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  • Spectral AlphabetsPhotography, Necropolitics, and the Marikana Massacre
  • Patrick F. Walter (bio)

The letter N, a haunted alphabetical figure, first becomes perceivable in Greg Marinovich’s story for the Daily Maverick that tells of forty-four platinum miners killed by the South African Police Service (SAPS) during a wildcat strike on August 16, 2012, in an event that has come to be known as the Marikana massacre. News crews captured a handful of these killings on video, and the footage quickly became a global phenomenon. Much of the violence, however, took place away from news cameras, among a group of boulders where some of the strikers had sought cover from advancing police forces. Surveying this site, often referred to as the Killing Koppie, Marinovich photographs alphabetical marks that forensics investigators had written on stones to locate and count the dead. The letter N denotes the resting place of the fourteenth corpse.1

Unlike the majority of footage of the Marikana massacre, which frames the assault and aftermath as a spectacle of corpses and injured bodies, Marinovich’s photographs articulate a precipice of the visible, each letter marking the absence of a body. By comparing Marinovich’s photos with other forensic and journalistic footage related to the Marikana massacre, I want to ask two questions raised by this revenant letter N: What labor is performed by the corpses captured in atrocity footage, particularly the all-too-common footage of sub-Saharan African violence that, disseminated online, becomes global spectacle? And, might Marinovich’s images suggest ways that photography could contest the deathly labor of becoming footage?

To understand how the visibility of a corpse, as a photographic or video image, can be a form of labor, we need to think carefully about the relationship between perception, politics, and violence, particularly in the context of South Africa’s informal communities where many [End Page 1]


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Figure 1.

Marked stone at the site of the Marikana massacre. Source: Greg Marinovich.

platinum miners live. AbdouMaliq Simone has shown that political struggles in contemporary South Africa often concern questions of visibility and invisibility. As Simone puts it, “This heightened sense of visibility has helped regimes control the city, even when they have little legitimacy and few concrete tools of repression. If spaces and opportunities for acting outside intense scrutiny are to be created, the act of making things visible itself must be manipulated” (65). In Nkaneng, the informal community that is home to many of the strikers who participated in the Marikana uprising, this struggle over visibility involves the implementation of, and resistances to, state surveillance. Prior to and since the August 2012 mining strike, police forces have subjected platinum miners and other members of informal communities to an intense optics of control.2 In the weeks following the Marikana massacre, the SAPS maintained a ground and air surveillance of Nkaneng. Armed with tear gas, rubber bullets, and paramilitary vehicles, police conducted sporadic raids into the community, ordering people off of the streets and demanding that men of the community be brought into custody.3 This police surveillance, however, has been met with resistance. Inhabitants of Nkaneng have dug trenches and set up roadblocks to hinder the advancement of paramilitary vehicles and have used their homes as secret armories.4 Also, inhabitants [End Page 2] have refused to have certain actions and spaces photographed by the news media. Describing an exchange with a group of men who were digging trenches, Sipho Hlongwane, a reporter for the Daily Maverick, writes, “I had asked the whole group what they were up to, and none answered that question. I wasn’t even allowed to take a photo.”5 Similarly, community members opened their homes to reporters from the Daily Dispatch but did not allow photographs to be taken of weapons stockpiles. A miner who identified himself as Tshwene told journalists, “These are weapons that are carried when times are tough. When we force our way, we use these weapons. Unfortunately, some of us had to die, but please don’t bother taking pictures of them, we are targets of the police.”6 By impeding state surveillance technologies and manipulating the gaze...

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