Media, Race and Capital: A Decolonial Analysis of Representation of Miners’ Strikes in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores media representation of a strike at Lonmin Platinum Mine in Marikana in August 2012, in which the police gunned down 34 miners. Data was collected from randomly selected articles from South African English-language print media. My main argument is that the South African print media provided coverage of the strike that privileged mining interests and generally ignored the concerns and voices of the miners. Using a combination of decolonial and neo-Marxist critical political economy of the media theoretical approaches, I suggest the media in South Africa operates in a global ‘colonial matrix of power’ that (re)produce dominant discourses and ideologies that favour elite interests. The article concludes with some remarks on the need for media in South Africa to adopt a different ethical and normative framework that gives voice to silenced and marginalised voices.

KEY WORDS:

• decoloniality
• South Africa
• media
• race
• miners’ strike
• Marikana

Despite the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the country remains deeply divided across class, race, and gender. Deep-seated inequalities laid by colonialism and apartheid still persist in many areas of the country’s social and economic arenas. The various monetarist macroeconomic policies adopted by the government and the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), all favour in one form or another marketisation, liberalisation, privatisation, and deregulation. In such a neoliberal policy environment, labour strikes and social protests are common. Since 1994, the country has seen the emergence of ‘new’ social movements established to express the struggles of the poor with respect to basic needs such as water and housing (Mirabftab & Wills 2005; Oldfield & Stokke 2006). These movements are part of what Asef Bayat (2000: 533) calls the ‘marginalised and deinstitutionalised subaltern’ urban under-class in the developing world that emerged as a result of the rapid global economic restructuring of the 1990s. Over the years, there has been an increase in social movement protests fuelled by what many see as government’s failure to provide basic services and a decent standard of living. Labour strikes have also increased in the past five years. As Gabrielle Lynch states, the Marikana labour strike is just one example of ‘nationwide protests that have come to characterise the daily lives of working class, nonworking class, and under-employed South Africans’ (2012: 547).

In this article, I analyse media representation of a miners’ strike at the Lonmin Platinum Mine in Marikana, North West province that led to the death of 43 miners, 34 of whom were killed by the police on 16 August 2012. This incident, which shocked the nation and international community, has drawn national and global media and academic attention. Since then, a plethora of studies on what has become to be known as the ‘Marikana massacre’ has emerged (for example Alexander et al. 2012c; Chinguno 2012; Satgar 2012; Bruchhausen 2014), most of it with a focus on the political economy dimension of labour strikes in post-apartheid South Africa. Jane Duncan (2014) however, opened academic debates on the media coverage of Marikana in an article that examines broader press transformation in South Africa, using the reporting of Marikana as the basis to explore this transformation. Duncan’s analysis focuses on sources used in newspapers in their coverage of the strike and subsequently the massacre. She shows that the press largely ignored voices of the miners and privileged the views of business and political elites. In his blog, Ben Fogel (2012) also contributes a critical analysis of media coverage of Marikana and demonstrates the media’s ‘complicity in uncritically reproducing narratives of the Marikana massacre that both removed the agency of workers and sought to justify state repression’. In this article, I add to the emerging literature by analysing the representation of the miners’ strike from randomly selected newspaper articles from a cross-section of English-language media. I locate this analysis within a critique of the media edifice in South Africa which I argue, despite transformation at the end of apartheid, still operates under neo-apartheid matrices of power.

In recent years, the South African media and its operations has increasingly been subjected to interrogation from a range of critical perspectives. Such studies have generally been informed by Marxist political economy (for example Jacobs 2003; Sparks 2009), cultural studies (for example Wasserman & Jacobs 2003), and more recently, postcolonial theory (for example Fourie 2008; Wasserman 2009). These approaches have unmasked a variety of power dynamics in the operations and practice of the media. I contribute to this growing critical literature by using decolonial perspectives to the study of media in South Africa. Using the central term ‘coloniality’, decolonial approaches are concerned with coloniality of everyday social experiences that are taking place through ‘continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administration’ (Grosfoguel 2007: 219). I use decolonial approaches and neo-Marxist critical political economy of the media in dialogue to critique not only media representation of the Marikana miners’ strike, but also the structural operations of the South African media. The decolonial approach is also used to read the Marikana strike, focusing on issues of global capital, subjectivity and race. Neo-Marxist critical political economy of the media approaches are useful in understanding the ideologies and power structures that influence media operations, ownership and funding. Decolonial approaches, while recognising the importance of some Marxist insights, nonetheless also point out to some of its inherent limitations. Scholars in this approach have accused Marxism of understanding injustices and struggles of the working class in terms of class and not race and in the context of Europe (see Walsh 2007: 227). Marx articulated a powerful critique of bourgeois ideology of capitalist modernity from a Eurocentred locus of enunciation. The decolonial approach on the other hand critiques capitalist modernity from a ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Grosfoguel 2011) perspective – that is a global system of asymmetric power relations and analysed in terms of who is speaking (body politics of knowledge) and from where (geo-politics of knowledge). The approach argues for thinking from and at the margins of the world system and foregrounds issues of modernity, colonial structures and race in our contemporary post-colonial period (Grosfoguel 2007). The necessity of engaging with race in the South African context is justified by the country’s long history of institutionalised racism and white racial privilege which today exist in nuanced and covert ways and manifest in different forms of social and economic exclusions. The theoretical strategies of decolonial and neo-Marxist critical political economy of the media provide useful cross-fertilisation for this article.

