ArticlePDF Available

Legalism in the Marikana Commission of Inquiry Report: Veiling “Sociological Causes” of the Massacre

July 2023
South African Review of Sociology 53(5):1-23

DOI:10.1080/21528586.2023.2224291

Authors:

Claire-Anne Louise Lester

Stellenbosch University

Content uploaded by Claire-Anne Louise Lester

Content may be subject to copyright.

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rssr20

South African Review of Sociology

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rssr20

Legalism in the Marikana Commission of Inquiry

Report: Veiling “Sociological Causes” of the

Massacre

Claire-Anne Louise Lester

To cite this article: Claire-Anne Louise Lester (2023): Legalism in the Marikana Commission

of Inquiry Report: Veiling “Sociological Causes” of the Massacre, South African Review of

Sociology, DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2023.2224291

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2023.2224291

Published online: 19 Jul 2023.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 10

View related articles

View Crossmark data

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Legalism in the Marikana Commission of Inquiry Report:

Veiling “Sociological Causes”of the Massacre

Claire-Anne Louise Lester

Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Farlam Commission of Inquiry’soﬃcial

discourse on violence within the context of the Marikana mine

massacre. The commission was established in 2012 to investigate

the killing of 34 mine workers during a wage strike at the Lonmin

platinum mine in South Africa. The commission was tasked with

scrutinising the actions of the police, mine management and

labour unions involved in the incident. By employing the concept

of legalism, this paper analyses the commission’s report and

argues that it adopted a legalist perspective on violence, which

served to legitimise the prevailing legal framework for collective

bargaining while delegitimising the strike action itself. The study

highlights Phase Two of the commission’s investigation, which

was aimed at examining the underlying sociological causes of the

conﬂict within the mining sector. This phase provided an

opportunity to delve into the structural factors that fuelled the

dispute. However, despite the potential for a more nuanced

exploration of structural violence, the ﬁnal report of the Farlam

Commission ultimately embraced a narrative form and

simulacrum of legality that reﬂected implicit moral and political

biases concerning speciﬁc forms of violence and social action.

The commission struggled to assimilate critiques of the collective

bargaining framework into its report, instead maintaining a

ﬁdelity to legalism, with practical implications for the type of

“truth”and “justice”the commission could promote. The paper

contributes to a broader understanding of the complex dynamics

between legal frameworks, violence and social justice in contexts

of labour disputes and collective action.

KEYWORDS

commission of inquiry;

Farlam Commission;

Marikana; legalism; South

Africa; platinum; mining

sector; discourse analysis

Introduction

The Marikana Commission of Inquiry (MCI or Farlam Commission) was established to

investigate the notorious event at Lonmin platinum mine, on 16 August 2012, when

the South African Police Service (SAPS) ﬁred live ammunition into a group of protesting

mine workers, killing 34 (Brown 2022; Marinovich 2012;2016; Marinovich and Nicolson

2013). It marked the highest number of deaths at the hands of the police in one

moment since the transition to democracy in 1994 (Mutasa 2017). The terms of reference

instructed the commission to investigate the respective roles played by the parties

CONTACT Claire-Anne Louise Lester clairel@sun.ac.za Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology,

Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY

https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2023.2224291

involved, namely the conduct of Lonmin Plc,

SAPS, the Association of Mineworkers and

Construction Union (AMCU), the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the Department

of Mineral Resources and other government agencies involved. To this end, a novel

feature was that it split its work into two “Phases.”Phase One would investigate the inci-

dents that occurred in the lead-up to the police shooting. The aim of Phase Two was to

examine the longer term, underlying factors contributing to the conﬂict, as was prompted

in the terms of reference: to investigate the “conduct of individuals and loose groupings

in fermenting [sic] and/or otherwise promoting a situation of conﬂict and confrontation

which may have given rise to the tragic incident, whether directly or indirectly”(Farlam

2015, 4).

The shooting followed a week of simmering tensions at Lonmin mine during which 10

other people were killed: six mine workers, two Lonmin private security guards, and two

members of the SAPS.

It followed some months of successive bouts of labour unrest

sweeping the Platinum Belt that had punctuated preceding years, beginning at Impala

Platinum, before spreading to Lonmin and Anglo Platinum (Chinguno 2013a;2013b;

2015). In May 2011, Lonmin Plc ﬁred 9000 workers from its Karee mine near Rustenburg,

also following a so-called “illegal strike”(Reuters 2012). Workers had grown increasingly

dissatisﬁed with low wages, and with the longstanding dominant union, NUM, spurring

the emergence of a rival union, AMCU. Fragmented labour has featured strongly in the

South African mining industry since the latter part of the nineteenth century. As

argued by Chinguno (2013a, 639), successive governments have facilitated a “cheap

labour regime”where labour is exploited to scaﬀold proﬁt accumulation whilst minimis-

ing risk for capital. Surrounding the time of the massacre in 2012, such labour fragmenta-

tion was evident (Alexander et al. 2013; Botiveau 2014;2018; SAFM 2012). As such, the

labour conﬂict animated the context in which the wage strike was being negotiated.

A day following the massacre, then-President of the African National Congress (ANC)

government, Jacob Zuma announced that the state would be setting up a commission

of inquiry. It was appointed on 23 August 2012 following the terms of section 84(2)(f)

of the Constitution of South Africa and titled “The Commission of Inquiry into the

Tragic Incidents at or near the Area Commonly Known as the Marikana Mine in Rusten-

burg, North-West Province, South Africa.”Colloquially known as the “Marikana”or

“Farlam Commission”, it was chaired by a retired judge of the Supreme Court of

Appeal, Ian Farlam. As the commission commenced its work, its oﬃcial motto was

revealed as “Truth, Restoration, Justice,”words that echoed the promises of another sig-

niﬁcant commission in the democratic era: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

(TRC), South Africa’s transitional justice instrument.

Research on the Marikana massacre ranges from that which focuses on the mine

workers’experiences of organising (Alexander 2012;2013;2016; Naicker 2016) to the mas-

sacre and its aftermath from the perspective of the rule of law (Adelman 2015; Brown

2022). The historical relationship between the state, mining houses, and tribal authorities

in platinum producing areas has been a key area of research, which includes discussion on

In 2019 Lonmin was acquired by Sibanye-Stillwater.

Coincidentally, the more recent mass killing of the striking workers took place on the 25th anniversary of another historic

mine workers strike involving 300 000 mine workers in 1987 (Battersby 1987). This strike, which occurred in the dying

days of the Apartheid regime, was led by NUM, with Cyril Ramaphosa at the helm, and it was this same Ramaphosa who

was, in 2012, a shareholder and director of Lonmin Plc. when the shooting took place.

2C.-A. L. LESTER

the related transformations in the platinum industry (Capps 2012b,2015; Chaskalson

2016). Benya (2015a;2015b), Benya and Seidman (2018) and Naicker (2016) engage Mar-

ikana from the perspective of the intersecting gender, race and class dynamics of labour

and social reproduction on the Platinum Belt. Other studies have assessed the case from

the perspective of police accountability (Van Der Spuy 2021); decry the problematic rep-

resentation of the massacre in the media (Duncan 2012;2013; Fogel 2012; Holmes 2015;

Wasserman 2015); or assess the ordeal from the perspective of unresolved justice for mine

workers and their families with each year that passes (du Toit 2013; Lester and Fogel 2022;

Marinovich 2015; Swart 2019; Wilson 2014;2015). Many of these critiques, particularly

those centred on the unresolved justice for victims and survivors of the massacre,

make some kind of reference to the failures of the Farlam Commission.

What is lacking is an analysis of the commission itself, one that considers seriously its

institutional form of a commission of inquiry against the historical context of commis-

sions established to respond to colonial and/or state violence in South Africa. As

such, this paper seeks to provide some insights into how we can better understand

the tool used to respond to this event in South Africa’s post-apartheid political

history, described by Brown (2022,1)asthe“worst abuse of state power since the

endofapartheid:thebloodiestdisplayofthestate’s ability to do violence to its citizens

in almost twenty years.”

I propose a reading of the commission’soﬃcial discourse on the event in question and

the way it came to terms with the causes of the violence under scrutiny. Following Ash-

forth (1990a,1990b), who analysed the oﬃcial discourse of twentieth-century commis-

sions looking into the “Native Question,”or “race relations”broadly speaking, I examine

the oﬃcial discourses on violence emerging through the MCI’s investigation. Speciﬁcally,

I assess the way various discourses emerged during the inquiry, as well as dominant dis-

courses representing violence in the ﬁnal report. This requires an analytical distinction

between the commission’sprocess—its investigative phase of hearings and other

modes of fact-ﬁnding—and its ﬁnal product, conceptualised as the ﬁnal report.

First, I examine the conﬂicts surrounding how to speak about the event within the

commission, which reveal the social implications of discourse on how language provides

frameworks for thinking about areas of social life. I then discuss aspects of the commis-

sion’s process and product, invoking the concept of legalism as an analytical lens. I

argue that the Farlam Commission’s institutional form as a commission of inquiry

meant that it was largely informed by legal modes of truth-seeking and legal reasoning,

and that while there appeared to be an attempt to go beyond a restrictive legal investi-

gation through the commission’s Phase Two—designed to investigate the long-term

sociological causes of the tragedy—the ﬁnal report betrays a ﬁdelity to legalist represen-

tations of the conﬂict, obscuring enduring structural catalysts.

I acknowledge that for some it may be considered limited to conceptualise the “product”of a lengthy and complicated

process like the Farlam Commission solely as the ﬁnal report. Yes, legal processes related to attaining ﬁnancial com-

pensation for victims and their families, as well as court proceedings surrounding responsibility for the killing of the

mineworkers, have continued after the publication of the ﬁnal report (see Ferreira 2022). However, I analyse the

ﬁnal report as that which was produced by the commission of inquiry as its oﬃcial interpretation of events and its

enumeration of recommendations for a way forward. As such, the report is the ﬁnal product produced by the commis-

sion, which was presented to the president.

