Police surround striking miners after opening fire on a crowd at the Lonmin Platinum Mine.
Some of the miners killed in the August 16 massacre at Marikana appear to have been shot at close range or crushed by police vehicles. They were not caught in a fusillade of gunfire from police defending themselves, as the official account would have it.
Of the 34 miners killed at Marikana, no more than a dozen of the dead were captured in news footage shot at the scene. The majority of those who died, according to surviving strikers and researchers, were killed beyond the view of cameras at a nondescript collection of boulders some 300m behind Wonderkop.
On one of these rocks, encompassed closely on all sides by solid granite boulders, is the letter “N”, the 14th letter of the alphabet. Here, N represents the 14th body of a striking miner that a police forensics team found in this isolated place.
They use these letters to detail where the corpses lay.
Analysis: Blood trails lead media nowhere
There is a thick spread of blood deep into the dry soil, showing that N was shot and killed on the spot. There is no trail of blood leading to where N died – the blood saturates one spot only, indicating no further movement. (It would have been outside of the scope of the human body to crawl here bleeding so profusely.)
Approaching N from all possible angles, observing the local geography, it is clear that to shoot N the shooter would have to be close. Very close, in fact, almost within touching distance. (After having spent days here at the bloody massacre site, it does not take too much imagination for me to believe that N might have begged for his life on that winter afternoon.)
And on the deadly Thursday afternoon, N’s murderer could only have been a policeman. I say murderer because there is not a single report on an injured policeman from the day. I say murderer because there seems to have been no attempt to uphold our citizens’ right to life and fair recourse to justice.
Morbid scenarios
It is hard to imagine that N would have resisted being taken into custody when thus cornered. There is no chance of escape out of a ring of police.
Other letters denote equally morbid scenarios. J and H died alongside each other. They, too, had no route of escape and had to have been shot at close range.
Other letters mark the rocks nearby. A bloody handprint stains a vertical rock surface where someone tried to support themselves standing up; many other rocks are splattered with blood as miners died on the afternoon of August 16.
The media did not witness or capture these events on camera. They were only reported on as component parts in the sum of the greater tragedy.
One of the striking miners caught up in the mayhem, let us call him “Themba”, though his name is known to the Daily Maverick, recalled what he saw once he escaped the killing fields around Wonderkop.
“Most people then called for us to get off the mountain, and as we were coming down, the shooting began. Most people who were shot near the kraal were trying to get into the settlement; the blood we saw was theirs. We ran in the other direction, because it was impossible now to make it through the bullets.
“We ran until we got to the meeting spot and watched the incidents at the koppie. Two helicopters landed; soldiers and police surrounded the area. We never saw anyone coming out of the koppie.”
Cold blood
The soldiers he refers to were part of the police task team dressed in camouflage uniforms, brought to the scene in a brown military vehicle. Asked about this, Themba said he believed people were hiding at the koppie, and police went in and killed them.
In the days after the shooting, Themba visited friends at the nearby mine hospital. “Most people who are in hospital were shot in the back. The ones I saw in hospital had clear signs of being run over by the Nyalas,” he said.
“I never got to go to the mortuary, but most people who went there told me that they couldn’t recognise the faces of the dead [they were so damaged, either by bullets or from being driven over].”
It is becoming clear to this reporter that heavily armed police hunted down and killed the miners in cold blood. A minority were killed in the filmed event where police claim they acted in self-defence. The rest was murder on a massive scale.
Peter Alexander, chairperson in social change and professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg, and two researchers interviewed witnesses in the days after the massacre. Researcher Botsong Mmope spoke to a miner, Tsepo, on August 20. Tsepo (not his real name) witnessed some of the events that occurred off camera.
“Tsepo said many people had been killed at the small koppie and it had never been covered [by the media]. He agreed to take us to the small koppie, because that is where many, many people died,” Mmope said.
After the shooting began, Tsepo said, he was among many miners who ran towards the small koppie. The police chased them, and someone among them said: “let us lie down, comrades, they will not shoot us then.”
How did they die?
