From the publisher:

“One of them that I could see was standing on my left hand side ... had a spear but he hit me on the back with the handle of the spear until it broke. There was one who was standing right in front of me wearing white overalls and with an NUM T-shirt. He had a butcher’s knife. I felt a blow to the back of my head ... from there I lost consciousness.”

On 16 August 2012, the South African police shot dead thirty-four men and injured hundreds more, bringing to a tragic end a week-long strike at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, North West Province. Not one of these miners posed a threat to any police officer.

For the first time, these men’s lives – and deaths – are put at the centre of the story. Placing the strike in the context of South Africa’s long history of racial and economic exclusion, explaining how the miners came to be in Marikana, how their lives were ordinarily lived and the substance of their complaints, Julian Brown shows how the strike developed from an initial gathering into a mass movement of more than 3,000 workers. Drawing on interviews with strikers and their families, he tells the stories of those who embarked on the strike, those who were killed, and the attempts of the families of the deceased to identify and bury their dead.

Brown also provides a comprehensive treatment of the subsequent Commission of Inquiry and points to the politics of solidarity with the Marikana miners that have emerged since.

Marikana: A People’s History is my third book, and I think of it an attempt to write a comprehensive account of the lives and deaths of the forty-four people who lost their lives in the strike and the massacre that took place at Marikana, in South Africa’s North West Province, in August 2012. It draws upon a wide range of sources - including the documents and testimonies produced for the Commission of Inquiry that purported to investigate the events leading up the massacre, scholarly engagement with these events, and interviews with some of the families of the deceased - to tell the most detailed and most accurate story that can currently be told about this tragedy. It has been a difficult book to write - and one that I wish had not been necessary. But the failure of the Commission to tell the full story of the massacre - and the frequent complicity of many commentators in circulating and promoting a story that obscures the responsibilities of the police in creating the tragedy and instead highlights the moments in which some striking miners undoubtedly acted violently - means that the efforts to capture the cruelties and tragedies of Marikana must continue.

This book is one part of those efforts, and one that I hope will help its readers understand what happened in August 2012 - and what we all lost then.

Where to Buy the Book

Marikana: A People’s History is published in hardback and ebook by James Currey (Boydell & Brewer) in the UK and Worldwide.

It can be bought directly from the publisher by clicking here.

Marikana: A People’s History is published in paperback by Jacana Media in the Southern African region.

It can be bought directly from the publisher by clicking here.

Julian Brown

From the publisher:

Table of Contents:

Where to Buy the Book