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 3

Legal discourse in commissioning violence

My research focuses on the impact of oﬃcial commissions on shaping and reﬂecting

social discourses. Many have assessed this discursive role, tracing the way oﬃcial and

public narratives on social problems become shaped through a commission’s public

process and the publishing of its ﬁnal report (Ashforth 1990a,1990b; Brown 2004;

Burton and Carlen 1979; Lester 2017; Moon 2006). Sitze (2013, 158–180) identiﬁes a par-

ticular colonial and Apartheid tradition of establishing oﬃcial investigations to uncover

the “truth”concerning state killings, particularly when there had been an insurgency

against colonial rule, a subtype of commission that he terms tumult commissions.

identiﬁes a pattern where these tumult commissions would “whitewash”state violence

in colonial contexts, often in situations where there was a suspension of the law

through the declaration of martial law or a state of emergency. Here, the commission

of inquiry would be used to legitimate the state’s use of violence whilst labelling the

event as a tragedy, a regrettable necessity to restore law and order. Others have

spoken to the legitimating function of oﬃcial inquiries, averring that commissions are

used as political ploys to attenuate reputational damage in the eyes of the public

(Farson and Phythian 2011), or to distract from some notorious event in which the

state is implicated (Herbert 1961).

A commonly heard refrain is whether these investi-

gations commission truth or rather conceal it, suggested in the name “Omission of

inquiry”(Mahlakoana 2019; McKinley 2015; Shapiro 2015).

Of relevance to my study are the parameters by which “truth”is adjudicated and

recorded in a commission’sﬁnal report—and, in particular, the rendering of oﬃcial

truth concerning forms of violence.

This requires an analysis of the discursive framing

of the conﬂict, and the ideological implications thereof for sustaining relations of

domination.

Traditionally, the study of discourse has involved, to varying degrees, the analysis of

the use of language to communicate beliefs and ideas (van Dijk 1997). I use the term

in line with its common usage, in the way one might refer to a “medical discourse,”“fem-

inist discourse,”or “modernisation discourse,”rather than as a general form of linguistic

communication. To use du Toit’s(1990, 95) formulation, a discourse constitutes “a fairly

Sitze (2013) presents the Jamaica Royal Commission set up following the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865 as the archetypal

tumult commission and enumerates some 24 of these in South Africa. Examples of tumult commissions, according to

Sitze (2013), include the inquiries established after the Bulhoek massacre occurring in 1921, Bondelswarts in 1923,

Witieshoek in 1951, Sharpeville in 1960 and the violent police response to the Soweto Uprisings in 1976.

Another prominent iteration of oﬃcial commissions seen in the twenty-ﬁrst century is the emergence of truth commis-

sions as transitional justice instruments. Within early debates, truth commissions tend to be presented as alternatives to

the retributive justice model oﬀered by the post-war legal tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo. Nonetheless, even

among truth commissions that have sought explicitly to eschew practices of truth recovery associated with courts,

scholarship has noted the dominance of legalism in transitional justice processes, including truth commissions, due

to law remaining a dominant discourse (McEvoy 2007, 412). For an interrogation of the distinction between truth com-

missions and generic commissions of inquiry, see Lester (2017,22–35).

A key concept here is that of oﬃcial truth, and oﬃcial commissions. There have been numerous unoﬃcial truth-seeking

commissions established to investigate past political violence. These have been set up by entities like non-governmen-

tal organisations or church groups, like commissions seen in Brazil (1979–85), Paraguay (1984–90), Uruguay (1986–89)

and Bolivia (1990–93), and these have produced unoﬃcial truth reports. Bickford (2007) refers to these as unoﬃcial

truth projects—bodies that aim to ﬁnd out the truth concerning past violence and even, in many cases, simulate

the investigative mode of oﬃcial inquiries by hearing witness testimony in a public forum, evaluating evidence and

producing a report. The distinction between oﬃcial and unoﬃcial truth commissions is that when a commission is auth-

orised by the state, at the very least the commission can claim its ﬁndings as “oﬃcial history,”even though the ﬁndings

may remain contested socially.

4C.-A. L. LESTER

comprehensive and systematically articulated ensemble of speciﬁc ways and modes of

talking about particular areas of social life associated with certain general institutions, pro-

fessions, and disciplines or with certain general ideological and political positions.”

Related, as they are, to modes of speaking about various areas of social life, I read dis-

courses as directly related to social practices. As I show in the sections that follow, the MCI

report is framed by legalism and is replete with legal discourse. The legal discourses were

underpinned by a tendency to invoke legal practices and procedures, along with the

associated social conventions of the courtroom. To invoke Foucault’s(1972;1977;1980)

term, the commission’s Phase One defaulted to a “regime of truth”constituted by legal

approaches and forensic argumentation. We saw this with each passing day as witnesses

were sworn in, just as they would have been in a trial, in what emerged as a quasi-judicial

process.

Concerning truth-seeking, or fact-ﬁnding, the legal ﬁeld relies on forensic argumenta-

tion in evaluating evidence to apportion lawful culpability in compliance with rules of due

process. Legal due process involves (but is not limited to) the following principles: adver-

sarial public hearings; the right to choose legal counsel; determining individual guilt; and

the presumption of innocence, where the burden of proof lies with the prosecution (Elster

2004, 88). The principles inform and are driven by a particular form of reasoning in the

determination of truth. For Fish, legal reasoning tricks one by presenting itself as auton-

omous—“The trick,”he states, “by which the law rebuilds itself in mid-air without ever

touching down”(Fish 1993, 171). The connection between legal reasoning and the role

of modern commissions—particularly those created in response to state violence—is

crucial in understanding how they generate oﬃcial truth, as well as their relation to the

state on the one hand and society on the other. As Bourdieu (1987) contends, the relation-

ship between the legal realm and society is paradoxical because whilst the legal “system”

presents itself as autonomous from other ﬁelds, institutions and practices, it simul-

taneously regulates interdependence between these ﬁelds. A foundational feature of leg-

alism, according to Shklar (1964, 2), rests on the idea that the law is “endowed with its own

discrete, integral history, its own ‘science’, and its own values, which are treated as a single

‘block’sealed oﬀfrom general social history, from general social theory, from politics, and

morality.”When it comes to clarifying legal or judicial truth, all that matters is what can be

construed as legally admissible evidence in terms of what is relevant to the case at hand,

as deﬁned by the legal parameters of the case. Concerning truth in the court of law, van

Krieken (2004, 10) asserts:

There are no extra-legal “truths”exempted from the juridical gaze and cross-examination, no

facts which have any autonomous status, all knowledge is mere testimony in favour of one

party or another. All science is merely “opinion,”the reliability of any area of knowledge is

always open to the court’s critical scrutiny.

The reference to cross-examination above pertains to the legal procedure for the vali-

dation of juridical truth. It is the perceived procedural consistency of legal practices

that establishes the credibility of the knowledge gathered and legitimates the court-

room’s conclusions as factual.

I maintain that while there may be various readings of commissions at particular

moments in history, oﬃcial commissions of inquiry are essentially legal institutions (see

Lester 2017;2020). This is because they are brought into being by legislation—in the

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 5

case of South Africa, the Commissions Act—and are guided by legal regulations estab-

lished by the state. Commissions in South Africa have powers that in many ways echo

those of courts, with their ability to subpoena papers or persons and to swear in wit-

nesses, where giving false evidence in a commission is considered perjury (The Commis-

sions Act 1947). As such, they demonstrate an intricate relationship between the state and

the law (see Lester 2017;2020). Established at various times and for myriad reasons, at a

general level they are ultimately institutions that use the law to guide ﬁndings and rec-

ommendations, which may involve the review or reform of legislation and policy. We

have seen this for example in colonial Africa where, as argued by Mamdani (1996,

62–63), commissions were used extensively to investigate indigenous populations to

impose laws to usurp “native”law and custom. Ultimately, this was to aid colonial

powers’imperialist agenda. Commissions have also been used to advise upon how

laws may have been transgressed to recommend ways society may operate more in line

with the law, particularly when regular legal institutions’legitimacy has been called

into question or been stretched to capacity.

Indeed, some inquiries may be considered ethnographic enterprises, gathering infor-

mation on a particular subject or problem of governance,

while others (like the South

African TRC) may outwardly eschew their legalist orientations.

However, one would be

hard pressed to identify an oﬃcial commission of inquiry—i.e. one set up by the state

and not an unoﬃcial truth commission established by civil society (see Bickford

2007)—that did not adopt some form of legal approach and conceptualisation in their

project of truth recovery. Most prefer techniques such as cross-examination as well as

other legal modes of forensic argumentation in their search for “truth.”

This legal orientation is even more evident among those “tumult commissions”(Sitze

2013) established to investigate instances or patterns of violence by the state. It was

Judge Wessels, leading the inquiry into the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre—an event to

which Marikana has repeatedly been compared—who stated:

Where evidence is given under oath or after solemn aﬃrmation, as was the case here, cross-

examination is a recognized and sometimes eﬀective method of testing the reliability thereof

provided it is undertaken by a skilled person …. The course of the proceedings proved again

that eﬀective cross-examination is sometimes the only way to arrive at the truth. (Wessels 1961,

8; emphasis added)

While the MCI report avers that the inquiry was a fact-ﬁnding body and not strictly “a

court of law nor even a judicial body”(Bell v Van Rensburg NO 1971(3) SA 693 (C) cited

in Farlam, 23), it would in practice draw extensively on legal precedent, principles and

aﬀect in making and justifying its ﬁndings. It is for this reason that I position this commis-

sion as a legalist institution that adopted legal methods and rituals of fact-ﬁnding.

