A warning, missed

The police massacre of mine-workers at Marikana in August last year came as a physical shock to South Africans, despite our jaded familiarity with very high levels of public violence. The events seemed in so many ways to be a surreal flashback to events from a repudiated past; from the grim video footage of police armored vehicles, tear gas and barbed wire to the bent-over groups of men, proudly displaying what the Inkatha Freedom Party used to call traditional weapons. There were undeniable differences, of course: the presence of uncontrolled videographers on the site not the least amongst them. Yet, in the weeks that followed the massacre, it has become increasingly clear that Marikana was much less a return to the politics of Apartheid than a symptom of the preservation of deeply formed structures of politics within the mining industry. We had, in short, little justification for our surprise. Almost all of the key themes that have driven events in Rustenburg to their horrible conclusions – especially the unions' organisational dependence on ethnic gangs and the power of ostentatious forms of masculinity – were present in bold type in Don Donham's recently published ethnography of violence on the gold mines in the first months of the democracy.

On the 16th of June, 1994, a little more than a month after Mandela had been installed as the President of a newly democratic South Africa, workers at one of the oldest and largest mines on the eastern Witwatersrand attacked the Zulu-speaking men in their midst, brutally – indeed symbolically – murdering two of them. This event, one of hundreds of similar acts of violence in the mid-1990s, was explained very widely in South Africa as yet another instance of normal -- indeed traditional -- ethnic conflict. Donham approaches this event carefully and methodically, exploring how the “conflict became 'ethnicized' to appreciate what it was about.” (9) In the process he opens up an anthropology of South African mining that unravels the ways in which white mine officials, in production and policing, and the new institutions of black trade unionism, were shaped by crude models of ethnicity and a hidden political economy of regimentalism and masculinity. The story of union organisation that Donham investigates shows unmistakably that the success of the National Union of Mineworkers in mobilizing mine workers in the compounds, especially after the traumatic strike in 1987 was driven, in part, by the union's reliance on secret networks of migrant solidarity, which were themselves modeled on memories and institutions of regimentalism.

This is a gentle, modestly written book that presents a deceptively simple explanation of obscure events in an isolated part of a very peculiar city. Donham has worked hard to understand these events using local tools of analysis. Unlike some other recent works by North American scholars it is steeped in the dense and rich anthropology, history and sociology of South African mining, migrancy and violence. And his collaboration with the photographer, Santu Mofokeng, provides an insight in to the mines that sits alongside David Goldblatt's and Ernest Cole's withering photographic essays.

This book provides an excellent starting point for anyone looking to begin a project of research in to the arcane world of mining in southern Africa. Donham's critical readings of the old and new anthropology are especially interesting, but so too is his close and insightful exploration of the official published materials from the mining industry, especially in the period after 1960. This is work that has not been undertaken for this period, and it is very helpful in bridging the gap between the idioms and understandings of the present and the relatively well-documented period before the establishment of the Apartheid state in 1948. Using commissions of inquiry, human resource plans and mine security reports Donham provides abundant and rich evidence of the explanatory and political radically simplified notions of ethnicity in the operations of this enormous industry. The power of the old stereotypes of the compliant Tshangaan, the brave Swazi, the violent Mpondo remains amazingly undiluted in to the present. With the temporary support of a new kind of human resource officer – trained in the Sociology of Work Program at Wits – Donham was able, perhaps uniquely, to lift the veil on the operations of the otherwise closed official world on the mines. Few scholars have had the kind of uncontrolled access to managers before this work.

What he shows is that a crude sociology operated on the mines that had the effect of isolating a small number of “Zulu” workers, attributing them with politics and affiliations that effectively isolated them from the other workers on the mine. To be treated as “Zulu,” and to be seen officially as a supporter of the Inkatha Freedom Party and its union subsidiaries, was to have answered the radically simplifying question, “Tribe?”, at recruitment in a similarly truncated manner. This official designation worked with a frighteningly simplified political ethnography in the compounds to make the small numbers of migrants from KwaZulu and Natal very vulnerable at moments of crisis.

