Worker Struggles as Community Struggles: The Politics of Protest in Nkaneng,Marikana

Introduction

This article is based on conversations with the Marikana women’s group, called Sikhala Sonke, mainly in December 2012. The appearance of an active women’s organisation on the mines during the 2012 strikes, linking their community struggles to the struggles of the men on the mountain was of immediate interest to me. Particularly, because it interrupted some of the triumphalist, masculinist, and Marxist analysis of the massacre at the time and it revealed a gendered space usually ignored in the mainstream media and academia. The women of Marikana made their existence and struggles public during and after the Marikana massacre, and contradicted the quiet assumption that the mines remain a space that is inhabited by men only, or that their contributions remain purely sexual.

There have been many changes since the segregated and ethnically constituted single-sex hostels dominated on the mines and yet much of the labour historiography does not seem to reflect the shifts in the spatial construction of mine communities today. ¹ Most of the men who migrate to work at the mines are from the former Transkei and particularly from Mpondoland and still intend to send money home and one day return to their rural homes after their labour contracts have ended. However, many now have family members, including daughters, wives, and sons who have joined them in their shacks at the mines, often to look for work. People generally still maintain the distinction between ‘home’, which is the Eastern Cape, and Nkaneng, the shack settlement and their current place of residence. Yet, together, the men, women, and their children in Marikana now constitute a new community that did not exist there before. The strikes and the subsequent massacre in August 2012 created a moment of crisis that was responded to, not merely through the constitution of worker committees, but also collectively as a community.

If we are to speak about the worker, beyond productivist Marxist and economistic understandings, then we must begin from the notion that workers are people rooted in communities. In the case of Nkaneng at Marikana, ‘communities’ refer to those that exist both in the rural and now, more recently, in the ‘urban’ mining space. The rural often has influenced and shaped politics in the urban space, and continues to do so. What emerges from the politics surrounding this moment of crisis, is a fidelity to a conception of democracy as constructed in the rural sphere, and people’s attempts to deepen and explore democratic praxis in a more meaningful and participatory way than the ‘official domain’ of politics would allow the marginalised. The continuation of a sense of justice, loyalty and community is evidenced through the interviews and time shared with people who were unable and unwilling to divorce what happened on the 16^th of August from broader practices of injustice by Lonmin against its employees and how the company, the government, and the union had ignored and discarded the communities of people they were supposed to protect and to be accountable to.

The article attempts, through a few life histories and conversations, to outline the creation of the women’s movement and how it functioned in the Nkaneng community in the period during the strikes of 2012 and the months immediately following the massacre. Most importantly it reveals the sometimes silenced political, social and reproductive work of women that creates and sustains the environment in which workers’ struggles become possible and, in some cases, successful.

Arriving at Wonderkop

I arrived at Wonderkop on 1 December 2012, and met Nomzekhelo, Ncomeka, and Wendy whom I drove with from Johannesburg to Nkaneng. Nomzekhelo Primrose Sonti ² is a strong, loud and cheerful woman. She moved to the North West Province 18 years ago from the Eastern Cape in search of work. She found work for a few years at Samancor, a mine near Mooinooi, before being transferred to Eastern Platinum mine working for a company inside the mines that sold clothes to mineworkers. She moved to a shack settlement in Wonderkop at Lonmin, Marikana in 2000 because it was close to where she was working at Eastern Platinum mine. In 2012, she left her job because she was not earning enough money. In fact, she earned the same salary for the 18 years that she worked for Eastern Platinum. Her employers became increasingly more hostile towards her because of her involvement in community activism. They cancelled her leave because she did not attend work during the strikes and she started facing intimidation by employers.

She refers to herself as an activist. She is the secretary of the African National Congress-aligned South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) branch at Wonderkop and she is one of the founders of the Marikana Women’s Group. The women’s group has also been referred to as the ‘Women’s Forum’ and the ‘Women’s Movement’ since they were only able to register it at the end of 2013 under the name Sikhala Sonke, which means ‘We cry together’. Nomzekhelo is a leader commanding wide respect within the community, and is knowledgeable about how things work between the mine, the unions, the government, and the community. Ncomeka and Wendy have recently joined Sikhala Sonke, and they travelled with Nomzekhelo to the Oneinnine ³ workshops in Johannesburg.