An example here is the Ralushai Commission, established in 1996 to investigate witchcraft violence and ritual murders in

what is now called the Limpopo province of South Africa (Ralushai et al. 1996).

For example, the TRC distinguished among four types of truth: (1) factual or forensic truth, (2) personal or narrative truth,

(3) social or dialogue truth, and (4) healing or restorative truth. It explicitly sought to create an environment of hearings

unlike that of a courtroom which might have exposed victims to cross-examination and further traumatisation. But,

nonetheless, the TRC was framed within an international human rights discursive and legal framework and made its

ﬁndings around the legacy of Apartheid’s political violence and its victims accordingly (see du Toit 2005, 439; see

also Buur 2002).

6C.-A. L. LESTER

It is important to note that this was not merely a matter of choice by the chairperson.

Rather, the legalist orientation was built into the commission’s constituting legislative fra-

mework, through its Terms of Reference and Regulations. Of particular signiﬁcance was

the regulation that entitled all parties to legal representation (Regulations: Commission

of Inquiry into the Tragic Incidents at or near the Area Commonly Known as the Marikana

Mine in Rustenburg in the North West Province, South Africa, 2012). The practical conse-

quence of this regulation was that “parties”were expected to have legal counsel, where

the public hearings (or Phase One) came to adopt the simulacrum of a legal trial. At one

point there were nearly 60 lawyers participating in the hearings.

The commission recognised that it was an oﬃcial inquiry and not a court of law, and it

notes in the report that groups were not “parties”in the strict sense of the term. None-

theless, the term “parties”was used throughout proceedings to refer to various groups.

As stated in the Report, groups “were treated as [legal parties] and were for convenience

referred to as parties”(Farlam 2015, 12; emphasis added). While invoking this legal par-

lance may have been for convenience, the aﬀective consequence was a dominance of

legal-speak in the investigative process. Lawyers would interrogate and painstakingly

dissect the admissibility and relevance of every statement made. As argued by Forrest

(2015, 8), “Legal counsel confronted each other with broadly human rights parties

pitted against the police and Lonmin and competing trade unions lining up against

one another.”

Legalism, according to Shklar (1964), refers to an ethical attitude that identiﬁes moral

conduct as consonant with following rules. Understood as a political ideology, a common

social ethos, and a set of institutional arrangements, legalism can become entrenched

through discourse and social practices. Moreover, it is imbibed and advanced by those

who have the most interest in preserving the reigning legal system. With its roots in

analytical positivism, legalism is the tendency to present the law as ideologically

neutral, or immune to the inﬂuence of ideology. It is the tendency to defer to the form-

alism of legal discourse and procedure to provide the appearance of being supra-political

so that ﬁndings and/or judgements can be perceived as objective. Legalism is also

expressed in legal culture, which refers to “legal values, habits of mind, repertoire of argu-

ments, and manners of expression shared by a group of lawyers at a given, historically

situated time and place”(Davis and Klare 2010, 406). It is inﬂuenced by training, socialisa-

tion and what legal actors regard as appropriate ways of resolving legal problems. It is

steeped in legal discourse and practices, in jurisprudence, and in the ways legal knowl-

edge is adjudicated. It is diﬃcult for legal professionals to view the world free from the

lens of legalism. As one English lawyer asserted:

A Lawyer is bound by certain habits of belief …. A man who has had legal training is never

quite the same again …is never able to look at administrative practices or even social or pol-

itical policies, free from his legal habits or beliefs …He is interested in relationships, in rights

in something and against somebody, in relation to others …This is what is meant by the lega-

listic approach …. [A Lawyer] will ﬁght to the death to defend legal rights against persuasive

arguments based on expediency or the public interest or the social good …. He distrusts

them. (cited in Shklar 1964,9)

Reliant, as it is, on established accepted rules the judicial ethos is essentially conservative.

This means that a particular legal culture or lens inﬂuences legal and professional

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 7

discourse, as well as understanding on the parameters of human possibility for social

organisation. While legal reasoning is not determined by politics, it is clear that it

shapes approaches to understanding social and political problems, and indeed their sol-

utions. To cite Davis and Klare (2010, 406) once more, “The discursive structure of legal

culture gives content to, but also constrains, the legal imagination of its participants,

the types of questions they are capable of asking and therefore, the range of answers

that they can provide.”In the section that follows I show how the MCI report was

shaped by legalism.

Representing the “massacre”: legalism in the Marikana Commission

report

The language used by oﬃcials to render Marikana’s violence reveals the potency of dis-

courses on violence in processes of state legitimation, as well as the palpable eﬀects of

a particular legal culture on the rendering of events. We see this in the MCI’s attempt

to bridle the language used to speak of the “incident”on 16 August. Was it a tragedy

or a massacre? The struggle over language began in the immediate wake of the event.

In President Zuma’s address to the nation, for example, he refers to the “loss of life

among workers and members of our Police Service,”which he called “tragic and regret-

table”(emphasis added). The euphemistic language used to render the brutal police kill-

ings as “loss of life”frames the way the public imagines and remembers the event as

something accidental rather than premeditated and purposeful (see Alexander 2016).

From the perspective of state legitimation, this representation is understandable. The

word “massacre”denotes a savage killing rampage, one associated with irrational and

indiscriminate slaughter. In modern society, it is inconceivable for a massacre to be con-

strued as legitimate violence. To conﬁrm that the ANC government was responsible for a

massacre opens the terrain of culpability which points to the state, or Lonmin personnel,

as having acted illegally or, indeed, criminally. Alternatively, the discourse of tragedy pre-

sents violence as an accident, comparable to how one might refer to a natural disaster

where no one can be held responsible. The “massacre”versus “tragic”narrative makes

possible a certain rendering of legal responsibility, culpability and guilt.

In the very title of the commission, it refers to the event as “tragic incidences,”a direct

refutation of the narrative that the state had directed and planned the killings. For Sitze

(2013) the tragic discourse was a common feature of “tumult commissions,”established in

the wake of imperial violence. The “tragic discourse of oﬃcial exoneration”(Lester 2017,

17) would operate as a technique to aﬃrm, discursively, that the police were right in per-

forming their duty to sustain law and order, legitimating impunity for the security forces.

The “massacre”narrative, however, suggests an indictment of the police and ANC govern-

ment, and raises the question of Lonmin’s complicity. To use White’s(1987) terms, the dis-

course of tragedy constitutes a narrativising discourse, evoking a sense of discursive

closure to a contentious historical event. The term “massacre”itself became contested

at the MCI, and parties were obliged to use the alternative term “tragedy,”implying a

more neutral stance on judgements of blame. As stated by Farlam, “Whether it’s a mas-

sacre is a matter we’ll decide at the end of the day”(cited in Bruce 2015; emphasis added).

The legalist paradigm is apparent in the report’s narration of violence, in the way it

makes its ﬁndings regarding the actions of each of the parties involved according to

8C.-A. L. LESTER

the legality of each party’s actions. While Section 23 of the South African Constitution

(1996) aﬀords all employees the right to strike, this is notwithstanding Section 65 (1)

(d) of the Labour Relations Act (LRA) of 1995, which sets out particular restrictions on

this right. The requirements set out by the LRA need to be met for the strike to be con-

sidered lawful, and hence protected. The Lonmin workers’strike was unprotected and was

referred to as a “wildcat”strike, named as such since its participants were striking outside

formal union structures as prescribed by the LRA. Consequently, the language framing the

strike, both in public discourse and the ﬁnal report, emphasised the strike’sillegality in a

manner in which the protestors became eﬀectively criminalised.

The overarching image of the strikers one is confronted with while reading the report is

that of a criminal mob; an irrational and superstitious collective intent on using violence

against non-strikers and the police (see Farlam 2015,60–62). Considerable culpability for

the “tragic”events at Marikana is placed on the striking workers for “undermining [the]

collective bargaining processes,”with their actions presented as “characterized by vio-

lence, intimidation and loss of life”(Farlam 2015, 42). As previously stated, there had

indeed been an escalation of violence at the mine, resulting in several murders. Based

on this, the report states that the workers’decision to engage in “an unprotected

strike”and to enforce the strike “by violence and intimidation, using dangerous

weapons for their purpose”instigated the deployment of the police (Farlam 2015, 42).

The discourse of an “unprotected,”“wildcat”strike slipped easily into that of the strike’s

framing as “illegal,”and, consequently, the striking workers as behaving criminally. This

framing of the mine workers’actions as illegal in public discourse emerged in the days

leading up to the massacre and was sustained in its wake.

An example of the emergence of this discourse of the illegal strike is evident in a radio

interview on South Africa FM on 15 August, hosted by Xolani Gwala. Lonmin’s executive

president of human capital and external aﬀairs, Barnard Mokwena, was one of the inter-

viewees. He announced that the strike was “of course illegal”and that the strikers “had

literally broken all laws.”The strikers were chastised for failing to obtain formal permission

to pursue collective action and gather. As stated by Mokwena, “there seems to be a ten-

dency to disregard everything and talk about what needs to happen and forget the fact

that these people have broken the law okay? From the beginning, they didn’t obtain the

permission in terms of the Public Gatherings Act …”(SAFM 2012). I ﬁnd that this narrative

is largely sustained in the commission report’s representation of the strikers.

The report presented various instances that highlighted the perspective of Lonmin and

its employees regarding the actions of the rock drillers. One such instance involved a

statement from Mr Botha, a Lonmin employee, who claimed that the rock drillers had par-

ticipated in an “illegal march and intimidated employees”(Farlam 2015, 72). Additionally,

a Lonmin security oﬃcer named Joseph Masibi referred to the need to “stop the illegal

gatherers”(Farlam 2015, 117). Moreover, witness accounts during Lonmin management’s

eﬀorts to convince the strikers to end the strike prior to the massacre revealed that the

strikers were informed that their strike was illegal and that they should all return to

work, but they refused to do so (Farlam 2015, 606).

