Marikana, chiefs and archives: 3 Johannesburg dialogues
Three days, three very different conversations. On July 29 I took part in a focus group discussion on the Farlam Commission’s report on the Marikana tragedy of August 2012. On July 30 Dineo Skosana from Wits University and I gave a version of the paper delivered at the IziThunguthu conference that the APC had hosted two weeks before at the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI). On July 31 I facilitated the Archival Platform’s final dialogue on the State of Archives report with provincial archivists from around the country and PARI staff members.
The roundtable on the Farlam Commission’s report was organised by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution bringing fifteen people together to think about how to take the recommendations of the report forward. A key question was how to prevent another massacre like the one seen in Marikana from taking place?
My role was to give an input on the broader social implications of the Marikana tragedy alongside David Bruce’s analysis of the report, which gave focus to the discussion. The report came under attack for being relatively weak and not offering any strong recommendations of action to be taken by the government, the leadership of the police service or mining companies. Instead of strong recommendations such as those put forward by the Khayelitsha Commision of Inquiry that investigate problems with policing in Khayelitsha, Western Cape, the Farlam report was seen as tepid at best.
Some of the startling insights to come out of the discussion include that:
i) social violence is likely to rise in the country because we have not developed effective mechanisms to reduce violence in the workplace, during strikes or in daily interactions between people;
ii) although the death penalty has been abolished formally, it has morphed into other spaces of social life such that the taking of lives people often goes unpunished;
iii) the police service has been in disarray since the current Commissioner took office, leading to a sharp rise in organised crime; and
iv) so far the police seem to have taken no steps to remedy the problems that led to the deaths of miners at Marikana, such as the poor training of police officers in crowd control and poor planning and execution of the operation.
The roundtable was the start of a conversation that is sure to go on for some time.
“Are chiefs trying to revive precolonial chiefdoms?”, the paper Dineo and I presented at PARI, takes a look at some of the arguments made in public and before the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims for the recognition of individuals as traditional leaders and the institution of chieftaincy. The lively discussion ranged from considering the place of traditional leaders on municipal councils, the role of chiefs in electoral politics, through to the interest some have in mining activities. We were pushed hard to think in different directions and sharpen our arguments as we rework the paper towards publication.
The archives discussion brought into conversation people working on local government who have been immersed in the archives of the Mogalakwena with provincial archivists and a staff member of the Public Service Commission (PSC). So began a discussion on what to do to fix archives that have been on the verge of starting for a long time.
The presence of people working in municipal archives and someone from the PSC brought dimensions to the discussion that have been missing from most previous discussions. Analyses of the state of archives often stop at the level of provincial archives. The forum marks a step forward in confronting the problems.