On 16 August mine employees, activists and little question a number of politicians will collect on the now infamous rock outcrop close to the previous Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana, North West province, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Marikana massacre. This was essentially the most deadly use of power by the South African police because the 1976 Soweto uprising in opposition to the then apartheid regime. At least 138 folks died in three days.
In reality, the Marikana bloodbath was so brutal that it has been likened to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, the place apartheid police shot unarmed civilians of their backs as they fled, killing 69. They have been protesting in opposition to identity documents that black folks have been pressured to hold, proscribing their motion.
Between 12 and 16 August 2012 a complete of 47 folks died. Among them have been 34 miners from the Lonmin Platinum mine shot by police. Another 10, including two policemen and two mine security guards, have been killed by protesting mineworkers. Three others died after the strike had ended. In addition, 78 miners have been injured. Most of them have been shot with R5 army fashion assault rifles by law enforcement officials and safety officers from the Lonmin Mine.
This 12 months, the commemoration of the occasion coincides with my professorial inaugural lecture on the Faculty of Theology, Stellenbosch University. How does my work as a public theologian and ethicist hyperlink with violence and the pointless lack of life that happened in Marikana?
It transpired as I used to be conducting some analysis for my inaugural lecture. I got here throughout a element in interviews with the placing miners that I had not seen earlier than. Central to the mineworkers’ calls for was an attraction to decency.
I want to take my cue from the thinker Avishai Margalit, who, in his ebook The Decent Society, asserts that (p.1)
an honest society is one whose establishments don’t humiliate folks.
He argues that it’s the confronting of societal evil that brings us to a politics of decency.
Based on my analysis into the bloodbath and its aftermath, I consider that the pressing job in South Africa is to study to dwell extra “decently in an indecent society” – and by no means to overlook Marikana.
What is decency?
The custom of the professorial inaugural lecture is that when one is promoted to full professor one ought to have one thing to “profess”. Having spent years studying, listening, reflecting, educating and writing, one would have a physique of labor, and even perhaps a number of concepts, to share.
I actually struggled to discern what to say. After all, what could be becoming, accountable, or correct, for a white male ethicist to “profess” in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2022? My wrestle deepened as I mirrored on the indecent, and racist, act of a white pupil urinating on the belongings of a black pupil on the college. He has since been expelled.
When the college set the date of my lecture for 16 August 2022, I realised that it coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Marikana bloodbath. I had previously written in regards to the bloodbath and its iconic chief, Mgcineni Noki.
That article argued that non secular folks and religion communities should as soon as once more take up the wrestle for justice in South Africa as a main concern. Moreover, two of my PhD college students, Jayson Gribble and Jaco Botha, had conducted research on the Marikana bloodbath. So I used to be comparatively conversant in this painful occasion within the nation’s historical past. However, as I used to be studying interviews with the miners I got here throughout one thing that I had not seen earlier than. It shook me.
In her book Marikana: Voices from South Africa’s Mining Massacre, Kate Alexander data (p. 25) that the placing miners
needed their employer, Lonmin, to take heed to their case for a respectable wage. But this threatened a system of labour relations that had boosted earnings for Lonmin, and had protected the privileges of the dominant union, the National Union of Mineworkers. It was determined to deploy ‘maximum force’ in opposition to the employees.
Many South Africans have turn into accustomed to the phrase a “living wage”, as utilized in labour relations. It refers to a minimal earnings that enables employees to subsist. It’s a brutal society during which folks would accept mere dwelling as a suitable customary.
At Marikana, the employees have been clear: they have been advocating not just for a “living wage”; they have been holding their employer to a better customary. They needed a “decent wage”, and so they hoped that the rights accorded to them in a democratic South Africa would defend them of their trigger.
They needed to safe a lifestyle that might deconstruct the historic indecencies of migrant labour, the separation of households, dwelling in poverty and being humiliated and dehumanised by wealthy and highly effective folks and establishments. To them that amounted to at least R12,500 (US$758 at right this moment’s trade price) a month.
Let us pause for a second to mirror on this phrase: “decent”.
What may it imply within the South African context? What may it imply on the tenth anniversary of the Marikana bloodbath?
Decency for the victims of the Marikana bloodbath was about extra than simply assembly their naked wants for survival. Yet, whereas they have been placing for decency, their employer, and the nation, enacted essentially the most violent of institutional humiliations upon them. They have been killed in an indecent method. To date there have nonetheless not been any prosecutions of the police and safety officers who killed the miners.
Sadly, South Africa and South Africans appear to be slipping ever extra deeply into indecency, as proven by the current gang rape of eight women in Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg.
The nation has one of many highest rates of rape and gender-based mostly violence on this planet.
In search of saints
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut was as soon as requested how he made sense of dwelling via probably the most troublesome and violent occasions in that nation’s historical past. The Nineteen Seventies noticed the height of the Vietnam war, rising poverty, increasing economic inequality, political corruption beneath President Richard Nixon, and the deepening of American racial injustice. He replied (p. viii),
what made dwelling virtually worthwhile for me have been the saints I met. They could possibly be anyplace. They are folks behaving decently in an indecent society.
If somebody have been to ask me the identical query, I must say that I’m in search of some bizarre “saints”. In reality, I do see them occasionally. They are folks behaving decently amid the indecencies of society.
They are feeding the hungry, advocating for justice, working for peace, and holding the highly effective to account.
South Africa wants extra folks, and collectives, who’re dedicated to dwelling decently, whose dedication is to undo the systemic humiliation brought on by the nation’s political and financial establishments, which is shamefully missed by its residents. This is an pressing job.
Dion Forster, Full Professor of Ethics and Head of Department, Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology, Director of the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology, Stellenbosch University
This article is republished from The Conversation beneath a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