The report’soﬃcial discourse contrasts this view of the workers with what is presented

as the rational, procedural and orderly character of the law. “The law”in this instance

refers to the collective bargaining procedure and the entire industrial relations machinery

of post-apartheid South Africa. For example, the report refers to the collective bargaining

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 9

legal framework as a “set of sophisticated enactments, central to which is the Labour

Relations Act No. 66 of 1995.”The report states further:

At its core the labour relations dispensation which resulted from these developments is an

arrangement of lawfully organised union and employer entities functioning within a bargain-

ing environment that not only regulates their interaction, but also provides for the possibility

of resort to lawful strike or lockout measures. (Farlam 2015, 43; emphasis added).

The report itself is replete with a discursive framing that emphasises the criminality of the

mine workers’actions, whilst aﬃrming the virtues of legal procedure. The framing juxta-

poses the image of “the crowd”of violent and allegedly irrational mine workers with what

is referred to as the “organised”and “sophisticated”legal context. We see this in the way

that the MCI became greatly concerned that the mine workers had engaged in muti

(medicine) rituals to prepare for their confrontation with the police, “armed …with

sticks and knobkerries (traditional walking sticks)”(Farlam 2015, 60). The report chastises

the striking mine workers whose actions are depicted as “characterised by violence”when

they circumvented the “agreed collective bargaining processes”to protest, as well as for

their committing “criminal acts”(Farlam 2015, 42; 562).

Therefore, the report’s orientation concerning the mine workers amounted to tabulat-

ing the manner and extent to which they broke the law. It is worth noting here that the

report also found fault with other “parties,”including the police and Lonmin—in particu-

lar, how these “parties”had deviated from the law. An example was the commission’s

application of the “McCann principle”—a principle of international law—when evaluating

the SAPS’actions. Through the application of this legal principle, the MCI reported that

the police plan followed on 16 August was defective, and that the decision to implement

the defective plan was an “illegal decision”since it led to the fatal shooting of the protes-

tors (Farlam 2015, 521). However, the verdict regarding the responsibility of the police

oﬃcers who shot the mine workers is ambivalent and rendered toothless by the legal

paradigm that framed the ﬁndings. As stated in the report,

in the case of certain shooters there is prima facie evidence that the [police oﬃcers] con-

cerned may well have been guilty of attempted murder, but it cannot be said that any

shooter is guilty of murder because it cannot be shown which of the shooters actually

killed anyone. (Farlam 2015, 258; see also Lester 2021, 236–244)

This is a clear exemplar of the MCI’s legalism, which eﬀectively exonerated those police

who ﬁred at the striking mine workers through legal double-speak. The legalism constitutes

narrativising discourse, which accentuated some issues—like the so-called criminality of the

strike—whilst muting others. In this case, legalism assists in distinguishing whether particular

actions are construed as legal or illegal and operates to foreclose the discussion on why the

mine workers might have decided to strike outside the labour relations dispensation. Legal-

ism then informs a technology of bureaucratic truth production, imposing a sense of legal

ordering on social phenomena that it simply takes for granted.

Phase two: investigating the “underlying causes”of Marikana

As presented above, the commission’sproduct, its ﬁnal report, exhibited legalism in its

apprehension of the subject matter. However, there was another aspect to the

10 C.-A.L.LESTER

commission’sprocess, which allowed for a more nuanced and systemic understanding of

the causes of the conﬂict. As stated previously, the MCI’s work was split into two “Phases.”

Phase One was to investigate the occurrences at Lonmin between 9 and 16 August 2012,

the days immediately preceding the police shooting.

As stated by Evidence Leader Adv

Budlender at the ﬁrst seminar—held on 31 March 2014—Phase Two would investigate

the longer term, “underlying causes”of the “tragic events at Marikana”(Seminar One

2014, 1), or what Chaskalson referred to as the “long-range causes,”of what transpired

(Seminar Two 2014, 2). For Alexander, these distinct phases aimed to investigate “legal

responsibility and legal causation”and “social responsibility and sociological causation,”

respectively (Seminar Two 2014, 4). The implication was that the MCI might have over-

come the legalist orientation of prior commissions to provide insight into historical and

systemic factors contributing to labour grievances.

Accordingly, Phase Two provided an alternative mode of truth-seeking to the legalised

courtroom practices seen in Phase One. Seminars invited experts to give presentations on

matters relevant to understanding the drivers of the conﬂict to aid the commission in

making recommendations. Farlam, who was present at these seminars, attested to their

utility in “getting a vast amount of expertise from acknowledged experts in the ﬁeld in

a manner which is much quicker and far more expeditious than would be the case is

we were hearing all the evidence, and having witnesses cross-examined …” (Seminar

Three 2014, 1). Hence, whilst aﬃrming the more conventional mode of truth-seeking

for commissions—legal cross-examination of witnesses—the Chairperson acknowledged

that in this instance, the seminars in which experts would provide research germane to

the subject of the investigation were a reliable and eﬃcient means to “get to the

truth”(Seminar Three 2014, 2). For Budlender, the review of likely sociological stimuli

was not to be viewed abstractly, but in terms of how they permitted an understanding

of the “underlying causes of the events of that week”(Phase Two 2014, 1). It is beyond

the scope of this paper to relay and reﬂect in depth on all topics that emerged from

these seminars, as they are broad. I focus speciﬁcally on emergent critiques of the existing

legal bargaining frameworks, and other structural critiques of the living and working

conditions of mine workers made during Phase Two, that in the end were not included

in the commission’sﬁnal report.

Critiquing the collective bargaining framework

A key theme emerging from the Phase Two seminars was a critique of the existing collec-

tive bargaining framework.

Expert testimony articulated the ways the legal context of

the labour laws of “collective bargaining”has contributed to the lack of formal represen-

tation for groups of workers and the speciﬁc ways it has created conditions for alienation

This was consonant with the role of oﬃcial commissions seen in South Africa, Britainct and other British colonies his-

torically, which would investigate state violence in the mining sector.

The legalistic approach of prior commissions of inquiry investigating state violence in the mining sector is detailed in

Lester (2021), where the resemblances between the oﬃcial discourse on violence in the Witwatersrand Disturbances

Commission of 1913 and the Marikana Commission of Inquiry are assessed.

Expert participants in Seminar One included Les Kettledas, the deputy Director General of the Department of Labour;

Ian Macun, the Director of Collective Bargaining from the Department of Labor; and Professor Sakhela Buhlungu, who

was at the time the Dean of the Humanities faculty at the University of Cape Town. Experts in Seminar Two included

sociologists Peter Alexander and Gavin Hartford and Professor Francis Wilson. In Seminar Three, individuals who made

presentations included Crispen Chinguno, Professor Eddie Webster, and Gareth Newham.

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 11

among workers. The labour regulatory framework that emerged after 1994 consists of the

Labour Relations Act (1995), the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (1997) and the

Employment Equity Act (1997), as well as the Skills Development Act and Skills Develop-

ment Levies Act of 1999. The ANC government inherited this bargaining framework,

including Industrial Councils, from the old LRA, with the Industrial Council system remain-

ing largely intact, albeit in a renewed form with Bargaining Councils. Signiﬁcantly, a prin-

cipal aim of this dispensation was to promote “orderly collective bargaining”and the

“eﬀective resolution of labour disputes”(Labour Relations Act 1995, Chapter 1) with the

overall purpose of maintaining a stable labour environment. A stable labour environment

is deemed desirable to attract investment in the mining sector and ensure productivity.

What emerged during the Phase Two seminars was a critique of the established legal

avenues through which to direct legitimate labour grievances. Speaking directly to the

notion of the strike’s“illegality”or that legal avenues provide an opportunity to deal

with grievances, Ian Macun stated:

There is a greater consensus today that the law does not oﬀer solutions to the issues that

cause workers to bypass unions, thinking of some of the scenarios that are sketched in

very few cases, in very few are there legal solutions to those sorts of situations. (Seminar

One 2014, 14)

It was noted further that unions with lower numbers struggle to negotiate organisational

rights in the workplace (Seminar One 2014, 9). As maintained by both Ian Macun and

Sakhela Buhlungu, the LRA promotes a model of majoritarianism in which minority

unions, or un-unionised groups, eﬀectively have little formal representation in the work-

place. The transition to democracy in 1994 saw a shift in trade union organisation to instil

a democratic organisational culture alongside strategic bureaucratisation.

This incited

the gradual bureaucratisation of the workplace, alongside the increased specialisation

of labour. Gavin Hartford argued that since the transition, labour issues tended to be

devolved to human resources departments, which had weakened the direct relationship

between workers and line management (Seminar One 2014, 17).

The professionalisation of trade unions emerged as a separate but related issue. The

MCI heard that mines would have a group of trade union functionaries who no longer

work underground and who earn considerably higher salaries than other mine workers.

As Hartford argued, in the case of Implats, “they’ll have about 60 full-time shop stewards,

maybe 100 full-time shop stewards at Angloplats, who are paid signiﬁcantly more than

the ordinary members they represent.”Eﬀectively, this leads to a crisis of representation;

a result of “the collapse of constituency-based representation”(Seminar One 2014, 16).

In turn this has compounded a sense of alienation among the working class. Hartford

argued that the workers’decision to strike was rooted in them being “alienated from

the production process subjectively as well as objectively”(Seminar One 2014, 18).

Unions operationalise representation via the majoritarian principle. It was noted how

the NUM had come to enjoy a “virtual monopoly”over a large portion of the workforce

The Wiehahn Commission was established in 1979 in response to the upsurge in strike action beginning in Durban in

1973, and the Soweto Uprisings of 1976. The commission recommended the amendment of the LRA to permit the for-

mation of “black”trade unions. See Ashforth (1990).

