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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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
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Theory:
i’m reading an article on post modernism and it said something to the effect that “undermining reality is the central source of fear in the post-modern gothic”
so am i right in thinking that this fear stems from post-modernism self-proclaimed (and self-conscious?) triumph over history and ideology? that the inward turn in post-modernism - the rejection of grand narratives etc. - will eventually crumble/disintegrate along with the current hegemony
sorry for the stream of consciousness posting every time i read something it just helps me work through the material better
to me the post-modern fear that there is no objective reality seems like a way for academics to shield themselves from the post-soviet, neo-liberal ‘there is no alternative’ world they have accepted/cheered on
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term postmodern gothic before, but I feel like it could describe a lot of things I like. Your take on it is intriguing anyway. What’s the article?
it was a journal article about house of leaves (jstor link, but it should be accessible through sci-hub if you’re interested in reading it). there’s also a brill book on gothic postmodernism which looks intriguing