“At that time, there were bullets coming from a helicopter above them. Tsepo then lay down. A number of fellow strikers also lay down. He says he watched Nyalas driving over the prostrate, living miners,” Mmope said. “Other miners ran to the koppie, and that was where they were shot by police and the army with machine guns.”
Several witnesses and speakers at the miners’ gathering, who refer to the army, or amajoni, actually refer to a police task team unit in camouflage uniforms and carrying R5 semi-automatic files on the day.
When the firing finally ceased, Tsepo managed to escape across the veld to the north.
It took several days for police to release the number of those killed. The number 34 surprised most of us. With the media recording only about a dozen bodies, where exactly had the remaining miners been killed, and how did they die?
Most journalists and others did not interrogate this properly. The violence of the deaths we could see, again and again, was enough to contend with. The police certainly did not mention what happened outside of the view of the cameras.
The toll of 112 mineworkers (34 dead and 78 wounded) at Marikana is one of those few bitter moments in our bloody history that the unblinking eye of the lens has captured. Several lenses, in fact, and from various viewpoints.
This has allowed the actions and reactions of both the strikers and the police to be scrutinised in ways that undocumented tragedies can never be. Therefore, although the motives and rationale of both parties will never be completely clear, their deeds are quite apparent.
Dominant narrative
Thus developed a dominant narrative within the public discourse. The police, various state entities and the media have fed the facts that the strikers charged and shot at the forces of law and order, provoking their own deaths. Indeed, the various images and footage can be read to support this claim.
The contrary view is that the striking miners were trying to escape police rubber bullets and tear gas when they ran at the heavily armed police task team (our version of Swat). The result was the horrific images of a dozen or so men gunned down in a fusillade of automatic fire.
From the outside the jumble of granite at Small Koppie, the weathered remains of a prehistoric hill, it would appear that nothing more brutal than the felling of the straggly indigenous trees for firewood occurred here.
Once within the outer perimeter, narrow passages between the weathered bushveld rocks lead into dead ends. Scattered piles of human faeces and toilet paper mark the area as the communal toilet for those in the miners’ shack community without pit toilets.
It is inside here, hidden from casual view, that the rocks bear the yellow letters that the forensic team methodically sprayed on to denote where they found the miners’ bodies.
The letter N appears to take the death toll at this site to 14. Some of the other letters are difficult to discern, especially where they were sprayed on the dry grass and sand.
The yellow letters speak as if they are the voices of the dead. The position of the letters, denoting the remains of once sweating, panting, cursing, pleading men, tell a story of policemen hunting men like beasts. They tell of tens of murders at close range, in places hidden from plain sight.
A wildcat strike
N, for example, died in a narrow redoubt surrounded on four sides by solid rock. His killer could not have been further than two metres from him – the geography forbids any other possibility.
Why did this happen?
Let us look back at the events of Monday, August 13, three days prior to these events.
Themba, a second-generation miner from the Eastern Cape, was present then too. He was part of a group of some 30 strikers who were delegated to cross the veld that separated them from another Lonmin platinum mine, Karee.
It was at Karee mine that other rock drill operators led a wildcat strike to demand better wages. The National Union of Mineworkers did not support them, and management took a tough line. The strike was unsuccessful, with many of the strikers losing their jobs. The Marikana miners figured there were many miners there still angry enough to join them on Wonderkop.
The Marikana strikers never reached their fellow workers; instead, mine security turned them back and told them to return by a route different from the one they had come by.
On this road, they met a contingent of police. Themba said there were some 10 Nyalas and one or two police trucks or vans. The police barred their way and told them to lay down their weapons. The workers refused, saying they needed the pangas to cut wood, because they lived in the bush, and more honestly, that they were needed to defend themselves.
The Friday before, they said, people wearing red National Union of Mineworkers T-shirts had killed three of their number.
The police version
The police line parted and they were allowed to continue, but once they were about 10m past, the police opened fire on them.
The miners turned and took on the police.
It was here, he said, that they killed two policemen and injured another. The police killed two miners and injured a third severely, from helicopter gunfire, Themba said. The miners carried the wounded man back to Wonderkop, where he was taken to hospital in a car. His fate is unknown.
