Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of South Africa's Marikana Massacre by Greg Marinovich (review)

This is a book that will inspire fury in its readers. Authored by acclaimed South African photojournalist Greg Marinovich, it tells the story of the Marikana massacre. On August 16, 2012, South African police and tactical units killed thirty-four striking miners employed by the Lonmin platinum mine, wounding seventy-nine more. Firing 328 live rounds at strikers armed with little more than farm tools, they dispatched the first seventeen at a kraal near Thaba Hill. Nineteen minutes later, they completed their task at nearby Small Koppie [low hill]. At this place of death, this "reeking altar"—sometimes used as a toilet, and therefore littered with scraps of toilet paper and human excrement—the final seventeen miners were slaughtered (p. 167). Some died with their hands up in surrender, making them easy targets.

Murder at Small Koppie is, on one level, an extraordinarily detailed account of the days before, during, and after the massacre. Entire chapters are devoted to piecing together the events of individual days and even shorter periods of time. But it is also a story about neoliberal capitalism, greed in the guise of mining conglomerates and the ANC ruling party, and the abdication of social responsibilities by both when it came to poor (mostly black) South Africans. Marikana is symptomatic of the "disconcerting cohabitation of big business and socialist rhetoric in post-apartheid South Africa," writes Marinovich (p. 144). Marikana was the nation's 9/11: a moment of reckoning in which the promises of 1994 were clearly shown to have failed. Variously describing the strikers as criminals, dogs, and worse, the government and its allies set out to dehumanize their victims, with the state initially going so far as to charge 270 miners with the deaths of their comrades.

Writing for the online Daily Maverick, Marinovich was present at Marikana in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, and he conducted extensive interviews with miners and their families. He transports us into the lives of these workers, into the shacks without running water that comprised their accommodations, in contravention of Lonmin's legally binding agreement to build houses for workers (the company had completed just three by 2012). He introduces us to the dangers workers faced underground, especially the rock drillers, who formed the bulk of the striking group. We learn of the difficulties miners experienced in meeting their living expenses, which were onerous given their responsibilities in the mining towns of Wonderkop and Nkaneng and back in the rural areas. Low wages frequently necessitated the services of predatory moneylenders called mashonisas, "the people who take you down" (p. 203).

These rich interviews reveal how strikers came to believe in the power of the sangoma (healer) to provide intelezi (medicine) to protect them during their strike. They describe taboos against the presence of women on Thaba Hill (where strikers gathered), the use of cell phones, and pointing with the finger, leading to the appearance of a distinctive gesture made with the fist. Importantly, Marinovich does not spare the miners their responsibility for the murder of several security officers and suspected informants in the days leading to August 16. I would raise one criticism: in this body of oral material, Marinovich rarely permits his subjects to speak. He paraphrases and reports on their views, but infrequently uses direct quotations, ensuring that the strikers and their families feel somewhat distant to readers. This is unfortunate, given that the author opens his acknowledgments section by stating how "This book belongs to the miners and drillers ... as well as the residents of Marikana" (p. 255).

Marinovich makes extensive use of the testimony that witnesses provided during the almost three-year-long commission of inquiry into the massacre, which culminated in March 2015. His conclusions are fearsome indictments of the South African state and its politicians, unions, and police. The primary motivation for each group was simply to deflect blame. Each was content...