Introduction Striking miners sit on top of the koppie at Marikana, North West province 1 Murder at Small Koppie_CS5.indd 1 2015/12/04 2:13 PM Murder at Small Koppie_CS5.indd 2 2015/12/04 2:13 PM ‘The invisibility of the poor: when noticed they are met with violence.’ – Nomzamo Zondo, director of litigation, Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI)1 T he koppie was a place imbued with power. During the rock drillers’ strike of 2012, this low hill at Marikana was a space jealously guarded from contamination, where no one dared wear a hat or carry a cellphone; women were prohibited. To point with a finger earned an instant reproach – on that sacred ground only a fist could be used to point. Even proffered handshakes were shunned silently, a dark look settling on miners’ faces when approached with an outstretched hand. The power of the magic was not to be trifled with; breaching a host of taboos could dilute it, or endanger the transgressor. It was this hill that the early Afrikaners had long ago called Wonderkop – which can best be translated as ‘hill of marvels or magic’, though the intentions of the original Boers who named it are lost to us.2 When the setting sun caused the rock to turn blood-red, it indeed seemed to be a site of enchanted potency. The striking miners thought of the koppie as a place where the otherwise god-like reach of the mine ran out. It was their redoubt, a place where they felt like men. Here, they were not malaishas,3 drillers or chisaboys;4 not boys of any kind. Yet as they left the koppie on that fateful late-winter’s day, its protection grew feeble, even if the striking miners did not yet realise it. As the sparkling coils of razor wire were rolled out, the miners were forced to run a gauntlet of police gunfire to escape arrest. They were prepared to withstand the thunderous double crack of the stun grenades, the fierce bite of the tear gas and the painful impact of rubber bullets fired at close range. Drillers have more physical fortitude than most; perhaps those who choose this work are born with hearts so stout, perhaps they acquire it while labouring underground in conditions beyond our comprehension. Yet nothing could 1 Zondo was speaking at the Daily Maverick’s ‘The Gathering’, Johannesburg, 2015. 2 There are innumerable hills or mountains named Wonderkop across South Africa, sometimes named thus because of a geographic or geological feature that evoked wonder, or based on the legend of a miraculous or wondrous event that was said to have taken place there. The Afrikaans word wonder is translated as ‘wonder’, ‘marvel’ or ‘magic’, while wonderwerk means ‘miracle’. 3 Fanagalo for ‘the person who wields the shovel’, the lowest-grade worker in the underground social hierarchy. 4 Fanagalo for ‘assistant miner’; literally ‘fire or hot boy’. 3 Murder at Small Koppie_CS5.indd 3 2015/12/04 2:13 PM m u r d e r at s m a l l ko p p i e prepare them for the terrible fusillade emerging from the funnel of police vehicles, which ripped through muscle and bone, hundreds of high-velocity bullets tearing through legs, chests and skulls, and kicking up a cloud of beige dust like a curtain. A single, strangled cry of ‘Cease fire!’ from a lone policeman with a jammed weapon triggered a chain of calls that finally stilled the gunfire. As the dust settled back onto the men prone on the blood-drenched earth, nothing would ever be the same again. It was as if the nation had spent eighteen years dreaming of an idealised society only to be violently awoken to a living nightmare. As horrifying as the televised killings were, there was worse that happened out of sight, at a jumble of rock and thorn trees not imbued with any symbolism other than that it being an open-air latrine for nearby shack dwellers. The place was dismissively known as Small Koppie, or Thaba Nyana, if people acknowledged it had a name at all. The winter shadows were long, blue and deep by the time police encircled the men seeking refuge there. None of the miners expected this forlorn site to be the place where they would face execution at the hands of police out to avenge their slain fellow officers, themselves pawns in a high-stakes game of neglect and oppression that allowed both the state and big business to benefit from a perpetually impoverished citizenry. The Marikana massacre swiftly became a platform for all types of opportunists to exploit, and for the state to belittle the extrajudicial executions as an unfortunate incident provoked by criminals. Activists and civil society who had been quiescent for too long were jolted into action. People of conscience, from veteran human rights activist George Bizos to grassroots activists too young to have experienced apartheid kragdadigheid,5 were galvanised. Many of these well-intentioned people failed to understand, or perhaps chose to ignore, just how brutalising it is to endure a lifetime of scrambling to survive, and tried to gloss over the acts of violence perpetrated by the striking miners themselves, lest it undermine their struggle. Violence was an essential component of the drillers’ strike. South Africa continues to be one of the world’s most physically, economically, socially and psychologically fractured states. The poor are politically, commercially and socially invisible until they force themselves into view. The only 5 An apartheid-era South African policy of using brute force to quell political opposition; Afrikaans, meaning ‘forcefulness’. 4 Murder at Small Koppie_CS5.indd 4 2015/12/04 2:13 PM introduction way that neglected and impoverished communities ever manage to break the spell of invisibility is when they use sufficient violence to be noticed. An evocatively titled paper, ‘The smoke that calls’,6 encapsulates the political struggle for visibility, as does the otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon of Izikhothane 7 publicly burning money and designer clothes they only wear once. That boys who live in their grandmothers’ Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses can show off how easily they can replace the materially desirable is a result of the psychological damage of poverty juxtaposed with extreme wealth. In the same vein, the miners’ rejection of their invisibility demanded that they be publicly annihilated. It was just politics, and economics. I first began to understand properly what had occurred at Marikana’s Small Koppie, or Scene 2, while standing in a low granite defile, stooping to avoid thorn-covered branches and trying not to stand on the rich, blood-steeped soil where Henry Mvuyisi Pato died, shot through the back of his neck with an R5 bullet. That death was marked with a spray of fluorescent yellow-green paint on an ancient boulder. Once I understood that the letter N stood for the disappeared remains of a human being,8 I began to see each and every one of those crime-scene signifiers for what they were: the bloody remains of miners’ bodies marked by an almost incomprehensible alphabet. It was the first step towards unravelling the dual massacres of Marikana, and the state’s cover-up of the police’s deadly labour. Yet this spectacle of brutality, a contemporary adaptation of human sacrifice, a part of which resonated around the world within minutes, did not purge either Lonmin or the ruling party and its abetters of their opponents. Marikana has instead become a rallying cry against the collusion of parasitic elites. The echoes of those gunshots have not yet stilled. 6 Karl von Holdt, Malose Langa, Sepetla Molapo, Nomfundo Mogapi, Kindiza Ngubeni, Jacob Dlamini and Adele Kirsten, ‘The smoke that calls: Insurgent citizenship, collective violence and the struggle for a place in the new South Africa’, Society, Work & Development Institute, 2011. Available at http://www.wits.ac.za/humanities/17416/ (last accessed September 2015). 7 From the isiZulu word meaning ‘bush’, it is now township slang for impoverished gangs of youth who live extravagant lifestyles. 8 The N was mistakenly painted instead of M, the correct designation of Pato’s body. 5 Murder at Small Koppie_CS5.indd 5 2015/12/04 2:13 PM