Ncomeka Mbulawa moved to Wonderkop a few years ago from Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape with her mother and a few of her brothers and sisters. Her father has worked for Lonmin as a winch operator since 1975 and her fiancé is contracted to Lonmin through an external company. Some of her siblings have been educated near Marikana at the surrounding schools and eventually they all moved to join their mother and father on the mine. Ncomeka is 28 years old, has two children, and is currently unemployed. One of her children lives with her at the Nkaneng shack settlement and the other stays at her home in Lusikisiki with her granny. She is soon to be married, which scares her a little. The custom is for her to stay in the Eastern Cape as a makhoti (married woman) with her husband’s family, to look after his mother. She does not want to go back, well at least not to look after someone’s mother. One day during the drive to Marikana town, where people have to go to buy grocery items that they cannot get in the shops in Wonderkop, Wendy tries to convince Ncomeka to tell her fiancé she doesn’t want to go.

Wendy Pretorious, is 34 and is now divorced. Her family is originally from King Williams Town in the Eastern Cape and they moved to Welkom when she was 11 years old because her father found work on the mine there. The mines slowly started to close and with them employment opportunities for many. Her father found work at Lonmin and had to leave his family in Welkom and relocate again. Six months ago, she decided to join her father to look for work on the mine, but this has not happened yet. Her father is a general worker at Lonmin and she was hopeful about finding work at the mine before the massacre. Now she is a little scared and hopes that as a member of Sikhala Sonke they can start other activities that will allow them to make some money.

We share stories while we drive to Marikana. Nomzekhelo knows many short cuts and it only takes us about an hour and a half to get there. Arriving on the mine is a surreal experience, if one has never grown up around the Witwatersrand. Everything looks a bit post-apocalyptic at first. There are seemingly endless mounds of earth and rubble, impressive machinery, vehicles, giant shafts and long conveyor belts in the sky joining one massive concrete building to the next. Yet Nomzekhelo makes it easy to weave in and out of unnamed roads, passing one mechanical process after another, all the way across the mines to arrive at Nkaneng, without an access card. When we get to one access point, the guard stops us and Nomzekhelo rolls down her window and speaks to him briefly in isiXhosa explaining who she is and that we ‘are with her’. He lets us through, while she turns to me and says, ‘We don’t know each other, but we understand each other’. Eventually we arrive at a Lonmin signpost pointing to the different shafts, finally the last arrow on the board points right to ‘Wonderkop Village’ and to the shack settlement called Nkaneng.

Nkaneng

The landscape of the mines has changed dramatically since the end of the compound system. Mining companies now offer their employees a ‘living out allowance’ (LOA), as opposed to alternative forms of employer-built housing, and it is the only other option for those who do not want to live in the single-sex hostels or those who have not been able to secure one of the few family units available. This money allows those who take it to cook their own food and live with a fair amount of privacy with family members or partners in a shack and, for many, to send more money home. As a result large shack settlements have emerged around the mines. The Nkaneng shack settlement is now home to hundreds of people − mineworkers and their wives, or husbands, their children and the animals they keep.

The shack settlement is called Enkanini in isiXhosa and Nkaneng in SeSesotho and is described by people who live there as, ‘taking away something by force’ or as having ‘a stubborn determination’ and symbolises their ongoing struggles for land and services. People say they are literally there ‘by force’ because no one seems to care about them and everything is a struggle. Chingono (2013: 12) also notes that it represents the intersection between ethnicity and settlement patterns. Nkaneng is home to mostly isiXhosa-speaking people from the Eastern Cape, and a few other provinces in South Africa as well as other migrant labourers from Lesotho and Mozambique. This has created tension between people who live in the shack settlement and those who are able to live in Reconstruction and Development Programme houses (low-cost housing built by the government) and receive services based on their ethnicity because the land here is owned by Kgosi (King) Bob Edward Mogale of the Bapo ba Mogale community. ⁴

