On this day in 2012, the Marikana Massacre took place when South African police fired on striking workers, killing 34 and injuring 76 in the most lethal use of force by the state in half a century.
The shootings have been compared to the infamous Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when police fired on a crowd of anti-Pass Law protesters, killing 69 people, including 10 children. The Marikana Massacre took place on the 25-year anniversary of a nationwide strike by over 300,000 South African workers.
On August 10th, miners had initiated a wildcat strike at a site owned by Lonmin in the Marikana area, close to Rustenburg, South Africa. Although ten people (mostly workers) had been killed before August 16th, it was on that day that an elite force from the South African Police Service fired into a crowd of strikers with rifles, killing 34 and injuring 76.
After surveying the aftermath of the violence, photojournalist Greg Marinovich concluded that “[it is clear] that heavily armed police hunted down and killed the miners in cold blood.”
Following the massacre, a massive wave of strikes occurred across the South African mining sector - in early October, analysts estimated that approximately 75,000 miners were on strike from various gold and platinum mines and companies across South Africa, most of them doing so illegally.
A year after the Marikana Massacre, author Benjamin Fogel wrote “Perhaps the most important lesson of Marikana is that the state can gun down dozens of black workers with little or no backlash from ‘civil society’, the judicial system or from within the institutions that supposedly form the bedrock of democracy.”
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Is anyone else really bad at drinking? Like, I spill coffee on myself like a solid quarter of the time. I keep an extra shirt in my car so I don’t have to do field work with coffee on my shirt
Same, I spill water on myself literally every single day
But I’m just a very very clumsy person in general
Every time I eat lunch and a coworker sits near me I can’t figure out taking bites of food without being a messy bitch
My dad is really bad at eating burgers,tacos etc. He always has sauce all over his face. Now I dont follow in my fathers footsteps. Im really good at eating fast food in a mostly clean manner without making a mess.
Not if I’m paying attention. Like if I’m eating a meal at a table with people then I’m pretty neat. But eating or drinking at my computer while doing shit on it I spill stuff on myself all the time. I wear shitty house-only clothes when working at the computer so that it doesn’t matter.
Yup. I hate drinking and walking it’s a recipe for disaster and people expect you to just do it.