The article is structured as follows: first I provide the theoretical framework undergirding this study by describing the theoretical basis of decoloniality and its explanatory value to critical political economy of the media; second, I provide a context of the media in South Africa in terms of discontinuities and continuities with the apartheid past; third, I present findings of how the print media covered and represented the Marikana miners’ strike; last, I conclude by discussing the need for a compassionate and conscious journalism that would require a rethink of the libertarian model currently informing South Africa’s journalism practice.

Decoloniality: Coloniality of Power, Knowledge and Being

Decolonial theories are rapidly gaining ground in critical social theory. They are normally associated with a group of radical Latin American scholars who foreground issues of geo-politics and body-politics in order to expose the persistence of modern / colonial structures in the contemporary postmodern / postcolonial period. The capitalist structures put in place over hundreds of years did not evaporate with decolonisation. With decolonisation, we have moved ‘from a period of “global colonialism” to the current period of “global coloniality”’ (Grosfoguel 2007: 219).

Although decolonial theories are associated with scholars from Latin America, their genealogy can be traced to thinkers of liberation such as Aime Cesaire, WEB Dubois, Amilcar Cabral, Franz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko, to name but a few who confronted coloniality and its principal apparatus. The main argument proffered by these approaches is that coloniality is ‘the invisible and constitutive side of “modernity”’ (Mignolo 2007). Thus the rhetoric of modernity goes hand in hand with the logic of coloniality; there is no modernity without coloniality (Mignolo 2007: 476). Patrick Crawley states:

at the same time that Europe was developing the ideological paradigm that established a certain local concept of reason as the universal criterion of humanity and civilization, European colonizers were enacting a continuous campaign of brutal violence and dehumanization against Amerindians and black African people transported as slaves to the Americas. (2013: 5)

Therefore, violence that accompanies modernity constitutes what Walter Mignolo (2011) calls the darker side of western modernity. This dark side consists of the denial of non-Europeans of their humanity. While in the West this modernity is credited with producing scientific progress, enlightenment and industrialization in the Global South slavery, colonialism and imperialism ‘darker’ projects. Perhaps the most apt definition of coloniality comes from Nelson Maldonado-Torres who defines it as:

long standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjectivity relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day. (2007: 243)

As shown in the citation above, coloniality exists in the realm of power, knowledge and being. It should be noted that decoloniality is a vast and diverse body of scholarship, and the concepts of power, knowledge and being do not represent the field of decolonial theories, but are used as organising principles of critique. Anibal Quijano (2007) coined the term coloniality of power, which is made up of four interlocking forces of power: (1) labour (structural practices of global capital); (2) sex and sexuality (structural practices of heterenormativity); (3) subjectivity (structural practices of Eurocentric white racism); and (4) authority (structural practices of violence).¹ The ‘colonial power matrix’ is therefore ‘an organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life’ (Quijano 2000 cited in Grosfoguel 2007: 218). I use the concept of coloniality of power to problematise both the media and economic systems of South Africa. The global ethnoracial hierarchy and global power structure underpinned by race and class set in motion by modernity and consolidated by the apartheid system, still influence some aspects of social relations in South Africa, including the operations of the media. In 2000, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) embarked on an investigation of racism in the media² and concluded there was racism in the media. While over a decade has passed since that assertion and several changes have taken place in the media and the country’s body politic, we can still argue that there is an ingrained racism that pervades the news agenda in the country. Although the racism is not overt and in some cases not intentional, the paradigm of racial stereotypes and even racist assumptions lurk under the surface. Stuart Hall calls this ‘inferential racism’, which he describes as:

those apparently naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional, which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions … [these] enable racist statements to be formulated without ever bringing into awareness the racist predicates on which these statements are grounded. (1990: 12–3)

Coloniality of knowledge refers to the manner in which Eurocentric knowledge systems are privileged over other knowledges and epistemes (Mignolo 2007). Quijano (2007: 169) states ‘African modes of knowing of producing knowledge, and of producing perspectives became subordinated to Euro-American epistemology that assumed universal proportions and universal truth’. In the context of this article, the very notion of liberal-pluralism, upon which journalistic principles are built, forms part of coloniality of knowledge. Liberal-pluralism derived from Western Enlightenment promotes journalistic norms and values based on liberalism with its emphasis on free and independent media, objectivity, neutrality and truth. Ann Mayher and David McDonald in their analysis of privatisation discourses in South African print media, argue that it is this facade of objectivity under libertarian press that gives neoliberalism its hegemony by appearing to give equal space to different views, while in reality obscuring ‘the more subtle, opinion-making discourses that generate neo-liberal biases’ (2007: 443).

More critically, coloniality of knowledge also speaks to the issues of location and the locus of enunciation. Ramón Grosfoguel (2007) articulates that knowledge is situated and in terms of the locus of enunciation, the location of the enunciator is geopolitically and historically important. ‘The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location’ (Grosfoguel 2007: 217). For instance, one can be geographically located in Africa, but articulate issues affecting Africa from the loci of the empire. In this vein, it can be argued that a number of journalists in South Africa, though located in the South, in many respects articulate issues affecting African subjects from the loci of empire as we will see in subsequent sections.

