Review note on “Violence in a Time of Liberation Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, 1994”, by Donald L. Donham (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press) R325.95 from Kalahari.net

Fourteen thousand people died during the violence that wracked South Africa between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and 1994, the year of the democratic elections. Donald Donham focuses on two deaths in this period – the murder of two black workers at a gold mine near Johannesburg. I always attributed this violence largely to Inkatha and the third force manipulations of F.W. de Klerk’s government. Donham places the violence in the context of international studies of political transition, while he also notes how easily these two deaths were accepted as ‘normal’ faction fights between tribes on the mines. Both of the dead were Zulus.

Donham is an academic anthropologist, based in the USA, and a writer with a gift for storytelling.

At a time when South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is criticised for bringing race into everything and for harping on the past injustices of Apartheid, Donham recalls a period, not twenty years ago, when white bosses on the mines divided their employees not only by race, but by tribe. Following traditions which date back over a century, as Donham shows, the mines attributed handiness with a drill to Xhosas and shaft sinking skills to Sothos. Black workers came to accept and to defend such job divisions themselves, as entitlements. When the racism implicit in the system became impossible to sustain, both before and after 1994, this created uncertainty and instability that provided one of the contributors to discord.

In 1994, Donham got the co-operation of a Mining House (Randgold) and the black National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to undertake “a dispassionate and in-depth study, unlinked to any particular incident, of the complex social relations on a SA mine.” The mine he studied was ERPM. Two murders happened to occur on June 16, 1994, just before he began fieldwork. Ambushed by this event, he switched his study to focus on this particular incident.

Not surprisingly, the victims of the unprovoked, violent attacks come off rather better in the telling than the management and the NUM. The managers let their guard down as they tried to move to a labour relations system less constrained by the practices of the Apartheid period. The NUM focused their organising efforts at the mine on Xhosa workers who were aligned to the ANC. (No one was ever identified as being responsible for the murders or for the “highly organised” attack on Zulu workers.)

But the analysis is no stitch-up. Donham refers comprehensively to the rich legacy of historical and analytical writing on the SA gold mining industry. The book is complemented by arresting photographs by the author and by Santu Mofokeng which help to illustrate the descriptions of the grim and inhuman working and living conditions of black mineworkers. Donham’s narrative structure reminds one of Rashomon, or Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet”, where the same violent incident is re-told separately, from the vantage point of four obververs. While Donham does not approach the narrative mastery of Janet Malcolm (“The Journalist and the Murderer” and “The Iphigenia of Forest Hills”) he tackles explicitly the uncertainities in understanding what happened, as part of the story.

A theme of the book is the failures of the transition in SA from the perspective of mineworkers.

“The elections of 1994 in South Africa ... gave black South Africans democratic rights in return for the protection of a purified but conservative capitalism – an economic system that has produced greater social inequalities than apartheid along with the systemic unemployment of at least one third of the black population.” (p.x)

Donham makes much of the fact that, when he returned to SA on a follow-up visit in 2005, the ERPM mine was owned by a black capitalist with a sporty Mercedes and a crashed Lamborghini. But the after story is so much more intricate. There is not a word of reference to the Randgold fraudster Brett Kebble, perhaps the original corrupter of the ANC Youth League, who controlled ERPM in 1994 and was a prime mover in its transformation as an instrument of Black Economic Empowerment. Brett Kebble’s purified form of capitalism was a white part of the “darker side” of national liberation.

South African readers of this engagingly written and multifaceted tale will be struck by the innovative spelling of many names. It is not clear which are errors and which are efforts to disguise the real identity of people. [“Frances” Wilson clearly falls into the former category!] It is remarkable that while Donham finds it significant that Gwede Mantashe is Xhosa (without naming him), he does not recognise James Motlatsi (the NUM President) as a Sotho or Kgalema Motlanthe as a Tswana. (Motlanthe is now the Deputy President of SA. He preceded Mantashe as NUM General Secretary.) ( )