Much like the scenario aptly described by Weber (1919) when analysing the professionalisation of politics, we see union

functionaries who “live from”their position, whilst weakening democratic representation and severely fragmenting

labour.

12 C.-A.L.LESTER

and that those belonging to minority unions have little to no say in decision-making pro-

cesses, the consequences of which aﬀect them palpably. In his presentation at the com-

mission Buhlungu asserted that when workers feel that they have “no other option”they

will bypass the union as a strategy to air their grievances (Seminar One 2014, 30). The

majoritarian principle, for Macun, eﬀectively undermines the democratic aim of union

representation in practice which also contributes to alienation between workers and

the union. For this reason, “minority unions may engage in industrial action indepen-

dently of the union”(Macun, Seminar One 2014, 9). Karl Marx—in his critique of the

waged labour relation—argued that the wage-labourer under capitalism faces a quadru-

ple alienation: alienation from that which he produces, from the production process, from

the self and from fellow workers (1844 [1978], 70–73). For Marx, liberal political economy

conceals the alienation and exploitation inherent in the production process (1844 [1978],

73). The extant collective bargaining framework forms part of this political economy that

veils the estrangement built into capitalist relations of production.

Moreover, the alienation between workers manifests as labour fragmentation, as

described by Chinguno (2013a). The specialisation of labour in mining, with the division

of labour into distinct operations, compounds fragmentation, inhibiting solidarity and

non-violent organising (Chinguno 2013, 640). Phase Two revealed that in the post-apart-

heid context, mine workers experience renewed forms of alienation, deepened by the

bureaucratisation of the labour union system (see Botiveau 2018).

These “sociological”discussions about the collective bargaining framework, which

took place during these seminars, critically analysed the way laws designed to facilitate

eﬀective collective bargaining can instead eﬀectively undermine and destabilise it. This

has fomented both inter- and intra-class conﬂict. While opening a legal terrain through

which to advance workers’concerns, the LRA also exists to ease inherent class tensions

that emerge from capitalist relations of production. As stated in the previous section, a

core feature of legalism is its strict, literal conformity to legal code and rules. Legalism

is concerned with preserving both the law and the social formation that the law exists

within and operates to maintain.

Legal loopholes and labour brokers

Another salient critique emerging during Phase Two regarded the way mining corpor-

ations like Lonmin utilised legal loopholes, permitting a bypassing of legislative protec-

tion for workers. One way in which this manifests is through the use of labour brokers

to employ mine workers. Germane to understanding the particularities of the Marikana

rock driller’s protest was the abundant practice of labour brokerage and the speciﬁc

ways this impacted labour organisation and solidarity.

Since South Africa’s post-1980s reintegration into the global market economy, there

has been a steady increase in the use of casualised labour. Some estimate that almost

40 per cent of people working in the formal labour market are employed in precarious,

or unstable, work (Englert and Runciman 2019, 88). Phase Two seminars revealed that

at the time of the 2012 protests in the platinum sector, about one-third of rock drill oper-

ators were employed via labour brokers, meaning that they were not generally organised

through unions (Forrest 2013; Seminars One and Three 2014). The practice of using labour

brokers for recruitment is understood as rooted in neoliberal globalisation and the

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 13

restructuring of the workplace from the 1980s towards casual and informal labour, which

was entrenched through the transition during the 1990–1994 period.

When a worker is

employed via a broker, the employed worker enters into an employment contract with

the labour broker rather than with the mine itself. The client—in this case, Lonmin—is

then invoiced for the services rendered and payment goes to the labour broker, who in

turn pays the contracted labourer. As the work is casualised, workers employed in this

manner tend not to have access to employment beneﬁts enjoyed by full-time employees,

and the state of non-permanence means that wages and bargaining power are reduced

(Forrest 2014). As illustrated by Forrest (2013):

Young workers, in particular, are recruited by the unregistered “bakkie brigade,”who pay as

little as R60 a day and may demand a R150 registration fee. Workers recruited in this way

enter very short-term work, making union recruitment impossible. Larger contractors oﬀer

a total service to the mine, from sourcing [of labour] to supervision and payroll management.

Chinguno noted further that the practice of labour brokerage contributes to the fragmen-

tation of the workforce, exacerbating the propensity for conﬂict and violent confronta-

tions between workers. Subcontracted workers are more likely to be on the receiving

end of violence by other workers if they resist striking (Seminar Three 2014). This presents

subcontracting, and the forms of precarity it engenders, as a fundamental catalyst of

rising tension in the mine. The casualisation of its work force is a practice adopted by

Lonmin Plc and is relevant to understanding the company’s role in fomenting the situ-

ation of conﬂict, which was part of the MCI’s terms of reference.

Dangerous work and undigniﬁed living conditions

The demand for a “living wage”of R12,000 per month (approximately $1500 at the time)

by the striking mine workers in the Marikana incident garnered signiﬁcant global atten-

tion, shedding light on the harsh working and living conditions faced by mine workers

in the South African Platinum Belt. During Phase Two of the investigation conducted

by the Farlam Commission, a crucial aspect that emerged was the focus on the deplorable

work and living conditions speciﬁcally endured by the rock drillers who participated in the

strike.

Extensive research on the South African mining sector and the minerals revolution has

documented the systematic violations of the miners’physical well-being and dignity,

stemming from the era of British colonialism and apartheid (Allen 2003;2005; Allen

and Carey 2003; Meyburgh and Pakleppa 2018; Saul and Bond 2014,28–35; F. Wilson

1972; Wolpe 1995,60–90). Lonmin Plc, a British-owned conglomerate operating in the

Bushveld Complex of South Africa since its establishment in 1909, was formerly known

as the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited (Lonrho). Lonrho

serves as a stark embodiment of the deep-rooted capitalist exploitation that underpinned

The issue had been one of contestation between unions and capitalist corporations for some time. It was an issue dis-

cussed at the National Economic Development Labour Council (NEDLAC) in 2009, with the main trade union federa-

tions, Cosatu and the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU) asserting their favour for a legislative ban on

labour brokers (Englert and Runciman 2019; Van Eck 2010).

Sections 1.1.3–1.1.4 of the commission’s terms of reference tasked it to investigate “whether it by act or omission,

created an environment which was conducive to the creation of tension, labour unrest and disunity among its employ-

ees or other harmful conduct”and “whether it employed suﬃcient safeguards and measures to ensure the safety of its

employees, property and the prevention of the outbreak of violence between any parties.”

14 C.-A.L.LESTER

British colonialism and imperialism (Van Vuuren 2018, 370–382). The Marikana massacre

highlighted the enduring nature of these exploitative conditions even in the post-apart-

heid era.

Previous commissions, like the Leon Commission of Inquiry into Safety and Health in

the Mining Industry, held shortly following the ﬁrst democratic election, detailed the

grave safety issues faced by people working underground in the mining industry. Its

report points to the moral questionability of employing people in a work context

which necessarily exposes them to harm, with “frightening rates of fatal and non-fatal

accidents”(Leon et al. 1995, 29). Platinum became the rising star of the post-apartheid

mining sector, with its boom beginning in the late 1990s (Capps 2012a;2015). As the

market expanded, the mining operation became more complex and dangerous for

those performing the work (Capps and Krameritsch 2018). Platinum reefs are comprised

of igneous rock found in fractured conditions, increasing the potential for rocks to be dis-

lodged while working. Mines tend to be relatively shallow with tenuous roof supports,

which makes rockfalls more frequent and harder to prevent. In addition, temperatures

rise faster in virgin rock compared to in gold mines and more mine workers suﬀer

from heat stress and heat stroke, even when working in relatively shallow mining con-

ditions. Mr Makhabula, a Lonmin worker at the time, expressed his fear when having to

go down into the mining shaft each day as well as the diﬃculties experienced while

working:

[When] the rock in the mine has fallen it’s hard for us to open the way so that we can go out

…. We are working in dangerous situations …we report these challenges [but] nothing

happens …[there] are other challenges we are facing. For example if you didn’tﬁnish your

task, other stations they start attending their explosions, then their smoke come back

where you are. The time you are carrying on working you are breathing those fumes that

are coming from that place. Those lead to sickness to us who are working in the mines.

(Seminar Two 2014,38–39)

Statements like the one above indicate that the Phase Two seminars permitted individuals

to speak to their experience in a forum distinct from the courtroom-like environment,

where they would not be cross-examined and where the veracity of their statements

would be dissected by lawyers. Moreover, the statement illuminates the constant

threat of physical harm and bodily trauma alongside the problem of persistent material

deprivation faced by mine workers.

The materiality of the inter-generational exploitation experienced by the strikers was

expressed in the call for a wage increase. As was asserted by one survivor of the police

shooting, Mzoxolo Magidiwana, who testiﬁed at the MCI, “We work like slaves, even

our fathers were rock drillers. Either they die or go back home still as rock drillers.

Poverty forces you to forget your ambition, leave school and work as a rock driller at

the same mine”(Desai 2014). Migrant labourers travel to the mine for work and make a

home in the surrounding informal settlements. Most of the striking workers were

migrant workers from the Eastern Cape region, Pondoland, Lesotho and Mozambique

(Seminar Two 2014, 10). It is largely migrant workers who ﬁll the role of rock drill oper-

ators, something which has occurred “since the commencement of mining”(Seminar

Two 2014, 10). As stated by James and Rajak (2014) the massacre highlighted the endur-

ing indignities of migrant labour, whose work is both dangerous and underpaid. During

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 15

Phase Two, experts and mine workers themselves stressed the strained economic con-

ditions faced by migrant workers surviving on the platinum belt. It was stated that

most workers in the country remain in the lower income groups and reside in “areas

where conditions and services are sub-optimal”(Seminar One 2014, 8). Since the tran-

sition the ANC has largely embraced market fundamentalism (Satgar 2012) and aban-

doned the poor to focus on growth and investment (Bond 2014). The eﬀects of this

reverberate into other areas of social life, threatening the mine workers’ability to meet

the basic necessities of social reproduction (Benya 2015b). The inability to pay for basic

needs and sustain two households has led to the use of Mashonisas (moneylenders).

