This book is an ethnographic account of the ‘micro politics of resistance’ of mineworkers in Marikana. It draws extensively from the experiences of mineworkers and strike leaders to answer some questions that remain unanswered about what triggered the unprotected Lonmin and Amplats strikes in 2012, how the Lonmin strike was resuscitated and sustained after the massacre and how these demands came to echo again across the platinum belt in 2014. Importantly, the book details how and who conceived the demand of R12,500 and R16,070; a shift from the tradition of percentages as was before 2012. It illustrates who provided the impetus at Lonmin and at Amplats and also how the Lonmin strike was partly due to poor management response to workers’ demands and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) internal dynamics, compared with the Amplats strike which is partly attributed to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration's (CCMA) tardy response.
By paying attention to informal structures (the different worker committees), worker agency and micro-processes involving specific individuals, Sinwell (with Mbatha) argue that the strikes and the demands by workers for a living wage were not spontaneous. Their empirical evidence shows that the demand for a ‘living wage’ emerged in change houses and at homes in workers’ daily experiences and their inability to live on a wage of R4500 or R4900. The book traces the ‘living wage’ demand to Alfonse Ramaola Mofokeng and Bulelani Magqabini at Lonmin and Zukile Christopher Mbobo and S.K. Makhanya at Amplats, the men who for a long time have been faceless and only known as Rock Drill Operators (RDOs), and not to Mambush, ‘the man in the green blanket’ who has become the symbol of ‘the Spirit of Marikana’.
The author further demonstrates that structural conditions for mass mobilisation were ripe, the relationship between the majority of workers and the leadership of the NUM were fraught to the point of complete disintegration. He explains how the NUM treated workers prior and post the Marikana massacre, led to many of them eventually jumping the ship to join the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU).
Sinwell uses the concept of ‘insurgent trade unionism’ to make sense of how AMCU emerged in the platinum belt. He does this by creating a conversation between the unprotected 2012 strikes which were mainly led by worker committees and the protected 2014 strike led by AMCU, an ‘unordinary’ insurgent union. Through his nuanced analysis Sinwell illustrates difficult moments and power struggles in the transition from the NUM to the AMCU, the difficulties of a marriage between participatory democracy and bureaucracy, or democracy and unionism as envisioned by workers when they joined the AMCU. Using direct quotes, he shows how workers who asked questions about AMCU and whether it was driven from below or controlled from the top, were side-lined and even expelled as cracks in the AMCU leadership deepened, and how this to some extent led to the demise of the Greater Lonmin Workers’ Council.
This very descriptive and empirically grounded book leaves one with a better and nuanced understanding of the 2012 and 2014 strikes, the insistent dehumanisation of black mineworkers in post-apartheid South Africa, and the disregard for their lives as evidenced by their working and living conditions. However, it also manages to humanise workers, necessarily so. We are given their biographies and (pseudo) names. This is important precisely because the massacre sought to dehumanise mineworkers. Sinwell weaves these biographies seamlessly and impressively in his big narrative about ‘the Spirit of Marikana’ and insurgent unionism.
The author relies on multiple sources to back up his evidence; from strike leaders, to workers, community members and activists from other provinces. While all these sources are quoted, very few of them are women; in fact women are left on the peripheries of these significant strikes and the story told by Sinwell. Their role as activists (in their own right) in Marikana during the two strike waves, as community members, workers and partners is left un(der) explored. From Sinwell's narrative it is as if the activists from Johannesburg had a far greater impact on workers and strike leaders than their wives who gave them support daily both in 2012 and during the protracted 2014 strike. We know it is women who experienced first-hand the crises of reproduction and thus a demand for a living wage, who picked up the slack and absorbed every economic shock and had to feed families even when household budgets and wages did not add up, an important impetus for the strikes. While the book is great at surfacing some of the ‘actors’ who have become marginalised in public discourse, the author commits the same when it comes to women. There is little to no attempt to acknowledge the role of women in sustaining the strikes in 2012, yet there is evidence to support this. They are mentioned hours before the massacre as just women; this is against the backdrop of Sinwell naming every man the reader encounters. There is no mention of them in hospitals or morgues or prisons looking for their family members or protesting outside courts when mineworkers were arrested. This covertly perpetuates the myth that women were not active or involved in the Marikana strikes.
What the author calls ‘The Spirit of Marikana’ reverberates throughout the book from the 2012 until the 2014 strikes. This is the spirit of the mineworkers who died for a living wage in the massacre. A spirit that could not be betrayed, and remained unshaken, resolute to achieve a living wage, a spirit that refused to retreat (Asijiki!) even when faced with a massacre in 2012 and hunger and financial strains in 2014. Workers, because of this ‘spirit’, remarked ‘rather we starve as unemployed men than starve at work’ (p. 160).
To conclude, I go back to one of the questions workers asked just before the massacre which was ‘if we are all killed, who is going to tell the story?’ (p. 48). I think the book goes a long way in telling the story, in fact it gives workers space to tell their story, from their perspective, in their own, slightly diluted, voices.
