pay for the necessities of life.

Whatever final acknowledgements, conclusions and recommendations that come forward from the commission, will be announced helpfully after the African National Congress election race is concluded early in the new year, once Jacob Zuma, a man acquitted of rape and ignorance of HIV/AIDS, has consolidated his position to continue on in the presidency of South Africa.