Nkaneng is divided into two sections. The ‘old part’ of the shack settlement is where some are connected to electricity or have pre-paid meters and access to taps. In the ‘new’ section, people do not have access to taps and many do not have electricity. There are no roads in the entire settlement. This is one of the major problems for people living there since everyone has to walk to the main road for taxis and other transport; this is what I discovered on our way to see Thumeka.

Thumeka Magonwanya arrived in Wonderkop in December 1999, looking for ‘greener pastures’. Born in Stutterheim, in the Eastern Cape, she left for Cape Town to study dressmaking and returned to Stutterheim where she could not find work. Thirteen years ago, she moved to Wonderkop hoping to find employment as a dressmaker. When she could not find any work, and in lieu of resources to start making garments, she began selling things in the street, which also did not raise enough capital. She soon found work at a tavern where she earned 700ZAR ⁵ per month. She now works as a cashier at a Somali-owned wholesaler in Wonderkop. She has not found greener pastures yet, but she says she is still trying. In the meantime, she says the Somalis are good to her and allow her to hold meetings at the shop when she is at work and cannot attend them at the office on the other side in Nkaneng. The office is a large tin-roofed structure with a concrete floor that floods when it rains and heats up quickly when it is hot; it is used as a community centre and a meeting space for SANCO ⁶ and now Sikhala Sonke. Thumeka’s daughter currently works for Lonmin handing out explosives underground. She refers to her daughter as ‘her son’, because she is her only child and she has gone underground to make money for them, as a son would do. She is a member of SANCO and a founding member of the Women’s Group, Sikhala Sonke.

Sikhala Sonke

Sikhala Sonke was started during the Lonmin strikes in 2012. Nomzekhelo Sonti and Thumeka Magonwayana were two of the founding members of the organisation. It was initiated by the women who organically started to mobilise in the community because they were left to take care of homes and children and had the added responsibility of caring for the men on the mountain: husbands, brothers, sons and friends. They started to seriously think about an organisation of their own, which would endure after the massacre, through conversations with each other as well as through conversation and support from the women in the Marikana Support Group in Johannesburg. For Nomzekhelo and Thumeka there was no other choice than to support the men on the mountain and the women and children who were suffering because of the strike. Thumeka described the situation, as just really sad:

It was sad because the other women, they didn’t even have food in their houses. So we were helping each other. If I’ve got bread I would give my neighbour as well so she’s got something to eat with their children. So it was very sad. It was very sad. And other men didn’t even have money because they have to pay the mashonisas’ the loans, so it was very bad. ⁷

They began praying together every day after the first men were shot in Marikana, and approaching police to ask why they were in their community with Nyalas (police vehicles) and guns. They soon started organising food parcels by asking the people in the community for donations (mostly from the Somali traders) and began to take food to the mountain daily. This food and support enabled the men to stay on the mountain in counsel together and to remain defiant. During this dark period in Marikana, many women had to face harsh conditions in the community while their husbands, brothers, sons, lovers and friends were dead, in hospital, arrested or traumatised from the events of the days leading up to the massacre.

Most of the women joined Sikhala Sonke because it was a time of a crisis; they needed to support the men on the mountain but they also felt the extreme pressure of not having an income during the strike and they all bore the brunt of police brutality. They began organising outside of the worker committees in their own spaces since they were not allowed to go to the mountain because of their spiritual beliefs. Chingono (2013: 24) mentions the mountain as having certain Xhosa symbolisms attached to it. He notes, ‘In Xhosa culture when there are problems in the family that need to be resolved the men converge at the kraal and the women are excluded as this is a gendered space. This symbolism is important given that many of the workers who converged at the koppie were from a Xhosa ethnic group with a strong attachment to their traditional beliefs’.

