Amatoritsero Ede<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s sporadic baying at the moon and consider another, more shocking, lunacy \u2013 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.<\/p>\n True, some of the protesters wielded \u2018machetes and sticks\u2019; true, it was rumoured that one even brandished a gun. Nevertheless, the riot police is a paramilitary force trained or \u2018supposedly\u2019 trained to disarm, disband and scatter; and if the situation comes to a head, \u2018equipped\u2019 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 \u2013 professionally, ethically and as a member of the community.<\/p>\n More worrisome is the fact that this event resurrects the ghosts of many a brutalised, tortured, bloodied and battered anti-apartheid protester or activist \u2013 often black, like Steve Biko, and sometimes white \u2013 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\u2019s razor-ed swoosh, whose final stares, through glazed murdered eyes, were surprised in death by hot government-issued apartheid bullets \u2013 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n Interestingly a government minister initially accuses some of the miners of being indirectly responsible for the murders by dint of their association (as \u2018accomplices\u2019 in a strike) with the massacred. As if in anticipation of such a turn of events, online videos reflect the miners\u2019 dazed eloquent dying eyes staring in unbelief at an upended world from the dust where they writhe and plead without words: \u201cpoor wordless body in its fumbling ways,\u201d says Dennis Brutus. Perhaps a good thing he is not alive to witness this return to a system he (along with countless others)\u00a0sacrificed 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 \u2013 at great costs \u2013 in order for her, a black woman, to become cabinet minister in a \u2018free\u2019 South Africa. Zuma\u2019s \u2018threat\u2019 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 \u2018untouchable\u2019 multinational operators of the mines, whom his government is in bed with, anyhow.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 impoverishment is a symptom of the dispossession of the black working class by the transnational corporation \u2013 Lonmin and its ilk in this case \u2013 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\u2019s July\u2019s People<\/em>, who has to \u2018host\u2019 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. That future is at no time more present than right now in contemporary South Africa \u2013 poverty, AIDS\/HIV, unemployment, lack of proper housing, scavenging, violence, squalor, a gradual collapse of public infrastructure and, a resultant xenophobia, even against other black people from the continent \u2013 irrespective of their herculean external moral and financial supportive roles in bringing down apartheid as a system. In the Malay Camp black township ghetto, the evidence of a \u2018normal\u2019 and decent life is telegraphed to its wretched inhabitants only as a \u2018hum\u2019 from the \u2018city\u2019 \u2013 faint, distant but deep; a persistent and humiliating thrill in the head of the poor. It is a white only kind of noise inhabited by the powerful \u2013 those gods for whom blacks were only kaffirs and servants. Today that hum is peopled by a different hue \u2013 black. The black South African elite has taken over those habitation where whites where once gods. In other words, the current black ruling class has maintained the white class and social hierarchies, along with their artificial conditions, which were installed by apartheid. What has changed in South Africa is only the baton of power. Apartheid injustice, dispossession and brutalities persist on both sides. Initially power changed hands in 1994 to hope and promise, but the hand that now rules still carries the same clenched fist of the apartheid years.<\/p>\n Yes, there is a minority, both black and white, who enjoy the largess and goodies of freedom, but they are a very small minority indeed. South Africans \u2013 \u2018the people,\u2019 white, black, Indian or Jew, still exist under the sirens, the hard knuckles and jackboots of apartheid conditions. In this ironic and cruel social and economic stasis it is not only the people, the oppressed miners in this instance, who are \u2018mine boys.\u2019 It is not for nothing that Peter Abrahams\u2019 rebellious and fighting mine boy, \u2018Xuma,\u2019 of 1942 has been transformed into \u2018Zuma\u2019 of 2012, president of the republic of South Africa. While he competes with the erstwhile colonial master in pomp, pageantry, pleasure and philandering within the colonial mansion, Zuma forgets his alter ego, Xuma, slaving thousands of miles under the earth in the mines of 1942; he forgets that his past and his future ought to find a political resolution in the present.<\/p>\n The multinational mining corporation, with all its rapacious digging, will eventually create a deep enough bottomless pit under the presidential mansion. And when the house eventually goes into a free fall, even before it hits a non-existent bottom, the ghost of Xuma, the activist, would have melted into ether, into a time past Zuma\u2019s sudden harsh \u2018deep\u2019 reality; and a future beyond approach for Zuma, trapped as he would then be under a collapsed country. Jacob Zuma, symbol of all that is wrong with the ANC, is the original mine boy \u2013 that type that will go back into a collapsing mine if only just to please the master; he is furiously digging his way back into the earth, already burrowed deeper than a cricket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s sporadic baying at the moon and consider another, more shocking, lunacy \u2013 a scene from the script of a classic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-597","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":650,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/597\/revisions\/650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nXuma arrives in a mining ghetto town and siding called Malay Camp looking for work in the mines. It is a \u2018camp\u2019 because it is a mining settlement \u2013 poor, desolate, drunken, and brawling. It is not a place for the weak. The men, miners all, live their lives in the belly of the earth and most times come up gasping for air, coughing and dying. It is of course apartheid era with the indigenous black South African banished to the prison of townships, plagued by a life of official regimentation, harassed, policed, over-taxed, deprived of all economic- or self-advancement through education, and, for amusement, abandoned to liver-eroding, illicit and groggy evenings in that devil\u2019s watering hole called the shebeen. In that hole lives, like that of Daddy the drunk, dissolve in drink. That is the picture of the South African future, which Peter Abrahams seemed to have painted in Mine Boy in 1942. It is the future because the past, for example 1942, was constructed as the hell it was, in large part because of the gold deposits and \u2018rush\u2019 which, attracted the Boer and, protracted colonial activity. Mines still physically dot the landmass of the country, and seem to be a permanent feature of South Africa\u2019s socio-economic and political landscape. The future is always a present.<\/p>\n