The Quiet Death of Lonmin

Their souls are silent now. Shot execution style. Flowers do not grow on abnormality.

At first, I saw them everywhere. They had different names besides ‘miners’. Some were vagrants. People who did odd jobs. Some were homeless. Some sold newspapers. Some begged for food. Some sold toys at the traffic light or pretty much anything in order to make a living. Some were garden boys. Yes, in South Africa, we still call grown men ‘garden boys’. I presumed as I had been brought up to believe that they were the masters of their own destiny. The day that Lonmin went down in history, the miners were not quite the masters of their own destiny.

We will never forget the future abandoned. This is what Africa does with revolutionary acts. The miners were people. People who only wanted to be understood but it was deceit that controlled the present. Then the game was up. Then the agenda came. The temptation to distort truth was there alongside the glamour of the international press. Alongside frenzy, there was propaganda too. I am inclined to think and feel very strongly about this, as I am sure all people of colour did. It does not matter what race, what faith, what gender. They changed the world. The miners. They fought for what they believed in. They were bold, brave and brilliant. They dreamed with a kind of certainty about what they wanted not for themselves but for their children.

This is why the miners went to ‘war’. What are the breathing lessons that we learn from war? We inhale death. We exhale inhumanity. War is a nasty business. We did not learn much from Lonmin. Our police followed in the footsteps of the Special Branch that day of the wuthering heights of apartheid. They turned to the literature of the police of apartheid. I can only paint and write about what I see in the post-apartheid world we live in today in South Africa. We live in a land of extremes. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Wherever we look there is wrongdoing and corruption at all levels in the spheres of government. We live and believe in the hierarchy of politics because is it not our votes that placed this government into power. In the eyes of the people in power, we do not exist.

They make their own rules. In the end, we are the losers. We want with an irresistible urge things to change. We cannot wait for transformation to take place but how quickly we forget. The zoo parade of the way of life during apartheid when detention, assassination, murder, and imprisonment was the order of the day but we want to believe that there is now a harmony that exists amongst humanity in South Africa not monsters. Death is death and it is not pretty in South Africa. If you have a long memory, you will remember those ghosts. If you are a child, you will remain an innocent. You will visit apartheid in a museum. Perhaps I should not write like this but I look at the world I live like a child. All adults do who have experienced trauma in childhood.

It comes with the history of violence, ghost stories, the major earth, men and women being born with a different texture of hair, the kinkiness of my curls, open parachutes descending like dreams. It comes with having been born learning to welcome the inevitable, the honourable, and conditioned to the universal loneliness of the working classes around us. It comes with being born with a different mother tongue, ordinariness, drink it in, bathe in it, swim in its muddy waters, and stand mesmerised on any shore by its contrariness. The journalists and photographers wearing their Mona Lisa smiles in this volatile region. This colossus comes with being consumed by the habit of looking, living with, surviving danger by habitat and by life. As I write this, I am shattered.

In the process of the days that followed, the miners became warriors. Their wives sang the blues. They danced to the tune of pain. They waltzed to suffering. The sorrows of many spoke to our hearts again. In the weeks that followed the Lonmin case was on television. Fodder. It was a terrifying sacrifice when the volcano people began to speak. I looked at the television screen. On the one hand, it meant nothing to me. On the other, it meant everything. Were they not my estranged brothers and sisters? For example, for years to come if you are a writer, artist, and poet. If you are an African. You are an African if you live in Africa. To the dead I have this to say who were catapulted into another realm from spiritual poverty and victory to another schizophrenic dimension.

The big strings of its orchestration. It comes when a family homes in and start to cry a river and the whole world starts laughing at the macabre of life. It comes with having been raised with a mother, yet another woman, another muse, another goddess. It comes with having been subjected to being called monkeys. These same monkeys riding on your back. A self-portrait. It comes with the flushed curve of your palm, myth, legend, and symbol. Epic. It comes with the pure rhythm of my feet, the snake in my hips. It comes with phenomenally homing in on ancient yet lovely bones in the morgue. Grown up beautifully with peaceful resolutions in the home. Even something like this, like death, a succession of deaths can feed, nurture your imagination.

Your children have to live as you did once. Listening. Oh the tears, the words, the organic observations, the songs exploding into stardom. It comes with watching shadows disappear standing at the water’s edge. It comes with moody blues. Standing on the ground looking up at the sky. Words of a poet, a writer, a documentary filmmaker in slow motion compelling, unique, relevant, fluid, pure while you guess at the intensity behind my words. I am history breathing. Funny how a brush with poverty, with innocence, with flawed human beings, characters everyone on the world’s stage putting everything into perspective. It comes with planting yourself comaed near kindling or a reservoir like a butterfly. It comes with wisdom, grief.

At certain intervals I felt ravished and then sated. It keeps us alive. That what hurts the most. It comes with my version of a lament and an ode. It comes with the intense imagery that inspires men, children and women. Citizens of the world not just a continent. In order for us to become visionaries, our thinking literally has to evolve from a series of compromises. It has to come with the arrival of education, the origins of what was lost in translation. It comes with a feast of novel blueprints on the ego, the intellect, psyche and the brain. Your victory was not a hollow one. Your memory, your struggle, your life, there was glory and depth in all that you did, all that you fought for and it was a gift. I was not prepared for mourning. I do not think that anybody really was.

Abigail George
Abigail George
Abigail George is an author, a screenwriter and an award winning poet. She is a Pushcart Prize, two-time Best of the Net nominated, Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Prize longlisted, Writing Ukraine Prize shortlisted, Identity Theory's Editor's Choice, Ink Sweat Tears Pick of the Month poet/writer, and 2023 Winner of the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award. She is a two-time recipient of grants from the National Arts Council, one from the Centre of the Book and another from ECPACC. She won a national high school writing competition in her teens. She was interviewed by BBC Radio 4, and for AOL.com, the USA Today Network and The Tennessean. Follow her on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram @abigailgeorgepoet.