LEST WE FORGET

A new exhibition, part of this year’s National Arts Festival in Makhanda, highlights the plight of the devastated families struggling in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre 10 years ago. By Tymon Smith

MEMORY Ten years after Marikana

This year will mark a decade since 34 striking mineworkers were killed by police at Marikana in North West. Ten other men, including non-striking mineworkers, security guards and police had been killed in the week leading up to the terrible events of August 16 2012, which were watched live on TV news stations by horrified South Africans and beamed across the world as indisputable final evidence of the postapartheid government’s abysmal failure to provide a better life for all.

In spite of the findings of the Farlam Commission of Inquiry into the events at Marikana and a few court cases that have creaked their way slowly through the wheels of the justice system, nobody has been convicted for their involvement in the deaths of the 44 men during that fateful, incendiary week.

A new exhibition, part of this year’s National Arts Festival in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), aims to highlight the long-lasting and still present emotional, economic and psychological effects of the Marikana massacre on the wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters whose lives were destroyed by the deaths of their husbands, sons, grandsons, nephews, brothers and primary breadwinners.

Many of the widows are from or live in the Eastern Cape so it’s only fitting that the exhibition be held in Makhanda and that its focus is squarely on their stories and voices. Curated by Zodwa Skeyi-Tutani, Marikana, Ten Years On: What We Lost in the Shooting is a collaborative effort that combines the “slow journalism” of writer Niren Tolsi and photographer Paul Botes — who have determinedly and extensively documented the lives of the widows and their families through repeated interviews and visits made over the past decade as part of their ongoing After Marikana project — and artworks created by a number of widows as part of an art-making workshop by the Khulumani Support Group. Tutani, who is from and based in the Eastern Cape, and whose previous curatorial work has investigated ways to address colonial memory and trauma through the historical lens of the area, in particular through a focus on the voices of its mothers and grandmothers, says she was drawn to the project by “the idea of migrant labour and how it affects home life in general and the idea of mothers constantly waiting: waiting for economic reasons; waiting for parenting reasons; but also partnerships really. There’s the idea of what it does to home life having a partner or any family member that you only see once or twice a year. What does that do to the home life? And then, eventually, the landscape of the space interested me.”

Tutani also travelled with Tolsi to Marikana to see the site and meet some of the widows, an experience she says changed the way she thought about the massacre “so, so much” because, as she notes: “In 2012, when we heard it reported, it was primarily that ‘the violent miners were being subdued by the police’. That was the running story until you read or heard stories from people in the Eastern Cape who had relatives there.

“When you read more and were exposed to the space and went to the mines and saw how they lived, you started to realise what it meant for a miner to actually think about wanting to be much more economically available for their family. The idea that they were there, always thinking about their families, and all they wanted was to be able to look after their families — and then this happened — killed for trying to look after their families.”

Many of the widows have been forced to find work to sustain their families and some have had no option but to work in the mines where their husbands died, often as cleaning staff for Sibanye-Stillwater, the company that now owns those mines.

The trauma wrought on these women, their children and their families has reached across generations with some children taking their own lives over the past decade, and other family members dying of shock and heartbreak at hearing the news in 2012. This intergenerational trauma is a key theme in the exhibition.

The exhibition is divided between two sites. This is a curatorial decision that recalls the two sites of the massacre itself, while also reflecting the geographical gulfs prevalent in the migrant labour system between homes and places of work.

The main part of the exhibition, which features the art by the widows and some of Botes’s vast archive of photos taken over the past decade as part of the After Marikana project, is at Grahamstown Gallery in the Albany Museum in the city.

The second section, which consists of a photographic essay, focused on the tragic, traumatic and depressingly representative story of one family — the Jokanisis — and their search for justice — is presented alongside some of the forensic evidence submitted to the commission and housed in the Ntsikana Gallery on the top floor of the 1820 Settlers Monument, perched on the hill above Makhanda.

Tutani says the curatorial approach is informed by Tolsi’s and Botes’s “slow journalism”, based on the idea of telling the story over 10 years and going back to the widows, engaging with them about the idea of home and what it means when you’re left behind.

“What does it mean when you’re forced to leave home? I wanted to bring that out physically and visually so that you can feel it when you’re in the space.”

She feels that Botes’s photos of the widows reinforce this idea because of the quiet dignity with which he portrays them, the idea of presence and “being here”.

“If you walk into the space and you see the portraits of the widows it immediately gives you the impression of their emotional state: ‘I am here. I’m left behind, I’m carrying on, I’m waiting for an apology.’”

A third element of the exhibition is an extensive series of public engagements in the form of walkabouts, panel discussions and workshops to keep the conversation sparked by the show alive on the streets of Makhanda for the duration of the festival and, hopefully, long beyond its conclusion.

Tutani is keen to emphasise that the exhibition aims to give voice to the widows: “Because even in some of the court cases, nobody was really paying attention to the widows themselves more than they were focusing on the event ... As widows, they’ve gone through such a traumatic event and haven’t been given a platform to speak about it. That’s not right.”

Tutani doesn’t believe that art can change the world, but she is a firm believer in Nina Simone’s dictum that it’s the duty of artists to reflect the times in which they live.

“I hope that people will see that the story of Marikana is not the one-sided story that’s been portrayed in the media ... I hope they’ll see it from both sides and from the perspectives of all the lives involved — and see it with new eyes,” she says.