Coloniality of being refers to colonial relations of power that have left profound marks on the general understanding of being and refers to different forms of ontological exclusion (Maldonado-Torres 2007). At the heart of coloniality of being is the Fanonian concept of the wretched of the earth or the damned. These are beings that are excluded and decentred – they are found on the margins and wastelands of the empire and exist in conditions which are designed and maintained by the configuration of colonial matrixes of power (Maldonado-Torres 2004). Marginalised people are thus seen as non-beings, therefore not given an opportunity to articulate their everyday lived experiences. Therefore, as Maldonado-Torres states ‘invisibility and dehumanization are the primary expressions of the coloniality of being’ (2007: 257). Extending the coloniality of being to media representation in South Africa, the issue of ‘gaze’ becomes important. Who do the media in South Africa represent? Who is speaking and who is given voice? Although journalism appeals to issues of objectivity and ethics, it can be argued that the media ‘gaze’ in the South African context is located within an ideological machine that reproduces neoliberal discourses. Nick Coudry brings to attention the importance of voice as a tool to make narratives of one’s lived realities. He argues that neoliberalism has denied certain people voice through ‘an unequal distribution of narrative resources’ which arguably ‘represents a deep denial of voice, a deep form of oppression’ (Coudry 2010: 9). Invoking WEB Dubois’ term ‘double consciousness’, Coudry argues that a denial of voice gives a ‘sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others’ (2010: 9). As shown in upcoming sections, the miners at Marikana were denied agency and others spoke on their behalf – journalists, political commentators, opinion-makers, and business elites. Linda Alcoff speaks of the danger of speaking for others as being:

borne of a desire for mastery, to privilege oneself as the one who more correctly understands the truth about another’s situation or as one who can champion a just cause … and the effect of the practice of speaking for others in often … erasure and reinscription of sexual, national and other kinds of hierarchies. (1991: 29)

Speaking for others ultimately disauthorises those spoken for and acts as a silencing tool. The miners became objects, not subjects. Herman Wasserman argues for the ‘ethics of listening’ as a normative framework for post-apartheid media in South Africa:

‘listening’ as an ethical value is appropriate for a new democracy where social polarisations continue to impact media narratives and agendas, and in a society where continued economic inequalities provide certain parts of the citizenry with disproportionate power to make themselves heard in the public sphere. (2013: 77)

Political Economy of Print Media in South Africa

The print media in South Africa operates in an oligopolistic market structure and is owned by five media groups, namely Media24, Times Media Group, Sekunjalo Independent Media,³ Caxton, and TNA.⁴ Like other media conglomerates elsewhere, these five companies operate within the logic of market fundamentalism that privileges profit maximisation. Over and above this, the media structure in South Africa is an inheritance from colonialism, albeit transformed at the end of apartheid in terms of ownership, staffing, content, and audiences (Tomaselli 1997; Steenveld 2004; Wasserman & De Beer 2005). As Guy Berger (1999) states, changes in the media brought new and previously excluded players in the industry such as blacks and trade unions. Together with this, new foreign ownership also entered the sector in the country, for instance Irish businessman, Tony O’Reilly bought significant shares in the large media group Argus and the British Pearson PLC group bought shares in Business Day (Tomaselli 1997). Through the lens of coloniality, we can begin to question this transformation.

The political economy foundations of the media have not dramatically changed, despite the diversification of racial composition in the media and the emergence of new local media conglomerates such as Sekunjalo. The print media has remained entangled within a global capitalist media structure that is subject to rules of globalisation, privatisation and liberalisation. Infusing insights from decolonial and critical race theory, we can also see that media transformation in the country did not address the structural and systematic racialised nature of media, power, and knowledge. Critical approaches to race understand race not as something biological or ingrained in humans, but as a social construction produced not by biology but social relationships, cultural meanings, and institutions (Crenshaw et al. 1995). Decolonial scholars trace the establishment of racial categories to the 15^th century Spanish and Portuguese expansion to the Americas during which ‘the superiority of the Westerners/Europeans over non-Europeans in terms of a racial narrative of superior/inferior peoples was constructed’ (Grosfoguel 2002: 210). As Quijano states, the idea of race ‘originated in reference to the phenotypic differences between conquerors and conquered’ (2000: 354). From this definition, we can see that race is a social construct designed to include and exclude certain groups and to conquer the ‘Other’. Grosfoguel (2007: 215) reminds us that the Cartesian ego-cogito (I think, therefore I am) as the foundation of modern western sciences was preceded by 150 years (since the beginning of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ego conquistus (I conquer, therefore I am).

Mainstream and liberal approaches to race view race not as systematic and ingrained in the social fabric of society, but as something individualised. We can argue that processes of transformation of the media in South Africa follow this liberal approach. That is why there has been emphasis on deracialising boardrooms and news content at the expense of overhauling the structural practices that reproduce racialised power relations. Joel Modiri (2012) argues that these structures of power are legitimatised and are woven and reproduced into social systems like law, labour, ideology, and knowledge. So we can see that despite changes at the boardroom and content level, the South African print media still show streaks of continuity with the past. Citing Sean Jacobs (2003), Wasserman and De Beer capture this argument thus:

The mainstream print media still operate according to the same functionalistic structural logic of circulation, distribution networks, price structure and advertising that has as their target the lucrative – and arguably still largely white, or at least affluent black – elite market … Although ownership transfers meant a deracialisation of the industry at boardroom level, the market segmentation still displays continuities with the societal polarisations of apartheid. (2005: 39–40)

Christian Claasen argues that a growing libertarian trend in the country’s media points to ‘certain ideological continuities between the racial capitalism of apartheid and the current liberal-pluralist environment’ (1999: n.p.). Mayher and McDonald (2007) opine that it is precisely this liberal-pluralism that perpetuates discourses of capitalism in the media in South Africa. Media functioning under market forces reinforce material interests of the capitalist state by marginalising alternative and counter-hegemonic voices and views.