The isiZulu word Mashonisa means “to impoverish,”or “to sink.”Moneylenders or “loan

sharks”provide credit at exorbitant interest rates, entrenching cycles of indebtedness

for many working in the mines (Bond 2013). This particular band of miners had

become targets for Mashonisas, who would make use of new technology for repayment,

such as holding on to borrowers’ATM cards and withdrawing money with interest rates as

high as 50 per cent per month, through direct debit orders or garnishee orders presented

to employers (see James and Rajak 2014, 455). Hartford framed the social and economic

conditions as “key drivers for the industrial action that unfolded in 2012”(Seminar Two

2014, 8). Moreover, these conditions led to a collapse of the institutions of collective bar-

gaining themselves in the wave of strikes that ensued following the massacre.

The platinum sector reﬂects the widespread inequality plaguing South Africa, stem-

ming from the institutionalisation of colonial relations of production, but equally

rooted in the organisation of post-apartheid capitalism. While Piketty correctly depicts

the Marikana Massacre as rooted in South Africa’s extreme inequality, resulting in distri-

butional conﬂicts (2014, 39), the Phase Two seminars illuminated that the conﬂict was

not only distributional but catalysed by the very nature of the work itself: work that is

dangerous and persistently violent.

These Phase Two seminars constituted a signiﬁcant aspect of the commission’s inves-

tigation. They provided the historical and social context for the “tragedy,”but more than

that, they provided a break from the hyper-legalised timbre of Phase One, which had

come to resemble a criminal trial. A fundamental implication of what emerged in Phase

Two was to highlight the contradictions and tensions experienced by labour within the

extant collective bargaining framework, as well as the wretched working and living con-

ditions, and the way that these contradictions were generative of certain conﬂicts. As

stated by Chinguno, “Precarious work and living conditions and the failure of political citi-

zenship undermine industrial relations institutions which have little capacity to manage

industrial conﬂict”(Seminar Three 2014, 44).

The ﬁnal report makes at least some reference to “large numbers of Lonmin workers

[living in] squalid informal settlements surrounding the mine shafts”, stating that the

“people living there lack basic social services”(Farlam 2015, 527). The problem,

however, as it was identiﬁed in the report, was that Lonmin Plc had not fulﬁlled its com-

mitment to “create ‘a safe and sustainable business’” (Farlam 2015, 528). The fault found

with Lonmin, then, was that it had not fulﬁlled its corporate social responsibility, as per its

Social Labour Plan, in which the company had committed to providing decent housing

options for employees. Bound by hyper-legalism, the report’s framing of Lonmin’s contri-

bution to the tension aﬃrms the social order and extant legal framework.

16 C.-A.L.LESTER

Blind legalities and the Marikana Commission report: a conclusion

As just discussed, Phase Two’sprocess of investigation shed light on structural antece-

dents of the conﬂict leading to the Marikana massacre. Yet these realities hardly

feature in the MCI’sﬁnal report. Rather, the legalities framing the report’sﬁndings

operate to obscure the way laws’eﬀects are experienced by diﬀerent groups and

classes of people (Marx 1842). As a liberal legal institution, the MCI was unable to

reﬂect upon the embedded assumptions and sensibilities internal to the law it applied

concerning the terrain of its investigation. This is apparent in the way it explicitly presents

an image of post-apartheid labour laws as “sophisticated”and thus beyond the scope of

critical analysis. The analytical distinction between the MCI’s process (its various modes of

investigation) and its product (the ﬁnal report) allowed for a more nuanced analysis of the

forms of knowledge generated in oﬃcial commissions of inquiry—underpinned by its

legalism.

Instead, the MCI’s report’soﬃcial discourse is replete with attempts to categorise

events according to the binary of “legal”versus “illegal.”It cites various past commissions

of inquiry extensively, along with case law and legislation deemed relevant to framing the

actions of the groups under investigation, and its interpretive lens of events. According to

van Krieken (2004, 6) the distinction between what is understood as legal and non-legal

positions the law “to continue the legal system’s own self-reproduction”(van Krieken

2004). Citing Luhmann in this regard, approaching disputes using the binary of legal

and non-legal—as the Marikana Commission did throughout—aﬃrms the legitimacy of

the legal system and “can be understood as a ‘kind of surplus value’skimmed oﬀfor

the beneﬁt of the system”(Luhmann 1995, 285–298). In other words, clarifying

between the legal and the non-legal in oﬃcial discourse entrenches the supposed auton-

omy of a legal code and has the added utility of naturalising the legal system and its

associated logic. In the context of capitalism, this amounts to defending private prop-

erty—in this case, Lonmin’s private property or ability to maintain the rate of production

to maintain proﬁtability. While, indeed, an aspect of the police plan was found to be reck-

less and “illegal”in accordance with international legal principle, the fact that an armed

national police force had been deployed to address a labour grievance on the campus

of a private mining corporation was not questioned.

An intrinsic component of positivist legal ideology is the law presented as immune

from human bias and interests. It is the maxim that legal practitioners are impartial

and dispassionate in their application and interpretation of the law. But Marx (1842)

argued that laws constitute part of the capitalist ideological superstructure, which

orients human behaviour in favour of capitalist production. Building on Marx and

Engels, Soviet legal theorist Pashukanis (Pashukanis and Arthur 1983)arguedhow

laws governing society tended to entrench inequality and exploitative relations of pro-

duction. In this way the legalism in the report, which focuses on the legal form, obscures

the embedded social relations and inequities produced in and by the legal frameworks

governing post-apartheid labour dispensation, and the conﬂicts they undergird. As it is

a legal institution, and hence, embedded in legalism, the Marikana Commission was

unable to digest that it is the very legal framework that enables crippling capital

ﬂight, providing little incentive for companies like Lonmin to reinvest proﬁts in the

sector productively, or to increase real wages for the labour that generates its value

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 17

(Alexander 2013; Bond and Mottiar 2013). The legalist framework hence operates to

obscure and naturalise these structural forms of violence as antecedents of the Marikana

massacre.

The MCI was commended for its strong Evidence Leader team, for the fact that it facili-

tated participation from a broad sample of actors in society, and for exposing police men-

dacity in concealing evidence despite the SAPS’attempt to cover it up (Forrest 2015).

While this may be true, a deeper reading of the Marikana Commission exposes more

general contradictions in legalism and legal ideology, particularly how truth itself

becomes construed as legal truth. The Phase Two seminars revealed several intrinsic

issues with the extant legal frameworks guiding labour. As Luxemburg writes,

Labour legislation is enacted as much in the immediate interest of the capitalist class as in the

interest of society in general …at the same time, private property becomes more and more

the form of open capitalist exploitation of the labour of others, and State control is pene-

trated with the exclusive interests of the ruling class. (1899)

While labour legislation is under constant evolution, redolent of a constant battle

between classes and fractions of capital, it appears that the laws developed following

the transition to democracy to attenuate and mediate the tensions of a particular histori-

cal conjuncture have created conditions for new contradictions in the industrial relations

terrain. These contradictions have resulted in emerging tensions and conﬂicts. The revel-

ations of Phase Two of the commission indicate that the existing legal frameworks are ill

equipped to address these tensions eﬀectively.

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers who provided insightful feedback on the previous draft of this

article. I also thank the editorial team at the SARS journal. Lastly, I thank Prof. John Comaroﬀfor

his valuable feedback on the ﬁrst draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

References

Adelman, S. 2015.“The Marikana Massacre, the Rule of law and South Africa’s Violent Democracy.”

Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 7: 243–262. doi:10.1007/s40803-015-0017-3

Alexander, P. 2012.Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer. Johannesburg: Jacana

Media.

Alexander, P. 2013.“Marikana, Turning Point in South African History.”Review of African Political

Economy 40 (138): 605–619. doi:10.1080/03056244.2013.860893.

Alexander, P. 2016.“Marikana Commission of Inquiry: From Narratives Towards History.”Journal of

Southern African Studies 42 (5): 815–839. doi:10.1080/03057070.2016.1223477

Alexander, P., L. Sinwell, T. Lekgowa, B. Mmope, and B. Xezwi. 2013.“Marikana: A View from the

Mountain and a Case to Answer.”In Critical and Radical Social Work. Johannesburg: Jacana

Media. doi:10.1332/204986014X13912727661623

Allen, V. L. 2003.The History of Black Mineworkers in South Africa: Volume II, Dissent and Repression in

the Mine Compounds 1948-1982. Keighley: Moor Press.

Allen, V. L. 2005.The History of Black Mineworkers in South Africa. London: Merlin.

18 C.-A.L.LESTER

Allen, V. L., and K. Carey. 2003.The History of Black Mineworkers in South Africa. Keighley: Moor Press.

Ashforth, A. 1990a.The Politics of Oﬃcial Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa. Oxford:

Clarendon Press.

Ashforth, A. 1990b.“Reckoning Schemes of Legitimation: On Commissions of Inquiry as Power/

Knowledge Forms.”Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (1): 1–22.

Battersby, J. 1987, August 16. “Miners’Strike in South Africa Raises the Spirit of Resistance.”The New

York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/16/weekinreview/miners-strike-in-south-africa-

raises-the-spirit-of-resistance.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Benya, A. 2015a.“Marikana: The Absence of Justice, Dignity and Freedom?”In Human Rights in

Mineﬁelds, Extractive Economies, Environmental Conﬂicts, and Social Justice in the Global South,

edited by César A. Rodríguez Garavito, (1st ed.) 260–297. Bogota

: Dejusticia.

