‘We kill this thing’: making sense of Marikana

Bill Dixon is Professor of Criminology, University of Nottingham. In this blog, Professor Dixon examines the events surrounding the Marikana Massacre and provides insight into the role of violence in facilitating corporate profit and political power. (contact: william.dixon@nottingham.ac.uk)

‘We need to act in such a way that we kill this thing’ - the words of Lieutenant-General Zukiswa Mirriam Mbombo of the South African Police Service (SAPS) at a meeting with senior executives of Lonmin, the London Stock Exchange-listed owners of the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa’s North West Province on 14 August 2012. Less than 48 hours later, 34 striking miners were dead. They had been shot - many of them in the back and in cold blood - by members of the SAPS during the implementation of a ‘tactical option’ to end a costly and politically embarrassing strike that had already resulted in the loss of 10 other lives.

What happened at Marikana has been described as ‘the single most traumatic event of the post-apartheid era’.[1] It is a view that is widely shared. Comparisons are often made with the infamous massacre of 69 unarmed protesters by the apartheid-era South African Police (SAP) at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960. Yet, not far off 13 years later, not a single SAPS member has been charged, let alone convicted, of a criminal offence in connection with what unfolded on 16 August 2012.

Marikana is only one fatal incident in a long history of police violence on and around South Africa’s mines. Almost a century earlier, and only months after the force was established, the SAP and troops killed more than 20 workers during strikes and protests in and around Johannesburg during the winter of 1913. Fast forward to January 2025 and over 70 bodies were recovered from the abandoned Buffelsfontein mine some 150 kilometres from Marikana. The deaths of these illegal artisanal miners, known locally as  zama zamas, was the grisly conclusion to a police operation aimed at forcing them to the surface, reportedly by denying them food and water.

The direct, personal violence inflicted on miners, legal and (formally) illegal, over the last 100 years has to be seen in the context of what peace researcher Johann Galtung has called structural violence.[2] Caused by the unequal distribution of income, education, health and other public services, this too has a well-documented history dating back to the years of colonial rule after the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Since the discovery of diamonds then gold in the second half of the 19^th century, South Africa’s mining industry has depended on migrant labour from deliberately impoverished rural areas and adjoining countries spending extended periods of time away from their families corralled into single-sex compounds. For most of the last century, violence was part of the everyday experience of miners both above ground in harshly policed hostel accommodation and below it as supervisors and ‘boss boys’ strained to meet the production targets on which their bonuses depended.

Since South Africa became a democracy in 1994, the compounds have been replaced by a system of ‘living out’, often in shack settlements in the absence of more formal accommodation. The outsourcing of labour through contractors has increased. But the reliance on migrants has not gone away, and mineworkers continue to bear the cost of maintaining two households, one on the mines another back home. As one worker from South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province and resident of the Nkaneng informal settlement near Marikana said in the wake of the massacre:

The truth is that we live like pigs while the mine smiles when we dig that platinum and make them rich. We have nothing to show for our long hours of work. We have to provide for ourselves here as well as our families back home.[3]

The background to the massacre on 16 August was the subject of a lengthy inquiry chaired by a former member of South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal, Ian Farlam. The Farlam Commission of Inquiry found that Lonmin was responsible for tension and unrest among its workforce by failing to discharge its obligations to provide decent and affordable housing.[4] It also paid a good deal of attention to the events leading up to the fateful decision to remove strikers from the ‘mountain’ (in reality a small hill or koppie) where they gathered each day. A recording of a meeting between Provincial Commissioner Mbombo and the Lonmin executives at which she talked about ending (or ‘killing’) the strike was a critical piece of evidence about the thinking behind the adoption of the ‘tactical option’. A further meeting of the SAPS’s most senior commanders took place the following evening and endorsed Mbombo’s decision to clear the strikers from ‘the mountain’, if necessary by force. The reasons for this decision were hotly debated at the Commission’s hearings and in the media.

The role of Cyril Ramaphosa, now the President of South Africa, then a member of the ruling African National Congress’s (ANC) National Executive Committee and the chair of an investment company with a substantial stake in Lonmin, was the source of much of the controversy. At issue was whether Mbombo’s decision was the result of improper pressure exerted by Ramaphosa, the Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa, and other leading members of the ANC government. Counsel for the hundreds of mineworkers arrested and injured at Marikana argued that, by passing demands for forceful action to end the strike down through the chain of command, Ramaphosa and Mthethwa effectively gave the orders that led to the 34 deaths on 16 August.

The Commission took a more forgiving view of their actions. There was nothing improper in Ramaphosa, other government ministers and the National Commissioner of the SAPS asking for decisive action to be taken to stop what Ramaphosa himself had characterised as the strikers’ criminal violence. Nor was there any evidence to suggest that Ramaphosa intended, foresaw, or should have foreseen, that his demand for action would lead to so many deaths.

What emerged from the evidence presented to the Commission was something much more insidious, and more corrosive of police governance, than overt political pressure of the kind alleged by counsel for the mineworkers. In his analysis, the social theorist Steven Lukes argues that power is exercised most effectively when it is least observable.[5] And it is least observable when power-holders are able to influence, shape or determine the actions of others by ensuring that those others think like them, and will act in accordance with their wishes without being ordered or pressured to do so.

Both Provincial Commissioner Mbombo and the National Commissioner, General Riah Phiyega, were essentially political appointments, their loyalty to the ANC government more obvious qualifications than their credentials as senior operational police commanders. They were acutely aware of the need to bring the strike to an end before it caused further damage not just to Lonmin’s profitability and South Africa’s attractiveness to international investors, but to the hegemony of the established National Union of Mineworkers (a key political ally of the ruling party) and, ultimately, to the ANC itself in the face of the threat posed by a youthful and energetic insurgent named Julius Malema. For Phiyega and Mbombo, the need to ‘kill this thing’ was obvious. They did not need Lonmin, one of its leading shareholders, the government or the Minister of Police to tell them what to do. They knew that something had to be done. They acted.  And 34 people died.

The deaths at Marikana on 16 August 2012 were extraordinary in their brutality. But they, and the circumstances surrounding them, were very much in keeping with the violent history of mining in South Africa – violence used directly by the police against miners and structural, woven into the fabric of their everyday lives as migrant workers. That they happened because senior police officers were so finely attuned to the needs of a mining company and the government of the day that they needed no instructions to act against the strikers tells us much about the closeness of the relationships between government, its agents and the business of extraction, and the centrality of violence to maintaining both corporate profits and political power.

[1] Hart, G. (2013) Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, p.2.

[2] Galtung, J. (1969), ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6: 167–91.

[3] Jika, T. (2013), ‘Life in a Time of Violence’, in F. Dlangamandla, T. Jika, L. Ledwaba, S.Mosamo, A. Saba and L. Sadiki, eds., We Are Going to Kill Each Other Today: The Marikana Story, 86–92. Tafelberg, pp. 86-7.

[4] The report of the Commission is available at: https://www.sahrc.org.za/home/21/files/marikana-report-1.pdf, accessed 22 April 2025.

[5] Lukes, S. (2005) Power: A Radical View. Second edition. Palgrave Macmillan.