My Kokosi

On approaching the township, flanked on your left stand heaps of rubbish, barbed wire fences with sordid plastic bags clinging for dear life on steel razor teeth, and there about you find children digging methodically in garbage piles.

Rain sheets down from a perfect dome of clouds dominating the expanse and human noises subside on yet another thunderous night, but nearby a tavern is in full swing, with revelers spending lives and wages on rare whisky and cheap cigars.

This is a newly evolving under-class of mine worker prosperity, with purported affiliations to the affluence of middle-class life, young men and women who have had a taste of city life boasting the latest phones and shoes, pouted lips smacking lenses for perfect ‘selfies’.

Raised by strong hands of aimleiiss parents and aunts worn out by years of kneeling on ceramic floors of mansions while waking up on piss stained blankets in shanty shacks made of stolen corrugated steel sheets; these youngsters are living the dreams they missed.

Their wishes are for a better life in the new imperial cult of world-class lifestyles, where they can vicariously exemplify success for their parent as well, those who worships their sons for being the first to buy a car on their dusty street.

After years of being brutalized by their inadequacies in metropolitan dog-eat-dog games, many have returned, found jobs through nepotism and corrupt means synonymous with the present political dispensation.

They become town clerks, managers, supervisors in gold mines and boiler-makers or construction workers, bred in a squalid place, left only to dream of the new-pin neatness of designer labels and ‘bank-owned’ cars of some irrational exuberance, while renting townhouses from white Afrikaner real estate agents.

But what can be expected of generations forged from the crucible of a life surrounded by eleven mines, besides an HIV pandemic that spreads like wildfire in backyard taverns catering for the ‘made’ ones?

It is a known fact that the mining industry has largely been responsible for some of the most heinous crimes against humanity this country has ever witnessed, from the poisoning of water resources to exposing workers to radioactive silicosis causing agents.

Though the industry is highly profitable, it is also lethal, and has ruthlessly uprooted people from their lands, and in my region, an extensive collusion between the Merafong municipality and capital continues to this day, at the expense of lives and livelihoods.

Shopping malls are built to monopolize business interests, clinics renovated without silicosis and tuberculosis wards, not even adequate supplies of ARV’s, while classrooms are built among dilapidated buildings of aging and under-resourced apartheid era schools.

Under guise of political compliance with state regulations, mining corporations such as Goldfields, Shaft Sinker, AngloGold (now bearing a suffix Ashanti) and BME pent on wealth beyond any means, they have managed to fool both the victims and their greedy accomplices in government offices.

The industry is known to use the judiciary to amend legislations; they utilize health municipal infrastructure and personnel to safe guard secret causes of workers’ diseases and deaths.

Research among affected residents has yielded allegations as scandalous as falsification of medical records of workers, and editing of pathology reports to conceal traces of cancer causing chemical agents in mining related illnesses experienced by many residents of Merafong.

The mines even lobby finance institutions to concoct financial schemes and contracts which steal benefits from unsuspecting workers, all done under the auspices of legal practitioners who throw wool over the eyes of illiterate clients and  exploit their situations for other sinister motives of profiteering.

And all this harm is done under the condition that mining is an inherently dangerous industry, which also is bedrock of South Africa’s development and economic growth.

Though most mines have been revealed to have financial arrangements that would put its former executives in acute constitutional difficulties; most legal obligations have been averted through puny CSI Initiatives hailed as successes in annual reports distributed by these company at exuberant conferences and gala dinners.

But undeniably, the seemingly irreversible demise of Merafong and its perpetual decline into extreme poverty is tied to the perilous history of the mining industry, and its continued disregard for human life and socio-economic development of communities from which labour is harvested.

Forced depopulation through ‘random’ squatter camps is also a crime against humanity, and this is staunchly stated by the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court, but most arable lands are still usurped from black people in this age of economic apartheid by corporations pent on mineral monopoly.

Elite loyalties having always been with their insatiable desire for the accumulation of more capital, social, environmental and economic justice will forever remain an eyesore for visionaries of new ways of profiteering.