Benya, A. 2015b.“The Invisible Hands: Women in Marikana.”Review of African Political Economy 42

(146): 545–560. doi:10.1080/03056244.2015.1087394

Benya, A., and J. Seidman. 2018.“There is no Change in Marikana: The Perspective of Women.”In

Business as Usual After Marikana: Corporate Power and Human Rights, edited by M. Grimm, J.

Krameritsch, and B. Becker, 104–123. Auckland Park: Fanele.

Bickford, L. 2007.“Unoﬃcial Truth Projects.”Human Rights Quarterly 29 (4): 994–1035. doi:10.1353/

hrq.2007.0036

Bond, P. 2013.“Debt, Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: From Moody’s

Macroeconomic Monitoring to Marikana Microﬁnance Mashonisas.”Third World Quarterly 34

(4): 569–592. doi:10.1080/01436597.2013.786283

Bond, P. 2014.“Consolidating the Contradictions: From Mandela to Marikana, 2000-2012.”In South

Africa—The Present as History: From Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana, edited by J. S. Saul, and P.

Bond, 176–210. Woodbridge: Boydell et Brewer.

Bond, P., and S. Mottiar. 2013.“Movements, Protests and a Massacre in South Africa.”Journal of

Contemporary African Studies 31 (2): 283–302. doi:10.1080/02589001.2013.789727

Botiveau, R. 2014.“The Politics of Marikana and South Africa’s Changing Labour Relations.”African

Aﬀairs 113 (450): 128–137. doi:10.1093/afraf/adt073.

Botiveau, R. 2018.Organise or die? Democracy and Leadership in South Africa’s National Union of

Mineworkers. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1987.“The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field.”Hastings Law Journal

38 (5): 805–813 HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/hastlj38&i=825.

Brown, A. D. 2004.“Authoritative Sensemaking in a Public Inquiry Report.”Organization Studies 25

(1): 95–112. doi:10.1177/0170840604038182.

Brown, J. 2022.Marikana, A People’s History.Suﬀolk: James Currey.

Bruce, D. 2015.“Marikana: A Massacre by any Other Name.”In Mail and Guardian. Marikana: A mas-

sacre by any other name—The Mail and Guardian (mg.co.za). https://mg.co.za/article/2015-08-

14-marikana-a-massacre-by-any-other-name/.

Burton, F., and P. Carlen. 1979.Oﬃcial Discourse: On Discourse Analysis, Government Publications,

Ideology and the State. Oxfordshire: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Buur, L. 2002.“Monumental Historical Memory: Managing Truth in the Everyday Work of the South

African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”In Commissioning the Past: Understanding South

Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, edited by D. Posel, and G. Simpson, 66–93.

Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Capps, G. 2012a.“A Bourgeois Reform with Social Justice? The Contradictions of the Minerals

Development Bill and Black Economic Empowerment in the South African Platinum Mining

Industry.”Review of African Political Economy 39 (132): 315–333. doi:10.1080/03056244.2012.

688801

Capps, G. 2012b.“Victim of its own Success? The Platinum Mining Industry and the Apartheid

Mineral Property System in South Africa’s Political Transition.”Review of African Political

Economy 39 (131): 63–84. doi:10.1080/03056244.2012.659006

Capps, G. 2015.“Labour in the Time of Platinum.”Review of African Political Economy 42 (146):

497–507. doi:10.1080/03056244.2015.1108747.

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 19

Capps, G., and J. Krameritsch. 2018.“Lonmin in Context: The Political Economy of the South African

Platinum Industry, An Interview with Gavin Capps.”In Business as Usual After Marikana: Corporate

Power and Human Rights, edited by M. Grimm, J. Krameritsch, and B. Becker, 84–103.

Johannesburg: Fanele.

Chaskalson, R. 2016.“The Road to Marikana: Transformations in South Africa’s Platinum Industry,

1994–2012.”Journal of Southern African Studies 42 (5): 857–873. doi:10.1080/03057070.2016.

1211807.

Chinguno, C. 2013a.“Marikana: Fragmentation, Precariousness, Strike Violence and Solidarity.”

Review of African Political Economy 40 (138): 639–646. doi:10.1080/03056244.2013.854062

Chinguno, C. 2013b.“Marikana Massacre and Strike Violence Post-Apartheid.”Global Labour Journal

4 (2): 160–166. doi:10.15173/glj.v4i2.1138

Chinguno, C. 2015.“The Unmaking and Remaking of Industrial Relations: The Case of Impala

Platinum and the 2012–2013 Platinum Strike Wave.”Review of African Political Economy 42

(146): 577–590. doi:10.1080/03056244.2015.1087396

The Commissions Act of 1947. 1947. South African Government. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/

ﬁles/gcis_document/201505/act-8-1947.pdf.

Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. 1996.

Davis, D., and K. Klare. 2010.“Transformative Constitutionalism and the Common and Customary

Law.”South African Journal on Human Rights 26 (3): 403–508. doi:10.1080/19962126.2010.

11864997

Desai, R. 2014.Miners Shot Down. Johannesburg: Uhuru Productions.

du Toit, A. 1990.“Discourses on Political Violence.”In Political Violence and the Struggle in South

Africa, edited by N. C. Manganyi, and A. du Toit. Stuttgart: MacMillan: 87–130.

du Toit, A. 2005.“Experiments with Truth and Justice in South Africa: Stockenström, Gandhi and the

TRC.”Journal of Southern African Studies 31 (2): 419–448. DOI: 10.1080/03057070500109664.

du Toit, F. 2013, November 27. Marikana Victims Deserve Justice. Cape Times.https://www.iol.co.za/

capetimes/marikana-victims-deserve-justice-1.1613269#.Upb6TCfY0_4.

Duncan, J. 2012, October 7. Marikana and the Problem of Pack Journalism. SABC News Online.http://

www.sabc.co.za/news/a/00f7e0804cfe58899b00bf76c8dbd3db/Marikanaand-%0Athe-problem-

of-pack-journalism-20121007.

Duncan, J. 2013.“South African Journalism and the Marikana Massacre: A Case Study of an Editorial

Failure.”The Political Economy of Communication 1 (2): 65–88. ISSN 2357-1705. Available at: http://

polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/22/197

Elster, J. 2004.Closing The Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Englert, T., and C. Runciman. 2019.“Challenging Workplace Inequality: Precarious Workers’

Institutional and Associational Power in Gauteng, South Africa.”Transformation: Critical

Perspectives on Southern Africa 101 (1): 84–109. doi:10.1353/trn.2019.0038

Farlam, I. 2015.The Marikana Commission of Inquiry: Report on Matters of Public, National and

International Concern arising out of the Tragic Incidents at the Lonmin Mine in Marikana in the

North West Province.

Farson, A. S., and M. Phythian. 2011.Commissions of Inquiry and National Security: Comparative

Approaches. Westport: Praeger.

Ferreira, E. 2022.“Marikana matter not quite over for Ramaphosa.”Mail and Guardian. Marikana

matter not quite over for Ramaphosa—The Mail and Guardian (mg.co.za).

Fish, S. 1993.“The Law Wishes to Have Formal Existence.”In Closure or Critique: New Directions in

Legal Theory, edited by A. Norrie, 157–174. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fogel, B. 2012.“The Selling of a Massacre: Media Complicity in Marikana Repression.”Ceaseﬁre

Magazine.https://ceaseﬁremagazine.co.uk/south-africa-marikana/.

Forrest, K. 2013, September 13.“Marikana was not just about migrant labour.”Mail and Guardian.

https://mg.co.za/article/2013-09-13-00-marikana-was-not-just-about-migrant-labour/.

Forrest, K. 2014.“Rustenberg’s Fractured Recruitment Regime: Who Beneﬁts?”African Studies 72 (2):

149–168.

20 C.-A.L.LESTER

Forrest, K. 2015.“Marikana Commission Unearthing the Truth or Burying it?”In Working Paper 5,

1–36. Johannesburg: Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand.

Foucault, M. 1972.The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.

Foucault, M. 1977.Discipline and Punish. London: Tavistock.

Foucault, M. 1980.Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester.

Herbert, A. 1961.Anything but Action? A Study of the Uses and Abuses of Committees of Inquiry.

Institute of Economic Aﬀairs. London: Barrie and Rockliﬀ.

Holmes, Carolyn. E. 2015.“Marikana in Translation: Print Nationalism in South Africa’s Multilingual

Press.”African Aﬀairs 114 (455): 271–294. doi:10.1093/afraf/adv001

James, D., and D. Rajak. 2014.“Credit Apartheid, Migrants, Mines and Money.”African Studies 73 (3):

455–476. doi:10.1080/00020184.2014.962872

Labour Relations Act [No. 66 of 1995]. 1995.Oﬃce of the President. Government of South Africa.

https://www.gov.za/sites/default/ﬁles/gcis_document/201409/act66-1995labourrelations.pdf.

Leon, R., A. Davies, M. Salomon, and J. Davies. 1995.Leon Commission of Inquiry Into Safety and

Health in the Mining Industry. Pretoria: Government Printers.

Lester, C. A. L. 2017.Truth in the Time of Tumult Tracing the Role of Oﬃcial “Truth-seeking”

Commissions of Inquiry in South Africa, from Sharpeville to Marikana.https://open.uct.ac.za/

bitstream/item/28712/thesis_hum_2017_lester_claire_anne.pdf?sequence = 1.

Lester, C. A. L. 2020.“Commissions of Inquiry and the Role of law: Towards a Materialist Approach.”

Social Dynamics 46 (1): 86–103. doi:10.1080/02533952.2020.1737902

Lester, C. A. L. 2021.“Legal Truth and Discourses of Violence in Post-Apartheid Commissions of

Inquiry: The TRC and Marikana Commission.”(Doctoral dissertation). Stellenbosch University,

Stellenbosch.

Lester, C. A. L., and B. Fogel. 2022.“We Should Never Forget South Africa’s Marikana Massacre.”