In fact, many women responded in the same way to the mountain and the meetings held there. They often spoke as if it were something I should be aware of, especially the fact that they were not allowed at the mountain and that the mountain held a special significance in times of hardship. Here again there seemed to be an allusion to the generational links between historical events like the Mpondo Revolts and Marikana. Others too recalled the massacre and the images it invoked of Ngquza Hill, whether memories of a time of revolt or oral history passed on to them (see Bruchhausen, 2015; Figlan, 2013; Gasa, 2013; Tolsi, 2013). Although the women of Marikana would send messages back and forth and take the men food, consistent with how women supported the mountain committees of the Mpondo Revolts, women did not attend meetings. In an interview with an Mpondo woman, whose great grandfather was an Mpondo Inkosi in Port St Johns, she reiterated that in Mpondoland men and women practised politics separately and independently. Remembering stories of the Mpondo revolts, she said we must not mistake women’s absence at mountain committee meetings for a lack of political participation, because politics were never discussed in the home. The men went to the mountain and the women met separately, and that is how things were done. Later many of the men and women would share with their partners the day’s discussions. Often men used medicines and muti ⁸ that women were not allowed to use and vice versa.

Many women in Sikhala Sonke confirmed that the reason women did not go to the mountain was because the men were using muti they were not allowed to use. ⁹ In fact, they ‘agreed with them’ and decided to form their own organisation. Therefore, in keeping with the traditional and cultural ways in which men and women discussed politics and made political decisions, including sometimes meeting separately, the women of Marikana formed a crisis organisation. They organised shelter and food at first. Then, when the police began entering the community, breaking down doors and shooting into people’s shacks, they decided to organise a march against police brutality. ¹⁰ They were initially denied a permit but eventually it went ahead on 29 September 2012. It was again through the support of the women in Johannesburg that they were able to go ahead with the march even though they were denied the opportunity to deliver a memorandum, which they had initially planned to do.

The march, which they had intended to take place on 22 September 2012, was twice banned by the Rustenburg and Madibeng municipalities. The reasons offered were unconstitutional, and the women of Marikana took both municipalities to the North West High Court for denying them the right to protest. The first refusal was communicated via text on 20 September. It stated they had not met the requirement of a seven-day notice period and therefore their march could not go ahead. This was a false accusation. The Rustenburg local municipality then communicated in writing that the ‘purpose of the march does not meet the requirements of the Gatherings Act’. However, it is illegal for the authorities to regulate protests based on their purpose, as the Act does not allow for this. This appeared to be pure censorship and an attempt to impose a blanket ban on any political marches in the platinum belt. In 2013, Jane Duncan and Andrea Royeppen reported that the Rustenburg district municipality routinely denied people approval for protests for arbitrary reasons. The Rustenburg municipality began to create their own list of criteria that protestors had to comply with, and which were not listed in the Regulation of Gatherings Act (RGA), in order to limit the number of protests occurring in the region, particularly around the platinum belt (Duncan and Royeppen, 2013). Rather than seeing protest as democratic expression of dissent and dissatisfaction, the municipality responded with threats and illegal attempts to undermine democratic participation.

Still, many social movements and organisations have to and choose to utilise the state’s legal system, which they rely on to maintain democratic principles. Yet even when the illegality of state policy is revealed, ¹¹

this often leads to further repression from the state. This response highlights the inability of the South African state to take ‘those who do not count’ seriously as reasonable citizens who are capable of thinking for themselves. In fact, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) banalisation category of silencing seems to echo through narratives of ‘service delivery protests’ or ‘irrational’ mineworkers who broke with ‘hard-won’ bargaining structures. Implicit in these claims, is the unthinkable notion that people are able to organise outside of the state − outside of the party or the unions − to demand access to public goods and services in order to live a dignified life. Thus, they are denied claims to the political and are marginalised and repressed because of the threat they pose to the conception of the nation or democracy. Partha Chatterjee (2004: 47) makes a similar point about the way in which a ‘widening arena of political mobilisation’ causes ‘much discomfort and apprehension in progressive elite circles’ where the complaint from the political elite and middle-class society is that politics has been ‘taken over by mobs and criminals’. In South Africa too, this is often the justification, in elite public discourse, for the state to continue to ban, control or respond violently to public protests.