Media’s Representation of Marikana: Findings

The August 16 Marikana massacre was preceded by ten other deaths, including two of a policeman and a security guard at the mine. In addition, 78 people were injured. The Marikana strike started in early August 2012 after Lonmin Rock Drilling Operators decided to go on an unprotected strike for higher wages. The miners were demanding a tripling of their salary to R12,500 (approx US$1,250). Duncan (2014) states that the public’s initial knowledge of what took place on 16 August was shaped by television footage which showed armed miners rushing towards the police, giving the impression that the police were under attack. The print media followed suit with this line of argument. However, an independent study conducted by a research team at the University of Johannesburg led by academic Peter Alexander, and investigative reporting by journalist Greg Marinovich from the online news website The Daily Maverick showed that many of the miners were shot from the back. It was only then that the print media’s line of argument began to shift (Duncan 2014). The Farlam Commission⁵ of Inquiry and a documentary on the massacre Miners Shot Down by Rehad Desai have also confirmed the possibility of a premeditated attack on the miners.

This article is based on newspaper articles relating to the strike and massacre published in major English-language South African newspapers, and specifically those published in the period immediately before and after the massacre. Using the key word ‘Marikana’ and focusing on the month of August when the strike took place, articles were extracted from the SA Media Database hosted by the University of the Free State. A total of 399 articles were produced by the database and random probability sampling was used to select 60 news articles. Random probability sampling ensures that every unit in the population has an equal chance of being selected for the study (Du Ploy 2001: 106). I selected articles from English-language South African newspapers rather than a few case studies because the intention was to get an aerial view of the coverage. The case study approach was also shunned because findings from case studies cannot be generalised to other cases (Yin 2003). Through a close reading and thematic analysis of the selected newspapers, I observed four issues: (1) the impact of the strike on the economy is highlighted at the expense of the underlying causes of the strike; (2) the strike is dramatised through use of the grotesque; (3) miners are not given agency and largely criminalised; and (4) although some media depict the strike sympathetically, this is done within narrow neoliberal discourses. The following sub-sections discuss these four issues.

Saving capitalism – media speaking from the loci of Empire

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define Empire as ‘a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (2001: xxi). In short, empire describes the ubiquitous and pervasive operations of global capitalism. In this article, the concept of empire is loosely used to mean a capitalist world order that conditions dominant modes of conduct and ideologies and is well encapsulated in the notion of coloniality of power discussed earlier. Henry Giroux argues that the dominant discourse of our time is neoliberalism which is ‘reproduced daily through a regime of commonsense and a narrow notion of political rationality’ (2008: 1). This ‘regime of commonsense’ has made capitalism the only economic system of organising life. This is the power of coloniality where the world is organised into a singular mode of universalism. Commercial media in many countries have thus become ‘translating’ centres that have helped to consolidate the hegemony of neoliberalism. As previously stated, the media in South Africa is highly commercialised and concentrated and routinely provides a platform for business and political elites at the expense of ordinary people. The media, including the left-liberal press like the Mail & Guardian, consistently supports a capitalist agenda, albeit with considerable subtlety. Richard Peet argues that media institutions ‘have been “captured” by neo-liberalism … disseminating a consistent set of ideas shaped around a particular policy agenda’ (cited in Mayher & McDonald 2007: 446). This explains why the lived experiences of people or groups resisting neoliberalism are marginalised in media spaces as demonstrated by the following statement:

The call to end the strikes and the statement that the workers were threatening the economy or the value of the rand, something we read in the newspapers every day, are providing one story. There is another that, when compared with their bosses, the workers deserve R12,500, which is their demand, and that they were brutally murdered in the interests of capitalist’s labour relations of production. While the former ignores the structural and actual living conditions of the miners, the latter has received virtually no attention in the mainstream analyses. (Sinwell et al. 2012: 8–9)

This market-oriented nature of the press in the country had an impact on the way the Marikana strike was covered. Broadly, the media promoted an acceptable and uncritical discourse of Marikana aimed at legitimising liberal capitalism and forestalling any critique of the system. During the entire strike, the media focused on describing single acts of actual or potential violence by the miners and generally underplayed the political goals and causes of the struggles (see Duncan 2014).

Many of the newspaper articles analysed were concerned about the impact of the strike on the economy and provided platforms to business elites. For instance, the Star ⁶ ran this headline ‘Investors running scared as labour violence escalates’. Quoting officials from the Standard Bank, Chamber of Mines, and Old Mutual Investment Group, the article emphasises that the Marikana miners’ strike ‘is bad for growth and for the balance of payments, and therefore rand-negative’. Another article from The Star ⁷ headlined ‘Labour dispute highlight structural problems, Fitch warns’, addresses concerns by rating agencies Fitch Ratings and Moody Investors on the ‘implications of the deadly labour dispute in the mining sector’. The Business Day ⁸ with the headline ‘Message of Marikana is “Stay away”’ focuses on the impact of the strike on foreign investors’ perceptions of South Africa and also warns of the danger of nationalisation of the mines. There were several kinds of these articles. Duncan (2014) in her analysis of the sources consulted by journalists at mainstream South African newspapers found that the business voice dominated in 153 of the stories on Marikana, accounting for 27 per cent of sources, while the miners and labour unions accounted for a mere 3 per cent.⁹ What these kinds of articles do is demonstrate that neoliberal ideas have been woven so deeply into the operations of the media that it becomes natural and commonsense to privilege the voice of business. Capitalism is presented by the media as the national interest and workers are convinced:

their true interests lie in supporting capitalism … and that the interests of workers and capitalists are congruous, such that whether in way, industrial action, economic or environmental crisis – we are ‘all in it together’. (Harper 2012: 11)

This was certainly true in the case of coverage of Marikana.

