On this day in 2012, the Marikana Massacre took place when South African police fired on striking workers, killing 34 and injuring 76 in the most lethal use of force by the state in half a century.

The shootings have been compared to the infamous Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when police fired on a crowd of anti-Pass Law protesters, killing 69 people, including 10 children. The Marikana Massacre took place on the 25-year anniversary of a nationwide strike by over 300,000 South African workers.

On August 10th, miners had initiated a wildcat strike at a site owned by Lonmin in the Marikana area, close to Rustenburg, South Africa. Although ten people (mostly workers) had been killed before August 16th, it was on that day that an elite force from the South African Police Service fired into a crowd of strikers with rifles, killing 34 and injuring 76.

After surveying the aftermath of the violence, photojournalist Greg Marinovich concluded that "[it is clear] that heavily armed police hunted down and killed the miners in cold blood."

Following the massacre, a massive wave of strikes occurred across the South African mining sector - in early October, analysts estimated that approximately 75,000 miners were on strike from various gold and platinum mines and companies across South Africa, most of them doing so illegally.

A year after the Marikana Massacre, author Benjamin Fogel wrote "Perhaps the most important lesson of Marikana is that the state can gun down dozens of black workers with little or no backlash from 'civil society', the judicial system or from within the institutions that supposedly form the bedrock of democracy."

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  • Abraxiel
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thinking of an elaborate pun on posit as in "to put forth as the basis of an argument" and positive in the usual sense and ovipositor.

      • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I'll take a crack at it.

        So you've heard about the experiments where they make ants wear stilts?(look this up if you don't, it's a cool survival trick with silver ants in the atacama desert and necessary to set up the joke). I met a guy who was doing something similar. He was looking into how ant height changes their ability to get certain resources back to the nest. He took a nest, and modified some of the eggs so that the ants would have different heights, some taller, some shorter. There was an odd by-product, the taller ones' legs just abruptly ended. Now ants don't have toes like us or feet, but they have little grabbing pads in sort of the same place as our toes. Now, it appeared this species attached pheromones there to let other ants know where they found things like food or water. He was trying to figure out if he could continue testing with them like this, when they found out they had breached the lab and gotten into the neighboring lab, which was testing mice in mazes. The shorter ants were coming back with bits of cheese from these mazes. The taller ants would go out and find it, but couldn't work together to bring it back, because they lack toes in taller ants.

        Let me know what you think

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      ·
      1 year ago

      now have 'horrible pun from Abraxiel on Hex Bear Dot Net' on my wishlist. observing with eager anticipation