“Miners Shot Down” by local filmmaker Rehad Desai explores the events and killings leading up to the day 34 miners died at Marikana, writes Nomatter Ndebele.
It was like a scene from the darkest days of apartheid: South African police opening fire with live ammunition, killing 34 striking black miners demanding a living wage from an international firm rich in capital.
But the killings outside of the Marikana mine of platinum company Lonmin happened on August 16 2012, almost two decades after Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation exchanged white minority rule for multiracial democracy.
A new documentary, Miners Shot Down by local filmmaker Rehad Desai, explores the events leading up to what has been dubbed the Marikana massacre.
The film has a special resonance at the moment because most of the country’s platinum miners have been on strike for a monthly wage of R12 500 for the past 15 weeks and general elections are to be held on Wednesday.
“The key thing here, really, is that R12 500 was the formal demand,” said Desai at a Johannesburg screening of the documentary on Workers’ Day on Thursday last week.
“But what really stuck in the throat of these mine workers was [having] their dignity stripped off them because their bosses weren’t prepared to talk to them as human beings.
“I think we need to know and remember, now and for the years to come and for our children, what happened at Marikana.”
News footage
The film draws on interviews with survivors and uses footage including a video recording of the shootings by news agency Reuters cameraman Dinky Mkhize.
Desai’s documentary begins a week before the killings, after an illegal strike erupted at Lonmin’s operations, generating a spiral of violence.
The film has had local and international screenings already, including at the Paris Human Rights International Film Festival and the One World Film Festival in Prague. Watch out to see where it will be showing in Cape Town.
Full report in Mail & Guardian