Jacobin.https://jacobin.com/2022/08/marikana-massacre-strikers-police-housing-lonmin-platinum-

mine.

Luhmann, N. 1995.“Legal Argumentation: An Analysis of its Form.”The Modern Law Review 58 (3):

285–298. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2230.1995.tb02011.x

Luxemburg, R. 1899.Reform or Revolution. Marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/

luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch04.htm.

Mahlakoana, T. 2019, August 15.“Mathunjwa: Farlam Commission one of Omission.”Eyewitness

News.https://ewn.co.za/2019/08/15/mathunjwa-farlam-commission-one-of-omission.

Mamdani, M. 1996.Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Marinovich, G. 2012, September 8.“The Murder Fields of Marikana. The cold murder ﬁelds of

Marikana.”Daily Maverick.https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-08-the-murder-

ﬁelds-of-marikana-the-cold-murder-ﬁelds-of-marikana/#gsc.tab = 0.

Marinovich, G. 2015, June 26.“In the Shadow of Marikana; a Lost Opportunity for Justice.”Daily

Maverick.https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-06-29-op-ed-in-the-shadow-of-marikana-

a-lost-opportunity-for-justice/.

Marinovich, G. 2016.Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre. Cape Town:

Penguin Random House.

Marinovich, G., and G. Nicolson. 2013, October 24.“Marikana Massacre: SAPS, Lonmin, Ramaphosa &

Time for Blood. Miners’Blood.”Daily Maverick. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-10-

24-marikana-massacre-saps-lonmin-ramaphosa-time-for-blood-miners-blood/.

Marx, K. 1842.“1842: Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.”Rheinische Zeitung.https://www.

marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm.

Marx, K. 1978 [1844].“The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1944: Estranged Labour.”In

The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by R. Tucker, 70–81. New York: Norton & Company.

McEvoy, K. 2007.“Beyond Legalism: Towards a Thicker Understanding of Transitional Justice.”

Journal of law and Society 34 (4): 411–440. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6478.2007.00399.x

McKinley, D. T. 2015.“Commissions of Inquiry or Omission?”The South African Civil Society

Information Service. https://sacsis.org.za/site/article/2347.

Meyburgh, C., and R. Pakleppa. 2018.Dying for Gold.

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 21

Moon, C. 2006.“Narrating Political Reconciliation: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa.”Social &

Legal Studies 15 (2): 257–275. doi:10.1177/0964663906063582.

Mutasa, H. 2017.“South Africa Remembers Marikana Miners Killed by Police.”Al Jazeera. https://

www.aljazeera.com/video/news/2017/08/south-africa-commemorates-marikana-miners-killed-

police-170816194825044.html.

Naicker, C. 2016.“Worker Struggles as Community Struggles: The Politics of Protest in Nkaneng,

Marikana.”Journal of Asian and African Studies 51 (2): 157–170. doi:10.1177/0021909615605533

Pashukanis, E. B., and C. J Arthur. 1983.Law and Marxism: A General Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Piketty, T. 2014.Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Ralushai, V. N. M. N., M. N. Masingi, D. M. Madiba, and J. A. Van den Heever. 1996. Report of the

Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders in the Northern Province of

South Africa”South Africa.

Regulations. 2012. Commission of Inquiry into the tragic incidents at or near the area commonly

known as the Marikana mine in Rustenberg in the North West province, South Africa. 35730 (9).

Reuters. 2012. Timeline - Major Strikes at South African Platinum Mines. https://www.reuters.com/

article/safrica-lonmin-strikes-idAFL6E8JKB8Q20120820.

Satgar, V. 2012.“Beyond Marikana: The Postapartheid South African State”.Africa Spectrum 47 (2–3):

33–62.

SAFM. 15 August 2012. SAFM: Lonmin Marikana Discussion. The Forum at 8 with Xolani Gwala.

https://justice.gov.za/comm-mrk/exhibits/Exhibit-LL.pdf.

Saul, J., and P. Bond. 2014.The Present as History: From Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana.

Johannesburg: Jacana.

Seminar One, Phase Two. 2014, March 31.Bargaining Arrangements in Platinum. Marikana:

Transcription of the Commission of Inquiry, 1–95. https://justice.gov.za/comm-mrk/docs/

20140331-SeminarPhase02-transcript.pdf.

Seminar Three, Phase Two. 2014, April 16.Violence in Industrial Relations. Marikana: Transcription

of the Commission of Inquiry, 1–95. https://justice.gov.za/comm-mrk/docs/20140416-

SeminarPhase02-transcript.pdf.

Seminar Two, Phase Two. 2014, April 9.Mining and Migrancy. Marikana: Transcription of the

Commission of Inquiry, 1–75. https://justice.gov.za/comm-mrk/docs/20140416-SeminarPhase02-

transcript.pdf.

Shapiro, J. 2015, July 1. Omission of Inquiry. The Times.https://www.zapiro.com/component/zoo/

advanced-search/55654?Itemid = 464&page = 5.

Shklar, J. N. 1964.Legalism: An Essay on law. Morals and Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Sitze, A. 2013.The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation

Commission. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Swart, M. 2019.“The Killing Fields: The non-Prosecution of Marikana.”In Marikana Unresolved: The

Massacre Culpability and Consequences, edited by Y. Rodny-Gumede, and M. Swart, 119–138.

Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.

Van Der Spuy, E. 2021.“Vagaries and Challenges Confronting Police Accountability in the South

African Post-Colony as Revealed by Recent Commissions of Inquiry.”International Journal of

Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 45 (3): 329–343. doi:10.1080/01924036.2021.1916971

van Dijk, T. 1997.“The Study of Discourse.”In Discourse as Structure and Process, edited by T. van Dijk,

1–34. New York: Sage.

Van Eck, B. P. S. 2010.“Temporary Employment Services (Labour Brokers) in South Africa and

Namibia.”Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal 13 (2): 107–204.

van Krieken, R. 2004.Legal Reasoning as a Field of Knowledge Production: Luhmann, Bourdieu and

Law’s Autonomy.https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/967/1/legal%20reasoning.pdf.

Van Vuuren, H. 2018.Apartheid, Guns and Money: A Tale of Proﬁt.London: C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers)

Ltd.

Wasserman, H. 2015.“Marikana and the Media: Acts of Citizenship and a Faith in Democracy-to-

Come.”Social Dynamics 41 (2): 375–386. doi:10.1080/02533952.2015.1060685.

Weber, M. 1919.“The Profession and Vocation of Politics.”In Weber: Political Writings, edited by P.

Lasserman, and R. Spiers, 309–369. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

22 C.-A.L.LESTER

Wessels, P. J. 1961.Report of the Commission Appointed to Investigate and Report on the Occurrences

in the Districts of Vereeniging (Namely Sharpeville Location and Evaton) and Vanderbijlpark,

Province of the Transvaal, on 21st March, 1960.

White, H. 1987.The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wilson, F. 1972.Labour in the South African Gold Mines 1911–1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Wilson, S. 2014, November 26.“After Marikana Commission: What Now?”Daily Maverick. Op-Ed:

After Marikana Commission - what now? (dailymaverick.co.za).

Wilson, S. 2015.“Judge Farlam’s Accidental Massacre.”Daily Maverick. Judge Farlam’s Accidental

Massacre (dailymaverick.co.za).

Wolpe, H. 1995.“Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power: From Segregation to Apartheid.”In

Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa, (1st ed), edited by W. Beinart, and

S. Dubow, 60–90. Oxfordshire: Routledge.

SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 23

Discourses on Political Violence and the Mechanics of Legitimation in Official Commissions of Inquiry in Africa

Chapter

May 2024

Claire-Anne Lester

The chapter provides some clarity in conceptualizing state sponsored violence and draws on various commissions held by governments to investigate violence in colonial and postcolonial Africa, shedding light on how discourses on violence are connected with techniques of legitimation.

The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth Century South Africa

Book

Jan 2014

Adam Ashforth

Marikana:: The Absence of Justice, Dignity, and Freedom?

Chapter

Aug 2015

Asanda Benya

South Africa - The Present as History: From Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana

Book

Feb 2024

5. Consolidating the Contradictions: From Mandela to Marikana, 2000–2012

Chapter

Dec 2014

Patrick Bond

Discipline and Punish

Chapter

Apr 2023

Michel Foucault

There is no change in Marikana: The perspective of women

Book

Feb 2018

The Study of Discourse

Chapter

Jan 1997

Teun A. van Dijk

Marikana: A People's History

Book

Jan 2022

Julian Brown

Vagaries and challenges confronting police accountability in the South African post-colony as revealed by recent Commissions of Inquiry

Article

Jul 2021

Elrena Van der Spuy

This paper takes inspiration from David Bayley’s recognition that Commissions of Inquiry yield useful archival material for investigating the challenges for police accountability. Guided by his spirit of inquiry, this paper presents three recent Commissions of Inquiry in South Africa (the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry and the Inquiry into the events at Marikana; and the yet to be completed Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture) and considers how each have shed light on the organisational woes and policy conundrums confronting the police and policing in South Africa. In turn, these Commissions have yielded spaces for (re-)engaging issues relating to the structure, function and governance of the police. In doing so, the deliberations of these Commissions have in interesting ways interfaced with concerns raised in both public debates and scholarly analysis.

The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Book

Jan 2013

Adam Sitze

Legalism in the Marikana Commission of Inquiry Report: Veiling “Sociological Causes” of the Massacre

Recommended publications

Posting Post Laval International and National Responses

Commissions of inquiry and the role of law: towards a materialist approach

White capital: Corporate social responsibility and the limits of transformation in South Africa

Vagaries and challenges confronting police accountability in the South African post-colony as reveal...

Discourses on Political Violence and the Mechanics of Legitimation in Official Commissions of Inquir...