Another element of the media speaking from the loci of empire is that almost all of the articles analysed for this capital failed to question the Mining-Energy Complex (MEC) and its complicity with domestic capital flight. MEC is a term that refers ‘to the core set of heavy industry along with the powerful vested interests and institutions that have evolved around mineral extraction and processing’ (Ashman & Fine 2013). As Paul Williams and Ian Taylor argue, the transition at the end of apartheid from racialised capitalism to neoliberalism did not transform the fundamental market logic of capitalism and the business elites ensured that ‘a break with apartheid did not threaten its ability to profit from a severely exploitative labour system’ (2000: 36). Two decades after the end of apartheid, it can be argued that South Africa’s major corporations largely remain forces of continuity. As pointed out by Sam Ashman and Ben Fine (2013), the post-apartheid economy is dominated by the ‘three Fs’: capital flight, finance, and foreign ownership. The media failed to contextualise the miner’s strike within this discourse of elite continuity. In studies on the relationship between the military-industrial complex and media elsewhere in the United States for example, it is clearly shown that the US corporate media is intimately tied to the interests of the military industrial complex (see Kumar 2006; McChesney 1997). In South Africa there seems to be an oblique link between the media and the MEC.

Capitalism is hostile to workers’ unions and the last two decades has seen the destruction of unionised labour in most western countries (Harper 2012). Therefore, it is not surprising that the marketised news media always undermine unions because, as Harper argues, most corporate media are intimately linked to capitalist ideology and organised withdrawal of labour power is a great threat to capitalism. The news articles analysed are roundly critical of the two labour unions – the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)-affiliated National Miners Union (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The media attributed the causes of the strike to union rivalry between NUM and AMCU. Phrases and words such as ‘turf wars’; ‘mob rules’; ‘divisive and arrogant unions’, and ‘lawlessness’ are used liberally to describe the two unions, as the following newspaper quotes show:

The initial outbreak of violence has been blamed on animosity between the National Union of Miners and Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.¹⁰

The role of mining unions, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union and National Union of Miners also needs close scrutiny. Some experts claim union leaders have lost touch with workers, leading to deadly rivalry.¹¹

There is speculation that a turf war between the long-established NUM and the comparatively new AMCU spilt over into open revolt.¹²

The AMCU president, Joseph Mathunjwa, is described as ‘divisive’, ‘populist’, ‘opportunistic’, and ‘demagogic’.¹³ Although there is rivalry between the two unions, the media ought to have investigated the deep-seated causes of this tension and rivalry beyond name-calling.

Speaking from the loci of empire points to an ingrained coloniality of knowledge, where journalists hide in a neutral place and outside history in order to appear objective. Steven Friedman argues that this objectivity is in reality a ‘middle class bias’ and that the press ‘sees the world through the eyes of the middle class, and the freedom it seeks to guard is that of the middle class’ (2011: 107).

Drama, sensationalism, and myths

A narrative on witchcraft and use of ‘muti’¹⁴ entered the print media discourse a few days after the killing of the miners. The media alleged that a number of miners had used muti to strengthen themselves against bullets from the police. The Business Day ¹⁵ reported the deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, as saying he ‘believes that the mine workers at Marikana had been in a muti-induced trance in which they would either kill or be killed’. In an opinion piece in The Cape Argus,¹⁶ the writer argued that the sangomas (traditional doctors) were as much to blame for the massacre as the police, unions, Lonmin management, and the miners themselves. The writer of the article describes the practice of sangoma (traditional healers) as ‘heinous’, ‘disgusting’, and ‘violent’. Similarly, in a lengthy article in the City Press,¹⁷ words like ‘secret rituals’, ‘possessed’, and ‘dangerous’ were used to paint a picture of demon-filled miners who believed the bullets from the police would not work on them. While the use of muti is an acknowledged practice in some mining towns (Chinguno 2013), the media, relying on a limited number of miners as sources, painted a picture of an irrational mass driven forward by ‘witchcraft’ instead of contextualing the practice of using ‘muti’ and its cultural origins. This narrative points to the global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European ways of life and derides non-European ways.