Yet, the women in Marikana remained committed to participatory democracy and to the belief in due legal process when they contested the decisions of Rustenburg and Madibeng municipalities, as well as the North West police force in the Rustenburg High Court and won their appeal. They did so despite threats and attempts to intimidate them for exercising their access to citizenship, which government would rather deny to poor people or engage in with them. Even though they had been repeatedly ignored and denied the right to march, the women maintained a fidelity to democratic and political principles. In a statement released before the march on 29 September, they wrote:

We, the women of Marikana, have won a decisive victory against the Rustenburg and Madibeng Municipalities, which have twice banned our planned peaceful march against the Marikana police station. The High Court has ruled in our favour, setting aside the prohibition by the municipalities and telling us that we have the right to march.

We are deeply disturbed by the authorities’ interference with our right to assemble, by the unlawful decisions of the municipalities, by the attitude of officials and police to our right to assemble, and by the undue influence of the police in the notification procedures outlined in terms of the Gatherings Act.

We know that other communities across the country experience the same problems as us when it comes to our democratic and constitutionally protected rights to assemble and express. We condemn this regular prohibition and banning of our legitimate protests. This is not the democracy we all fought for!

We march for justice for the death of our husbands, fathers, sons and brothers at the hands of the police. We march for justice for the death of Paulina Masuthlo, our sister, who died on the 19th September, a few days after she was shot with rubber bullets by the police. (Excerpts from the Women’s Statement released 29 September 2012)

In addition to highlighting the state’s attempt to politically silence what was happening within the community of Marikana, the women of Marikana also linked their repression to a broader struggle against state repression in South Africa, where those who don’t count are constantly criminalised and excluded from civil society.

Although they won the right to march, which they did with 800 women from the community, they were denied the opportunity to hand over a memorandum they had prepared. In this memorandum, they expressed their anger and disbelief at the shooting of three women in the community and the death of a councillor, activist and friend, Paulina Masuthlo. Paulina Masuthlo was a Councillor for the African Natioonal Congress (ANC) in Marikana. Nomzekhelo, who was a close friend of hers, describes her as,

A brave woman. She was the hero. She was supporting those strikers who were fighting for their demands, just money. Even at the memorial service for these 34 people on the mountain there, it was only Paulina, who was wearing the mining uniform, which is white uniform with the gumboots, with the makaraba helmet. She was nice. She was showing everybody that she is supporting this.

(Interview 1: Sonti, November 2012)

Most of the women who knew her testified to her brave character and her fierce loyalty to the community and, during the strikes, her support for the men on the mountain and their families. In many ways, she was the example of how people at Marikana conceptualised local government, community leaders, and the entrenchment of political principles and democratic practices rather than commitment to a party structure. Thumeka mentioned that even on the day of Paulina’s funeral there were people who said some members of the community and people within the ANC did not like her. Nomzekhelo captured her commitment in spite of her unpopularity with the ANC for supporting the miners:

Hayi, it was her work, because when you are the councillor, you are standing for the people in everything, it’s bad or it’s right you must be with the people. You see? You mustn’t go away if something is bad for the community you must be there because you are voted, you see? You are working for them. Even at Karangua, at the court, every day we were with Paulina there, she was trying even for food for the people, she was supporting even those guys who were in jail, trying to get food, trying to get water, every day. (Interview 1: Sonti, November 2012)

Paulina was shot on 15 September when police entered the Nkaneng community and started shooting at women and children with rubber bullets and using tear gas as they went through the settlement searching for weapons. While some reported that she was shot during a protest (see Nash, 2013), Nomzekhelo, who was with Paulina near the office waiting for other women to arrive for a meeting, remembers it vividly, and described how the police entered Nkaneng in Hippos ¹² and started shooting at them. Paulina was hit by one of these bullets.

