CHAPTER FOUR
Marikana
Sue Jean Taylor
A Town in Decline and the ‘Ordinariness’ of Apartheid, Atrocity and Ruin
South African towns and cities are infamous for their racially segregated town planning and spatial structures,1 with ‘black’ areas (townships) usually located in less desirable neighbourhoods than the ‘white’ residential and business areas. Townships were established on the outskirts of urban and industrial areas in order to form a reservoir of low-paid black migrant labour to sustain the towns and cities economically. Any large-scale urban migration of black work-seekers was prohibited through racially based legislation. Following the first South African democratic election in 1994, work-seeking movements were no longer restricted and, as a result, formal low-cost housing lags far behind the needs of work-seeking migrants. Informal settlements have sprung up around all major towns and cities to house hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, including mineworkers in South Africa’s mining areas. In many small towns in South Africa, the apartheid-built infrastructure is physically still in place, but the original ideological and restrictive spatial design has been overridden by the desperate need for housing for low-income earners. Although the core structure of the original settlements may remain in many of South Africa’s former ‘white towns,’ many small towns and their very large peripheral townships are now de facto ‘black towns’ with a black African majority.2 One particular small South African town, Marikana, in the North West Province, witnessed a fatal police ambush when, in 2012, a now infamous miners’ strike occurred. A large group of platinum miners, employed by the mining company Lonmin, demanded more money for their dangerous toil. In particular, the rock drillers, who felt they took the most risk, wanted to be paid R12,500 per month, rather than the R4000 they received. For the strike to hold, non-striking miners had to be intimidated, and some were brutally murdered.3 Marikana: A Town in Decline
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