This is one area of an otherwise excellent book that I think warrants criticism. There can be no denying the stupefying power of the simple regional categories used by officials on the mines; bizarrely inaccurate labels like East Coaster, Tshangaan, Malawian, and Zulu have an unmistakable and enduring power in the structure of the mines, much of it derived from a crudely applied ethnography that was used to mirror indirect rule inside the compounds, and underground. But Donham's account is very quiet on the investments that workers themselves made in to these strange categories, he offers no word on what ethnic subjects say about their own history, the distinguishing qualities of their own languages, landscapes and socialising institutions (about which migrants speak habitually and with great enthusiasm). This is a small fault in an otherwise powerful book, but it leaves us ill-equipped to understand why people (and, yes, it is usually migrant men), today as much as in the past, identify themselves “100% Zulu boy” or “110% Pedi.”

Instead, like the marxist scholarship he draws on, Donham offers an analysis and periodisation of the strange form of capitalism in South Africa as the core of his explanation of ethnicized violence. He focuses on the odd structures of capitalism in South Africa, which used a century of coercive labour and mobility controls to drive wages down from their highs in the 1890s, reaching a breaking point in the middle of the 1970s that was, in equal parts, demographic, economic and political. What emerged from this crisis was the complex institution of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Initially, at least, NUM was favoured by Anglo American, the dominant and most progressive of the mining corporations. This translated in to easy access to secured compounds (the single sex hostels that housed hundreds of thousands of migrant mine workers) and easily achieved thresholds for compulsory union debit orders. The NUM grew rapidly through the 1980s, not least because of the careful stewardship of Cyril Ramaphosa. The tense but cooperative relationship between the union and the corporations changed after a massive strike in 1987 that saw NUM throw its considerable weight behind the popular struggle against white rule. Marginal mines, like the old East Rand mine that Donham was investigating, looked for more complaint alternatives to NUM, and they found them in the form of unions backed by Mangosutho Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party.

It was in the effort to break in to a mine that was dominated in part by a long history of racial paternalism and indirect rule, and in part by the self-consciously counter-revolutionary unions of the IFP, that the NUM found itself drawing on the secret regimental organisations of isiXhosa-speaking migrants, mostly from Pondoland (p 141-4, 151). This was the same intensely hierarchical, tightly organised and fiercely violent migrant organisation that the NUM faced at Marikana, but in Donham's study (and several others) the amabutho (soldiers) provided NUM with the keys to the compound.

The actual events of the immediately preceding the murders of the Zulu workers, show that the issues at stake had much more to do with competing forms of migrant masculinity than political affiliations. Managers sent Zulu-speaking workers home on paid leave after protests by Inkatha in the city, and their return to the compound, as Donham shows in a reconstruction of verbal boasting in the compound, endangered the “masculine honour of the amabutho.” (p159 – 61) But this process was also a struggle over the meaning and ownership of citizenship. As the mines struggled to “address black workers as modern individuals” they shed the rigidly coercive patterns of ethnic paternalism, effectively withdrawing from the compounds and handing institutional authority to the union movement. It was this withdrawal that, ironically, “created a space in which ethnic gangs could flourish.” (p168) Like the immigrants who were attacked in 2008, Zulu-speaking men were attacked on this mine because they were viewed by ANC-allied migrants as less than citizens who were “enjoying our freedom.”

The book concludes with a short chapter on events and processes at this old, dying mine over the last two decades. Here Donham identifies many of the same sources of brutal conflict that have bedevilled the platinum mines. The face of the mine owner changed to a new black-empowerment company, funded by debt. And this new owner rapidly entered in to conflict over the basic elements of mine management with the most powerful NUM shop-steward, who used ethnic patronage to control all appointments on the mine. Faced with intractable technical and geological problems the mine staggered to its knees in 2009. The amabutho, in the meantime, dissolved in to the shack settlements that emerged around the abandoned compounds.

In this tightly-focused and carefully argued study Donham sheds light on almost all of the dynamics that have determined events that shocked the world in the different context of the platinum mines around Rustenburg.