In addition to being ‘possessed’, the miners were also painted as dangerous and violent. For instance, the City Press article¹⁸ painted the miners as ‘militant’, ‘hostile’, ‘armed’ and mentioned in several places that the miners were carrying pangas and spears. The ‘panga-wielding miner’ was a constant theme across many of the articles analysed. Following are some examples of this kind of narrative:

Many told of how they [relative of the miners] ran for cover as bullets rang out in the bushy veld where the machete-wielding protestors had clashed with police.¹⁹

The militant group, under the command of a tall, dark man draped in a green cape, looked like disciplined warriors. They were armed with pangas, spears, clubs and sharpened steel rods and were clearly in control of proceedings.²⁰

The shooting broke out when police sought to disperse striking workers armed with pangas, spears and clubs who had gathered on a hill in the area.²¹

They are wrapped in blankets, their spears and fighting sticks protruding menacingly as they chant songs of war.²²

Crispen Chinguno explains that it is part of tradition and culture for some men in South Africa to carry traditional weapons during strikes as they see this action as war and the weapon becomes a symbol of this war. He goes on to say that when the Marikana strike started, the miners carried sticks and umbrellas and they were therefore not armed. They only acquired real weapons when officials from the local NUM branch attacked and killed two miners and the meaning of the weapons ‘shifted from being symbolism to reality’ (Chinguno 2013: 32). Alexander quotes an interview with one of the miners:

My brother … what I can say about the sticks and spears [is that] we came with them from back home. It is our culture as black men, as Xhosa men … even here … when I go look at anything … at night [such as cows] … I always have my spear or stick … A white man carries his gun when he leaves the house, that is how he was taught, so sticks and spears that is the black man’s culture. (2012a: 27)

The media failed to provide this context and quickly labelled the miners as violent and irrational, thus denying them their subjectivity and humanity. Wasserman promotes the value of human dignity as a ‘protonorm for journalism’. He argues that treating people with dignity means ‘listening to their stories – their narratives about their everyday lives, their struggles but also their victories, their pain but also their pleasures’ (Wasserman 2013:78). As Alexander rightly notes ‘with honourable exceptions, journalists lacked the credibility, commitment and patience to build the trust necessary to get the workers’ story’ (2012b: 170).

Screaming and sensationalist headlines were also used to create shock and awe such as ‘Caught in a war zone as bullets rain and bodies drop’;²³ ‘Mine shooting bloodbath’;²⁴ ‘Marikana’s killing field’, ‘The bloody smell and ugly sight of Marikana’;²⁵ ‘He lay in veld like a dying dog.²⁶ A Sunday Times article²⁷ with a headline ‘Ticking bomb explodes as we look on in horror’, opens with the following paragraph ‘A man’s head is half blown away, the other men are scattered around like dead cattle. Their war cries silenced, their demands for higher wages ended in a tragedy that should not have happened’. A City Press article in describing the death of one senior mine supervisor days before the massacre, wrote:

Pangas were used to hack his face and head and he was left for dead on a footpath. A picture taken by the police shows the man’s mangled body lying face up, one eye wide in death, and a cow’s skull on his chest.²⁸

This kind of dramatisation and sensationalism act as silencing tools as readers focus on the moral shock expressed by the media. The miner is not given voice. Instead he is labelled as ‘violent’, ‘irrational’, ‘illiterate’, ‘uneducated’, ‘unreasonable’. This form of silencing means that fundamental issues affecting the miners are not discussed by the media.

Miners as the ‘damned of the earth’

As Maldonado-Torres states, damnation or life in hell constitutes a reality characterised by the naturalisation of slavery (2007: 247). The damned (the wretched, the dispossessed, and the condemned) becomes a non-being and an invisible entity and ‘exists in the mode of not-being there, which hints at the nearness of death, at the company of death’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 257). A majority of black blue-collar workers in South Africa, still living under the boulder of global coloniality with high-levels of poverty, face brutal exploitation. Although these workers are not formally colonised, their relationship of exploitation and racism point to coloniality, a continuation of racist distribution of labour and colonial forms of exploitation. Racism is constitutive and entangled with the international division of labour and capitalist accumulation at a world-scale (Quijano 2007). Harper opines ‘exploitation of workers is the very lifeblood of capitalism’ (2012: 37). Therefore, in most capitalist states, labour strikes are framed as public inconveniences and the strikers are often stripped of agency and therefore not given a voice to explain their concrete demands. To be damned in the Fanonian sense means to be criminalised. The strike at the Marikana plant was unprotected as the miners shunned the formal procedures for protected strikes set out in the Labour Relations Act. As a result, the media ‘criminalised’ the whole strike by negatively labelling it with phrases such as ‘illegal’, ‘unsanctioned’, ‘violent’,’ criminal’, and ‘wildcat’ without digging into the reasons why the miners decided to strike outside the legal processes. Using a communist critique, Stephen Harper argues that although the media may mention the economic demands of strikers, they often ‘ignore the political character of strikes as expressions of class revolt against the entire system of exploitation’ (2012: 46).

It is clear that in this context, the Marikana strike was a class revolt against neocolonialism and neoliberalism. However, as useful as the communist and neo-Marxist analyses of the media are, we need to stretch the argument further by focusing on issues of ‘race’ and coloniality of being. As stated earlier, Marxism is to all intents and purposes blind to racial oppression and the reproduction of the ‘colonial wound’ (Mignolo 2009). As Frank Wilderson argues ‘Marxism assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy … the black subject reveals Marxism’s inability to think white supremacy as the base’ (2003: 225). Race therefore becomes important in analysing the position of the (black) worker in the context of postcolonial capitalist modes of production. The black being is seen as an object which does not have ontological density, agency, and existence. The system renders invisible the humanity, identity and social realities of the black worker. For instance, the deaths of the 34 miners were described in the media in a manner that removed their humanity and subjectivity:

Several bodies lay on the ground, some piled on top of the other … some of the bodies lay face down with gaping wounds, others were bleeding from the stomach. One man has half his head blown away.²⁹

Thus the killing of the black body is discursively naturalised and normalised. This kind of reporting alludes to what Cornel West calls ‘black invisibility and namelessness’ (cited in Wilderson 2003: 230). Death, lack of recognition, killing, lynching, and imprisonment among so many characterise the situation of the damned (Maldonado-Torres 2007).

