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  • Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of South Africa's Marikana Massacre by Greg Marinovich
  • Timothy Scarnecchia
Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of South Africa's Marikana Massacre
Greg Marinovich
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017
xviii + 267 pp., $24.95 (paper)

Greg Marinovich, a Pulitzer Prize–winning South African photojournalist, provides us with a mesmerizing and unforgettable narrative of the events surrounding the August 2012 Marikana Massacre, which occurred during a strike organized and led by Lonmin-employed platinum mine rock drill operators (RDOs). The massacre occurred when the state intervened to suppress the strike after conflicts between the striking workers, the trade union (which did not support the strike), and the Lonmin security and local police resulted in violence. This narrative and the color photography included in the book should become required reading in undergraduate and graduate courses on globalization and international labor studies. The book was first published in South Africa and won the Alan Paton Prize for nonfiction in 2017. It is to the credit of MSU Press's editors that the book has been republished in its "African History and Culture" series, along with a helpful contextual preface by historian Peter Alegi, for the benefit of North American readers.

Marinovich pieces together a very important narrative told through his own interactions with some of the key and less key individuals involved in the strike. The main character is Shadrack Mtshamba, whom Marinovich got to know before the strike and who would be his main source of personal experiences after it. The book starts out with a riveting description of the world deep underground where South African RDOs, following the veins of platinum, carry out extremely dangerous and exhausting work manipulating hydraulic drills that take out long tube-shaped bits of rock. Marinovich explains that platinum mining companies such as Lonmin tried to mechanize the mining, but the costs were too high because the machines could not distinguish between platinum and other materials (135). They thus returned to using the labor-intensive techniques, but with less prestige for the RDOs than in past generations. It was still a physically demanding position, and one that was not as well paid given the increased cost of living in mining communities and the fact that the mine's financial difficulties made pay raises difficult. Marinovich draws the reader into the miners' world, and by the time the decision to strike is described, the reader is already quite convinced that their demands were legitimate.

The world of the miners is very bleak, and the landscape of the strike and the associated violence is even bleaker. Marinovich has a keen eye for landscape and an even better sense of how to place his characters in this landscape. A series of hand-drawn maps at the front of the book helps readers have a better sense of the setting, which makes his description of the violence between the strikers, their union, and Lonmin security more vivid and compelling in the days before the massacre. Chaos and violent mutilations of the Lonmin security guards by the strikers inspired vengeance by the police, whose interests [End Page 123] converged with those of Lonmin executives and state officials who sought to suppress the strike and "send a message" to mine workers everywhere in South Africa.

There is not room here to describe in detail all that led up to the massacre, but what makes Marinovich's account so compelling is his attention to the visceral violence that occurred in the days leading up to the main confrontation. His telling of the attacks on Lonmin security guards and Lonmin employees in the days preceding the massacre makes real the charged atmosphere of the final confrontation.

Marinovich also places the state's response after the Lonmin executives' goading in the context of South Africa's elite politics—particularly the role of the current South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the decision to use force to suppress the strike. In 2012 Ramaphosa was in a position to demand a strong response against the mine workers, and there are emails to prove that he did apply this pressure. Marinovich gives a concise but...

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