She was then taken to the mine hospital with the help of someone with a vehicle in the community. From there, she was transferred to a hospital in Rustenburg for the bullet wound in her leg. On Tuesday, she called Nomzekhelo to say everything had gone well and that she would be discharged on Wednesday 19 September 2012. When Nomzekhelo called the hospital on the Wednesday afternoon, they told her Paulina was dead. She, Paulina’s sister and a few others who went to the hospital, were in complete disbelief. For them, it was impossible that she could have died from a rubber bullet wound to the leg especially when she was fine after the operation. They were obviously devastated and received no proper explanation from the nurses who gave them the news. None of the people who were close to her believed that she died from the bullet wound and though they do not know what happened or who did it, many of the women I spoke to including Nomzekehlo, Thumeka, Wendy, Nomceka and Ncomeka’s mother Florence Mbulawa, believe she was poisoned. ¹³ Paulina’s death was a huge blow to the community and to the already waning faith in the legal system or democracy.

It was also devastating for other reasons. Despite countless efforts to engage the councillor of the ward, SANCO and the women’s group were repeatedly ignored. Nomzekhelo described SANCO, in a similar way in which she described the role of a councillor, based on the principles of transparency, common humanity and open democracy and, here again, the stress on democratic consensus rather than representative democracy is apparent:

The aim of SANCO in the community is to develop the place, which we are living in. The duty of the SANCO it is for the whole community, never mind on which organisation, you are ANC, you are UDM, you are DA, what what ¹⁴ As long as you are in South Africa and you are staying here on that place you are the SANCO, because you are the resident of that place. So SANCO it stand for helping all those communities who are staying there, such as problems, assistance, everything you see, everything that is happening that is wrong, even the corruptions, we look after the corruption. (Interview 1: Sonti, November 2012)

The Land on which Nkaneng is built

There are 38 shack settlements around the Rustenburg platinum belt, and in 2010 Lonmin estimated that ‘50% of the population who lived within a 15km radius from its mining operations lived in informal [sic] dwellings and lacked access to basic services’ (Chingono, 2013: 9). As a result, people in Nkaneng have had an ongoing battle with the municipality over the issue of land and services. Although most people who live there acknowledge its temporary nature, because the Eastern Cape is still home, the conditions in which they are forced to live in return for their labour are unacceptable by any measure. Even today, ethnicity on the mine is still a contributing factor to broader and more generalised tensions between people. Since they do not have access to what is demarcated as Tswana traditional land, they are all technically living in Nkaneng illegally. The government and Lonmin have made no attempt to reckon with the new spatial configurations and consequently the community that has emerged, as a direct result of the ‘living out wage’ and persistent migrant labour system. They have also failed to provide proper services for their workers and their families. Aside from basic services, there are no schools or crèches on the mine and the colonial mindset of the mines to support the mineworker with only enough money to reproduce his labour, ignores the growing poverty in rural areas as well as the very obvious new households on the mines.

The women of Sikhala Sonke say that the land the shack settlement occupies, as well as the land Lonmin stands on, belongs to Kgosi Bob Edward Mogale of the Bapo ba Mogale Royal Family. Mogale will not cede the land to them, so they cannot build formal housing. The formal housing (brick structures) that does exist belongs to Tswana people, who are allowed to get RDP housing in that area because of ethnic citizenship. Traditional authorities tell people like Nomzekhelo, they do not belong there and the land is not for amaXhosa. The municipality is as unhelpful and Lonmin has taken no responsibility for housing the mineworkers and their families who have to face this reality. According to Nomzekhelo they:

Want to stay here freely because now, it’s still an informal settlement and we don’t have any services. But the problem now, if they want us to vote for them they are coming and mobilising on our side and we are voting for them because it’s our organisation which is ANC, and we like them. But now we are very very disappointed, because this democracy its long time… its 18 years but nothing has happened here at Wonderkop as you see. We don’t have roads, we don’t have water, we don’t have toilets, we don’t have houses… everything we don’t have. Although we are voting, although we are the ANC members you see.