In South Africa, the majority of people, including the miners at Marikana, located in informal settlements and shanty-towns live under what Orlando Patterson (1985) terms ‘social death’, and Arturo Escobar calls ‘social fascism’, defined as:

as a combination of social and political exclusion whereby increasingly large segments of the population live under terrible material conditions and often under the threat of displacement and even death. (2004: 216)

Warren Montag theorises this condition of death thus:

Death establishes the conditions of life; death as by an invisible hand restores the market to what it must to support life. The allowing of death of the particular is necessary to the production of life of the universal … alongside the figure of the homo sacer, the one who may be killed with impunity, is another figure, one whose death is no doubt less spectacular than the first and is the object of no memorial or commemoration: he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market. (2005 cited in Banarjee 2008: 1548)

The way the media views the marginalised black subject is also seen in the way the media in South Africa reports on social protests. Protestors are often framed in negative ways that ignore their subjectivities and lived realities (Chiumbu 2012; Dawson 2012). For instance, in a Sunday Times article, the writer connects former labour protests in South Africa to the Marikana strike:

When municipal workers strike in Johannesburg, we all flee the city-centre. Because we know what is coming – a marauding angry mob of blue collar workers who seethe with hostility and resentment at having to chuck our rubbish into garbage trucks for a miserable salary … and we hear union leaders stoke the resentment among panga-armed members until it boils and the city centre resembles a wasteland of rotting food and waste.³⁰

The media in South Africa, dominated by media oligopolies, has largely failed to give adequate space and voice to protesting citizens. Apartheid legacies continue to perpetuate information inequality in the country due to the entrenchment of a liberal-pluralist media with its misplaced emphasis on neutrality, objectivity and free market place of ideas. This stance presupposes a level playing field regulated by rational discourse and consensus in the Habermasian public sphere sense. As Claasen (1999) opines, a libertarian philosophy cannot understand an economically unequal society. He goes to state:

In a society of structured inequality, the negative liberty and neutrality of the libertarian press leads it into collusion with market capitalism such that its private ownership and inherent market logic become detached from the pursuit of the public good, and are easily grafted into a profit-generating mechanism. What was once a force for democracy is now an agent of capitalism. (Claasen 1999: n.p)

The inequalities of South Africa have been re-organised along class lines, with the underclass of the so-called blue-collar workers, living a damned life at the margins of society.

Media sympathy within neoliberal discourses

Although this article argues that the corporate media in South Africa (re)produce and propagate capitalist discourses and marginalises alternative voices, this discourse is not pervasive and is tampered with articles that seem to attack the exploitation of miners. These stories are covered in a relatively balanced manner. Duncan (2014) writes that much of the media reporting on Marikana shifted after independent accounts of the events leading to the massacre had been published, leading to a greater sensitivity. Indeed, the media published a number of stories that showed the human face of the miners and their families. The sympathetic articles on Marikana raised legitimate concerns regarding issues such as low wages, terrible living conditions, and police brutality, but going back to the issue of gaze discussed earlier, we still need to look at who is speaking. In most of these sympathetic stories, it is still others who are speaking on behalf of the miners, flagging issues that they think the miners are facing. The miners themselves are not called to give their own testimonies and narratives about their lived realities. Across the 60 articles analysed, there are a sprinkling of political commentators, politicians, activists and business consultants who raise issues about the working and living conditions of the miners. However, what is striking about these articles is that they are still locked in a certain ideological logic and do not cross the boundaries by unsettling dominant discourses.

The majority of the articles provide solutions that are framed within neoliberal rationality. For instance, in an article headlined ‘Marikana blood has stained ANC and Cosatu as stooges’,³¹ the writer questions the exploitation of the miners by a capitalist economy controlled by whites, but his solution is the establishment of a cordial and stable relationship between capital, working class and labour. Similarly in an article titled ‘Poor have had enough of promises’,³² the writer raises the daily struggles of miners across the country, but puts the blame on the incumbent government, the ANC and fails to question the operations of capital and empire. In another article, ‘Marikana Tragic, but it’s not Sharpeville’³³ and a few others, the solution to avoid ‘another Marikana’ is the setting up of judicial commission and the strengthening of labour laws. These articles fail to question the MEC that underpins capitalism in South Africa. In a way, the authors of these articles show a form of coloniality of knowledge or discursive coloniality whereby the only discourse for articulating workers’ struggles is a norming and normative neoliberal one. It can also be argued that the writers adopt a problem-solving approach, which accepts existing systems as they are and do not question them, but provide solutions to correct problems within the system. In other words, it assumes that the major components of a system are not subject to fundamental changes (Cox 1986). The end result is the superficial analysis and a world-view that favours the status quo. This is a form of ‘dyconsiousness’, ‘an uncritical habit of mind … that involves a subjective identification with an ideological viewpoint that admits no fundamental alternative vision of society’ (King 1991: 135). The critical or diachronic approach, on the other hand, seeks out the contradictions and conflicts inherent in a social structure and questions existing structures. This approach is emancipatory in the sense that apart from questioning a particular world order and how it serves particular interests, it also uncovers other possible routes for transformation or change (Cox 1986).