Since the explosives company BME (Bulk Mining Explosives) annexed the Losberg hillside, much of Fochville has been turned into an equivalent of Chenobyl, and no inquest will be held of course into the deteriorating health of the community, which would determine blame and therefore compensation.

No research into the health impact of the company’s close proximity to residential areas has been conducted, nor has research into the health of mine workers been made public, in spite of the hot, silica-filled, dusty and insanitary conditions prevalent in the mines.

And considering that today, death from occupational disease is classified as ‘natural’ in our country; it comes as no surprise that our government hasn’t shown interest in justice for miners, who make a majority of the employed citizens of this country.

No inquest has been held into a single death which occurred as a direct consequence of exposure to excessive levels of dust and chemicals, no employer prosecuted for exposing workers to harmful substances in the workplace.

Utilizing and repurposing mine waste rocks for foundations of a shopping mall is one way of burying a dangerous environmental liability, while catering for the exorbitant consumerism punted by media and financed by wages of insecure workers.

No significant reduction in environmental incidents is visible around Merafong, yet mining companies congratulate themselves with pronouncements of their so-called ‘management of cyanide and waste generated during gold production’.

While dust emissions have not been mitigated in many areas, companies such as Anglo are boasting about plans to remediate areas impacted by contamination from tailing storage facilities dotting the West Rand landscape.

But of late, with its Environmental Management Programmes, the company has managed to ‘develop strategies for rehabilitating contaminated soil and ground water resources’, only after more than a century of exploitation and an inexhaustible continuation of degradation of the environment.

Today, our townships have become prison-like compounds that enslave the mining and agriculture industry’s workforce, and reminiscent of the diabolical spirit of the infamous Land Act, Africans have been driven into a new type of ‘native reserves’, where we are but a cheap source of labour for pennies.

The self-same ‘native reserves’ of the cursed apartheid years, which were funded through industry and legitimized through a rogue judiciary, are now welcoming mining conglomerates boasting names of black empowerment partners’ on boards and public relations campaigns.

Names of struggle stalwarts such as Sipho Pityana and Cyril Ramaphosa are brand accolades donned by corporate brands, bearing the blessings of a ‘struggle aristocracy’ which seems more versed in latest fashions and automobiles.

While the state’s police force has been instrumental in sustaining apartheid’s legacy of intimidation, this ‘democratic’ institution is covertly involved in mass incarceration of thousands of young black men, who now toil daily on white-owned farms as unpaid labour.

The police force and it’s piggybank prison system also seems certifiably co-opted to become guardians of elite interests, and security guards wielding guns at miners protesting for their share of the golden pie are the same black desperate faces, take Marikana for an example.

Through our townships, prisons are filled and maize fields tended to by inmates circulated around farms owned by racist ex-military generals, for the purported benefit of a nation under siege from all sectors of the corporate world.

I am left to wonder what it would take for the mining industry to pay reparations to affected communities and individuals, to compensate not with pittance but capital, for the killing and paralyzing of local workers on an industrial scale.

Will the growing number of miscarrying young women who worked at ‘explosives companies’ become another statistic of corporate neglect, while enduring widows bury their children with severance packages squandered by incompetent lawyers and funeral societies?

What of the thousands of young men being recruited by mines to pillage earth’s dwindling resources for unworthy remuneration, squandering their health in the name of economic growth and productivity?

These and many other questions require answers, and we as a community seem complicit in the continuing tyrannical silence that shrouds our most blatant murder, because generations are passing through chemical fires and radioactive heat to be forever maimed.

While Zamazama’s are mushrooming around every mine housing complex, and illegal deals are making fly-by-night millionaires of the most affluent yet under-educated of generations, the corporate elite are making exorbitant profits and raking bonuses to buy entire islands.

And while ‘undetected’ rock falls kill innumerable youth, I suppose this begs the question, how was this rampant up-for-grabs attitude engineered, and how does poor black youths fit into the equation?