(Interview 1: Sonti, November 2012)

While many have suggested that the pervasion of ethnicity in people’s narratives about life on the mines is attributed solely to xenophobia and ethnicism or traditional patriarchy (Bond and Mottiar, 2013: 297; Cronin, 2012) this must also been seen in context.

While it is true that under Jacob Zuma’s presidency, the emergence of an ethnic, patriarchal, homophobic and misogynist politics has proliferated within South African state politics, ethnicity at Marikana is experienced in direct relation to people’s material existence and support networks. This was clearly visible during the strikes and the massacre. In fact, Nkaneng (made up predominantly of isiXhosa- and then Sesotho-speaking people) is now the majority community around Lonmin so that, as Chingono (2013: 8) explains, ‘the question of who is local and alien is often contested but quite crucial in understanding the socio-economic and political dynamics in those communities’. Pillay (2013: 32) also makes the important point that ‘cultural artefacts’ [sic] which workers bring with them into a strike ‘interrupt the desire in much of this scholarship (South African labour studies) for a revolutionary worker subject, that is fully universal without the particularities of race or ethnicity’. He adds that it is important for us to reckon with the migrant worker both as a product of capital but also as part of a history of indirect rule and colonial governmentality (Pillay, 2013: 50). Since many mineworkers straddle two different worlds, which encompass the rural and the urban, union organisation and political organisation that has certain cultural inflections, Marxism is ill-equipped, as it has been on the question of race, to deal with the complexity of how ethnicity functions within the South African mining space.

The frustration with being continually ignored by government and Lonmin based on their ethnicity must be taken seriously and not seen as the lack of a proper historical subject or historical project, which has its base in Eurocentrism. It is on the basis of this exclusion that Sikhala Sonke in some ways attempted to step in and take action to try to improve conditions in the community. This did not mean at its inception exclusion based on ethnicity or even vigilante violence as some have suggested (see Cronin, 2012). Rather, they started − through SANCO and then Sikhala Sonke − to offer people help with identity documents; complaints about the councillor; rape; domestic abuse; and other forms of social services, which their municipality had denied them. One of their main concerns now is the construction of a road.

In Nkaneng, there are no roads, and the few cars struggle over the uneven muddy dirt roads that taxis refuse to drive on. Everyone must walk to the main road to get taxis. For many this is a very long distance and when it rains many cannot leave their homes. Few vehicles go in and out. Mostly, there are big trucks delivering goods to stores: every few days one is bound to see a huge Carling Black Label truck delivering more beer to the ‘Never say Die Tavern’ next to ‘the office’.

The roads are the pivot of a whole range of activities that are denied to the community as a result: for example, not being able to buy large grocery items, or to attend school or work when it rains heavily, which is extremely common in the summer. Most importantly, it is impossible for ambulances to reach sick or injured people in Nkaneng because of the lack of a gravel road, especially crucial during the strikes and the massacre. Although they do not have other services, the old part of the shack settlement has some form of electricity or pre-paid meters, and people in the new part illegally connect to electricity as well. Some also have taps in their yards and others are allowed to buy 20 litres of water for R2, which is what Ncomeka pays. Still that is a struggle for some. There are also long-drop toilets that are not ideal but ‘at least something’. Nomzekhelo, Thumeka and others in Sikhala Sonke felt that if they could get a gravel road they would have made some positive contribution to life in Nkaneng. They approached Lonmin many times for gravel; Lonmin’s response was that they do not have any trucks that can deliver the gravel to them. Nevertheless, Nomzekhelo says:

It was long time ago when they said that. So if we can get help of the trucks and the permission to get that gravel, we as the women, we can do that ourselves. Not to ask somebody to help us on the road, we can do it by ourselves. If somebody, a man wants to help us, he can come and assist but we can do, as Sikhala Sonke, that road.