Conclusion

The print media in South Africa is no different from other liberal-democratic and consumer-oriented media elsewhere. As stated earlier, the media is largely governed by market interests. Thus, the economic incentives of the media compromise their ability to support and participate in radical democratic communication. Robert Hackett and William Carroll point to a number of issues that are responsible for what they call ‘media’s democratic deficit’, including inequality, centralisation of power, homogenisation, corporate enclosure of knowledge, and an elitist process of communication policy-making (cited in Saeed 2009: 469). The criticism by Hackett and Carroll fall within Marxist political economy critique which as argued earlier is still valid, but taking a coloniality approach, it can then be argued that the South African print media operating under global coloniality is subordinated to the general logic and structure of power that is firmly linked with capital and exploitation. The hidden yet ubiquitous coloniality has manifested itself in the way the print media articulate issues of marginalised people. Although not exactly the main intention of this article, the arguments made herein point to a need to epistemologically transcend or ‘decolonise’ critical political economy of the media by infusing it with other subaltern perspectives such as decoloniality and postcoloniality to create a necessary dialogue between diverse critical epistemic and political perspectives. As Cox (1996: 87) famously stated ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’, i.e. theory should respond to a particular set of conditions. As such, when thinking about how we analyse media in a postcolonial or neo-apartheid context such as South Africa, western-centric political economy of the media approaches are likely to be completely satisfactory or adequate. A growing body of literature argues for alternative theories that ‘de-westernise’ journalism ethics and state, for example, that the African tradition of ubuntu, of respect for communitarian values and human dignity, could form the basis for African journalism (Christians 2004; Rao & Wasserman 2007; Fourie 2008; Sensanti 2010). These approaches explore postcolonial theory and various threads of Afrocentity to critique western notions of journalism ethics which are argued to be constitutive of the capitalist world-system.

It is clear that in South Africa, neoliberal macroeconomic policies and their attendant capitalist practices have led to dispossession, marginalisation, and the death of certain populations, as the Marikana case illustrates. Subhabrata Banerjee (2008) drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s, Achille Mbembe’s, and Michel Foucault’s notions of sovereignty and biopower, calls this economic marginalisation necrocapitalism, which is a distinct capitalist practice that is underpinned by a form of accumulation by dispossession that involves slavery, violence, and death. It is clear that in South Africa the victims of the ‘structural violence of necrocapitalist practices’ (Banarjee 2008: 1556) are the poor and marginalised. The media in the country should question these forms of oppression. A media in a country like South Africa with its long history of racialised exploitation, exclusion, and marginalisation of a whole group of people needs to develop a form of journalism practice that resonates with the experiences of marginalised communities. This will require a rethinking of the dominant liberal-pluralism media framework that currently frames journalistic practice in South Africa.

The following statement by Wasserman provides a fitting end to this article:

For journalism in a new democracy such as South Africa to serve more than an elite, for it to enable citizens to actively practise their citizenship through media, for it to treat all South Africans with dignity, it would have to learn to listen across the different lines that continue to keep South Africans apart – journalists would have to learn to listen to the stories of those on the other side of the railway line, the breadline, the picket line, the barbed wire fence. (2013: 80)

Note on Contributor

Sarah Chiumbu is a Senior Research Specialist in the Human and Social Development Programme at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in Pretoria, South Africa and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow of Media Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Oslo, Norway.

Notes

1. Mark Taylor ‘Turning to decolonial theory’ <http://marklewistaylor.net/theory/#no4>.

2. This investigation came as a result of a request from two professional bodies, the Black Lawyers Association (BLA) and the Association of Black Accountants of South Africa (ABASA) to investigate two newspapers: the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times for alleged racism.

3. Formerly Independent News & Media SA (INMSA), owned by the Irish industrialist, Tony O’Reilly. Ireland-based parent company Independent News & Media (INM) confirmed on 17 June 2013 that its shareholders had voted in favour of selling the media group to the Sekunjalo Group.

4. TNA is a new media company owned by the Gupta family. It owns the New Age newspaper and the 24-hour news broadcast channel ANN7. The Gupta family is very close to President Jacob Zuma, and has managed to attract massive amounts of government spending.

5. The Farlam Commission (Marikana Judicial Commission of Inquiry) launched on 1 October 2012, is the state-supported judicial commission set up to investigate the Marikana massacre.

6. The Star, 28 August 2012.

7. The Star, 27 August 2012.

8. The Business Day, 28 August 2012

9. The rest of the sources were: mine management/owners (14 per cent), political parties (10 per cent), government (9 per cent), and the police (5 per cent).

10. The Times 17 August 2012.

11. Independent on Saturday 18 August 2012.

12. Pretoria News 15 August 2012.

13. Business Day 20 August 2012.

14. Muti refers to black magic.

15. 31 August 2012.

16. 27 August 2012.

17. 19 August 2012.

18. 19 August 2012.

19. The Saturday Star 18 August 2012.

20. City Press 19 August 2012.

21. Citizen 17 August 2012.

22. Saturday Star 18 August 2012.

23. Sunday Independent 19 August 2012.

24. New Age 17 August 2012.

25. Sunday Independent 19 August 2012.

26. New Age 20 August 2012.

27. 19 August 2012.

28. City Press 19 August 2012.

29. The Times 17 August 2012.

30. Sunday Times 19 August 2012.

31. Sunday Times 26 August 2012.

32. The Star 24 August 2012.

33. City Press 19 August 2012. The Sharpeville massacre took place on 21 March 1960 in the township of Sharpeville, 69 people were shot dead by the police. The black protestors were demonstrating against the pass laws.