The Magic, the Mountain and the Muti: towards an interpretation of Marikana as marronage

Adams, Robyne

The Magic, the Mountain and the Muti: towards an interpretation of Marikana as marronage

Master Thesis

2022

Abstract

In the decade since the Marikana massacre, the many scholarly insights into the event tend towards abstracting these strikes into a universalist ‘working-class' discourse. This minor dissertation departs from this analysis, however, by paying attention to repertoires of resistance that connect Marikana with a longer history of collective resistance in South Africa. To do this, I read specific testimonies given during the Marikana commission inquiry and focus on subsets of acts, symbols, languages, phrases and words – all of which point to strong ontological continuities between Marikana and what I believe to be Marikana's pre-history - the 1850's Cattle-Killing Movement, the 1921 Bulhoek Massacre, the 1960s Mpondo Revolts and the 2000s Xolobeni protests. In light of this, I suggest that the Marikana striker's political praxis are indicative of a unique epistemology of resistance - an epistemology that points to a longer and yet, more invisible lineage of black radicalism. With this history of black resistance in mind, I re-read the forms of collective action that unfolded in Marikana - as akin to a specific, but highly overlooked form of flight from oppression - as sociogenic marronage. I argue that the concept of sociogenic marronage helps us plot a genealogy of black resistance and radicalism that is not captured in Eurocentric frames of understanding collective struggles.

Keywords

Theories of Justice and Inequality

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