What is clear however is that they felt they could no longer wait around for government to help them and that they should organise themselves.

Organisation at Point Zero

For the women it is incredibly important to link oppression in the home to that in the mines. The creation of Sikhala Sonke at this time of crisis is not an exception in the history of women who organise when their home space is threatened and when their children go hungry or when their political freedoms are curtailed.

For instance the women’s anti-pass marches that took place from the early 1900s into the late 1950s in South Africa are a testament to a tradition of women’s political organisation against repressive state policy. Nomboniso Gaza (2008: 136) discusses how African women in 1913 were most affected by the new pass laws the state had begun implementing in May, in which ‘In that month alone, the arrests for pass infringement quadrupled’. Many women were carrying up to 13 passes, which had direct economic and social consequences for the women who were supplementing their husbands’ already meagre salaries, and who had migrated from the Cape and other places to seek a better life (Gaza, 2008: 135).

The militancy of migrant women did not end there. In Potchefstroom, women also protested against new pass laws, which would directly affect their livelihood in beer brewing and income from housing boarders from the mines (Gaza, 2008: 141). In 1956 again, 20,000 women marched to Pretoria to hand over a petition to JG Strydom against pass laws. Some have argued that these marches were framed around women’s traditional roles and therefore were not feminist. However, Nomboniso Gaza (2008) has shown how women were politically organising as mothers and wives and how, as Federici (2012) argues, women’s homes are both a space of oppression and the base from which to organise. There are definite points of connection to other struggles organised around the home, which speaks to certain universal principles of crisis and struggle. There are several accounts of women’s initiatives around the home space during times of crisis, which had direct links to social conflict, and economic crisis. The Glasgow Rent Control Strike of 1915 is one example of working class women who illustrated the direct link between the point of production and the communities where workers live (Castells, 1983). In the historic UK miners’ strike of 1984, again women were at the forefront of resistance (Spence and Stephenson, 2007), and Annelise Orleck (1993) has written detailed descriptions of the boycotts, lobbies, barter networks and anti-eviction demonstrations organised by poor women in America during the Great Depression, whose efforts kept many communities alive, despite ridicule from some. The centrality of women of ‘common origin’ in the 1871 Paris Commune has also been noted by Castells (1983).

Not only were women who were forced into these traditional roles mocked when they highlighted how implicitly their lives were linked to the political and economic spheres, but often women who do not fall into these traditional roles are demonised and over-sexualised. Both of these tropes perform the task of depoliticising any intervention that women make based on their own gendered lives in society. Often even when these interventions, made on the basis of women’s roles as wives and mothers, are so explicitly linked to the political, they remain, for the most part, outside mainstream historical nationalist accounts.

All of these cases resonate with the caricature of women on the mines in South African literature, where these women too always appear on the edge of urban deviance. They are at the mines as prostitutes, mistresses or beer brewers, or they are common women whose contributions are only sexual. There is no doubt that it has historically been the case that migrant women often had to attach themselves to men in one way or another because of the conservative patriarchal structure of apartheid law in South African society. However, the depoliticisation of sex as work, whether one is a wife, girlfriend, or sex worker, creates the image of urban women as cheap and therefore operating outside the realm of the political. Yet it is also the case that many women in Marikana have come to seek work, or to be with husbands and boyfriends or fathers and brothers, and to carve out a small space for themselves within the community and to improve it.

The formation of the women’s movement in a time of crisis not only brought the home space into contestation as well as made visible the invisible social reproductive labour of women and their contribution to the waged labour of men, but it also shattered the historical depictions of life on the mines and the roles women occupied vis-a-vis men. After the women’s march it was impossible for the media not to make at least a sweeping reference to, and in some cases to publish in-depth stories about, the women of Marikana. Even if the coverage did not engage with the political sphere of the women’s organisation, they had successfully managed to insert themselves into the narrative and to establish their presence at the mines and their ability to speak about and organise around the crisis within their communities. Whether this will be included in labour studies and historiography in the future, however, remains to be seen.