Police spokesperson Captain Dennis Adriao said miners attacked public order policing officers, hacking to death two policemen and critically injuring another.
He said eight people had been arrested for that incident and for the 10 deaths prior to August 16. “Two are in custody in hospital who were injured in the attack on the police.”
The police version of how this event took place is quite different from that of Themba, but what is clear is that the police had already arrested people for the murders committed thus far.
Why, then, the urgency to confront those among the thousands camped on Wonderkop in the days leading up to the massacre?
Self-defence
But let us not, in this article, let this obvious question distract us too much, and return to the events of August 16 itself.
The South African government information website still carries this statement, dated from the day of the Marikana massacre: “Following extensive and unsuccessful negotiations by South African police service members to disarm and disperse a heavily armed group of illegal gatherers at a hilltop close to Lonmin Mine, near Rustenburg in North West Province, the police were viciously attacked by the group, using a variety of weapons, including firearms.
“The police, in order to protect their own lives and in self-defence, were forced to engage the group with force. This resulted in several individuals being fatally wounded, and others injured.”
This clearly states that the police acted in self-defence, despite the fact that not a single policeman suffered an injury on August 16.
And as we discussed earlier, it is possible to interpret what happened in the filmed events as the police over-reacting to a threat.
What happened afterwards, 400m away at Small Koppie, is quite different. That police armoured vehicles drove over prostrate miners cannot be described as self-defence or as any kind of public order policing.
The geography of those yellow spray-painted letters tells a chilling and damning story and lends greater credence to what the strikers have been saying.
Come and shoot
One miner, on the morning after the massacre, told Daily Maverick: “When one of our miners passed a Nyala, there was a homeboy of his from the Eastern Cape inside, and he told him that today was D-day, that they were to come and shoot. He said there was a paper signed allowing them to shoot us.”
The language the policeman reportedly used is strikingly similar to that which Adriao used early on August 16, and was quoted on Mineweb.com: “We have tried over a number of days to negotiate with the leaders and with the gathering here at the mine, our objective is to get the people to surrender their weapons and to disperse peacefully.”
“Today is D-day in terms of if they don’t comply then we will have to act … we will have to take steps,” Adriao said.
A little later he commented: “Today is unfortunately D-day … It is an illegal gathering. We’ve tried to negotiate and we’ll try again, but if that fails, we’ll obviously have to go to a tactical phase.”
Speaking to the possible intention of the police, let us look at how the deployed police were armed.
The weapons that the majority of the more than 400 police on the scene used were R5 (a licensed replica of the Israeli Galil SAR) or LM5 assault rifles, designed for infantry and tactical police use. These weapons cannot fire rubber bullets. The police were clearly deployed in a military manner – to take lives, not to deflect possible riotous behaviour.
The death of their comrades three days previously set the stage for the police, who have been increasingly accused of brutality, torture and death in detention to exact their revenge. What is unclear is how high up the chain of command this desire went.
Selective silence
There has been police obfuscation and selective silence in a democratic society where the police are, theoretically, accountable to the citizenry and to our elected representatives. We live in a country where people are assumed innocent until proven guilty; where summary executions are not within the police’s discretion.
Let us be under no illusion. The striking miners are no angels. They can be as violent as anyone else in our society. And in an inflamed setting such as at Marikana, probably more so. They are angry, disempowered, feel cheated and want more than a subsistence wage.
Whatever the merits of their argument, and the crimes of some individuals among them, more than 3000 people gathering at Wanderkop did not merit being vulnerable to summary and entirely arbitrary execution at the hands of a paramilitary police unit.
In light of this, we could look at the events of August 16 as the murder of 34 and the attempted murder of a further 78 who survived despite the police’s apparent intention to kill them.
Back at the rocks the locals dubbed Small Koppie, a wild pear flowers among the debris of the carnage and human excrement; a place of horror that has until now remained terra incognita to the public. It could also be the place where the Constitution of South Africa has been dealt a mortal blow. – Courtesy Daily Maverick, dailymaverick.co.za