LETTER: Marikana’s 34 miners versus 34 abakwetha minors
Volumes have been written about the worker massacre, but little is said about the deaths of initiates
The needless deaths of 34 young men can trigger vengeful anger that lasts for a decade. Or casual sympathy that’s gone before the page is turned. When it comes to mortality, it’s not the count that matters but the cause. It’s not the suffering of the victims that drives the political classes, but the machinations of the villains.
Thirty-four is, notoriously, the number of miners who were shot dead at Marikana in August 2012. But it is also, coincidentally, the number of “Abakwetha” minors who died in the same year in the Eastern Cape. The different ways the two episodes have been treated says a lot about the (parlous) state of our collective national project...
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