The tiny town of Marikana (established in 1870) was never much of a town and for a long time was really no more than a railway station and a collection of shops. In fact, the outside world would not have heard of Marikana at all if it were not for the notorious Lonmin Marikana platinum mining strike and shooting, where 34 striking Lonmin miners were shot and killed by police in 2012. I visited Marikana three times for a research project on visual activity, looking to record visible signs of the 2012 atrocity - graffiti, posters, stencilled signs saying “Remember Marikana” - but there is no visible trace and no memorial. There is only the shabby town in the shadow of Lonmin’s platinum processing plant within whose ambit, thousands of people live in poverty. So much platinum has been hauled out of the ground, you would think the place would be electroplated in money, but it is not.
Stencilled sign
A few shops and a railway station
The current form of the town of Marikana reflects an early white Afrikaner farming history, with small shops and a railway station on the early Pretoria-North-Midway line. In about 1910, the farmers from the area around Marikana requested the railway siding on this line so that they could transport their agricultural goods to urban markets in Pretoria. To this...
