Editorial

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Sirens Knuckles Boots!

Amatoritsero Ede

The ongoing lunar moment in the wake of a forgettable amateur film on the Internet is predictable. Better it is to move beyond political Islam’s sporadic baying at the moon and consider another, more shocking, lunacy – a scene from the script of a classic apartheid disaster like Sharpeville or Soweto. Only there is a macabre twist. It is not the accustomed short-gun-toting white Apartheid police squad that is now carrying out target practice by aiming live ammunition on the fleeing backs of black South African school children. Rather, it is mostly black policemen in a black ANC-ruled South Africa who gun down forty-four protesting black miners in a hail (Mary) of bullets.

True, some of the protesters wielded ‘machetes and sticks’; true, it was rumoured that one even brandished a gun. Nevertheless, the riot police is a paramilitary force trained or ‘supposedly’ trained to disarm, disband and scatter; and if the situation comes to a head, ‘equipped’ to give good tackle without breaking any bones, too much sweat or, killing anyone. The riotous crowd of miners, as a disorderly uncoordinated body, simply represented the usual professional hazard. The South African police failed as a security force on all fronts – professionally, ethically and as a member of the community.

More worrisome is the fact that this event resurrects the ghosts of many a brutalised, tortured, bloodied and battered anti-apartheid protester or activist – often black, like Steve Biko, and sometimes white – on the long road to freedom. These were those who were forced to live on the edge of ruin, whose brave lives were ruled by the whip’s razor-ed swoosh, whose final stares, through glazed murdered eyes, were surprised in death by hot government-issued apartheid bullets – as if they only braced for the fall of the sjambok or a white booted foot stomping down hard on a clenched and prostrate black face. One should not even try to count the number of black homesteads – the harmless children and their mothers, over whom the apartheid juggernaut rolled on the streets and who were crushed to death; and the innumerable men and women harassed and driven insane by alienating exile or excruciating incarceration and pushed to suicide as the last refuge from their nightmares.

Interestingly a government minister initially accuses some of the miners of being indirectly responsible for the murders by dint of their association (as ‘accomplices’ in a strike) with the massacred. As if in anticipation of such a turn of events, online videos reflect the miners’ dazed eloquent dying eyes staring in unbelief at an upended world from the dust where they writhe and plead without words: “poor wordless body in its fumbling ways,” says Dennis Brutus. Perhaps a good thing he is not alive to witness this return to a system he (along with countless others) sacrificed all his life to end, especially when the minister performs an apartheid-style (il)legal transference of criminal responsibility from bad government unto the citizen-victim, justifying that mass execution with a typical erstwhile inhuman and evil logic of apartheid. Conveniently she, Ms. Minister, has a short memory of those injustices which generations of South Africans had to valiantly fight against – at great costs – in order for her, a black woman, to become cabinet minister in a ‘free’ South Africa. Zuma’s ‘threat’ to investigate the matter is empty; he plans to turn a blind eye on the police and their apartheid-style crime and focus on the ‘untouchable’ multinational operators of the mines, whom his government is in bed with, anyhow.

This whole dance macabre has turned out to be a tacit official condoning of Apartheid-style state violence against the working poor. And precisely because of the staggering amount of platinum wealth, measured in billions of dollars, which they dig up from the caverns of the earth, the miners’ impoverishment is a symptom of the dispossession of the black working class by the transnational corporation – Lonmin and its ilk in this case – in collusion, surprisingly, with a comprador post-apartheid ANC government. All that, despite the utopia symbolized in the optimism of Sam, that black servant in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, who has to ‘host’ his unjustly impoverished, homeless and penniless former overlords in a sudden extreme reversal of roles and fortunes within a simulated free South Africa. When, in reality, over three hundred years of leviathan status quo is overtaken by actual radical political change, no one could have expected the on-going twenty-first century retrogression into apartheid-era legal, civic and socio-economic dispossession. This is why we are forced to step back in time and find ourselves in, for example, Malay camp in 1942.

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3 Responses to “Editorial”

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  1. Mat Nashed says:

    “The future is always a present.” – It’s like being trapped in another persons nightmare! This is a great piece Ama. An alarming prognosis of the progressive operations of the inequity in South Africa.

  2. A. Katawala says:

    This is a passionate piece – and a sad one too. If only Zuma could be so self-reflective.

    “To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church”

    And would some Power the small gift give us

    To see ourselves as others see us! (Robert Burns)

  3. Hope Eghagha says:

    Was thoroughly shamed by the role-reversal. And I remembered Ayi Kwei Armah saying something about love for the white man and the expulsion of colonialists…

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