Marikana mine shootings revive bitter days of Soweto and Sharpeville

Deaths of protesting miners mark low point for democratic South Africa run by a 'co-opted' ANC mistrusted by the poor

Phumelele Gura survived a barrage of police bullets and more than two weeks in prison, where he lay awake listening to the sound of workmates allegedly being tortured. His grandfather and his father backed the ANC. He no longer will.

"I won't vote for the ANC next time because they failed the people," he said. "My family always voted ANC but we don't trust it any more."

Gura, 49, is not alone in thinking the events of 16 August 2012 marked a tectonic shift in South Africa. That was the day when police, enforcing the will of the country's black-majority government, opened fire on striking miners, killing 34 and injuring 78.

The massacre represented "probably the lowest moment in the short history of a democratic South Africa", wrote Cyril Ramaphosa, a senior figure in the African National Congress and a former mining union leader.

Comparisons were made with the bloodiest days of apartheid: Sharpeville, Soweto, now Marikana.

Three weeks on, the strike persists and the dust has not settled. But it is increasingly apparent that this tragedy has shaken faith in the ANC and its union allies as never before; that it has focused scrutiny on the exploitative 140-year relationship between foreign capital and black labour and led some to speculate that the tinderbox of South African inequality is just a spark away from conflagration.

Mining has powered the South African economy, and warped its society, since the arrival of the empire builder Cecil Rhodes. Like many of the millions who burrowed underground to extract diamonds, gold and other minerals, Gura came a long way from home in search of a working wage. He found it as a rock driller at the Marikana platinum mine, owned by the British-based company Lonmin.

"It's hard work and sometimes you drill the rock and a rock falls down on you," he reflected. "That's what we're afraid of.

"We spend eight hours underground. It's very hot and you can't see daylight. There is no air sometimes and you have to get air from the pipes down there."

Gura said he lived in a tin shack with a pit toilet and intermittent electricity and water. He earned about 5,000 rand (£380) a month and, like many workers here, sent a portion home to his family in Eastern Cape province. He ran for his life when the shooting began on 16 August, but was arrested and jailed. "From my cell I could hear the police beating my brothers, telling them to speak what they want."

Betrayed

His partner, Primrose Magwangqana, 45, was afraid she would never see him again. "I thought he was dead," she recalled. "They said to some people, 'your husband is in prison', but later they found out he was in the mortuary."

She too feels betrayed by the party she supported all her life. "I am an ANC member but I won't vote for them next time because they failed us. Only [the expelled youth leader] Julius Malema helped us."

Striking mineworkers interviewed by the Guardian in Marikana this week echoed the sentiment. The ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, which liberated black South Africans and is celebrating its centenary year, can no longer take their support for granted.

Samkele Mpampani, 36, a ringleader who marched on another Lonmin mineshaft this week, said: "I won't vote ANC. They have killed our workers. I don't recognise the ANC any more. Jacob Zuma must step down. It's over now. It's over."

The ANC was already bleeding electoral support before Marikana and sinking into factionalism. The party is accused of enriching a tiny black elite while failing to bring decent education, healthcare and jobs to the poor.

Once a courageous anti-apartheid warrior, Ramaphosa now sits on the board of Lonmin and, it was recently reported, can afford to bid up to R19.5m (£1,480,000) for a prize buffalo.

Protests over poor service delivery have been swelling for years, sometimes fatally, but the scale of Marikana looks like a watershed.

Allister Sparks, a veteran journalist and analyst, said: "It is a cataclysm. Black people saw the police of the black ANC government shooting their own workers. It's shattered the deep-seated trust of the ANC as 'our party', the party you're born into, the party your fathers belonged to.

"The ANC was in the black mind, the black soul, it took on an almost mystical quality. But now they've lost faith in it. The bond is shattered and it happened on television."

The unwritten, almost Faustian, pact made by the ANC at the end of apartheid is creaking under the weight of curdled promises. It set up the ANC's union allies to deliver modestly higher wages for workers while also ensuring labour stability for big business. It saw Thabo Mbeki, the former president, assuring business owners that they should donate to the ANC because "people trust us, we fought for them … they will be patient".

The patience now appears exhausted. Critics say white capital was essentially left untouched and that the purportedly socialist ANC was co-opted by the establishment.

Malema has been calling for a revolution that will make the mines ungovernable until they are nationalised. He has lashed out at British firms such as Lonmin for scooping mineral resources from under the soil upon which workers live in squalid conditions.

Lonmin is easily portrayed as a ruthless capitalist vulture presiding over Orwellian conditions, but the details are bitterly disputed. Mineworkers continue to insist they are paid R4,000 a month and want R12,500. Lonmin asserts that most workers get about 10,500, if bonuses are included.

Economists claim this amount would put them in the top 25% of formal-sector earners in South Africa. "There are a hell of a lot of people in the country worse off than those miners," said one.

Yet it is hard to gloss over the bleak landscape in Marikana, where mine headgear spins, chimneys belch smoke,  and giant corrugated steel and concrete silos loom over scrubland dotted with shacks, rubbish and dung.

The Bench Marks Foundation, an organisation monitoring corporate social responsibility, has described a "yawning gap" between Lonmin's promises and the experience of local communities. "They don't engage, they don't communicate properly with the community," it said.

Defenders of Lonmin argue that housing is also a local government responsibility and that many mine workers use part of their wage to maintain homes in distant provinces.

Lonmin claimed: "There are factual inaccuracies within the Bench Marks report and the company doesn't agree with all the findings. However, it does acknowledge that there are certain areas in which it could be doing better. This is a challenge faced by the entire mining community and requires the co-operation and involvement of many parties."

Writing in South Africa's Sunday Times, Ramaphosa admitted: "There are few innocents in this tragic saga … For wherever we find ourselves, we cannot escape the sense that, through our action or inaction, we bear some responsibility for the circumstances that made such a tragedy possible.

"As we mourn, so too must we introspect … What we do now as a people will determine what we become as a nation."

The government has expressed frustration at the mining sector's slow pace of transformation. The sector failed to meet last year's target of 15% black ownership, transferring only 9% of wealth into black hands. It looks unlikely to achieve the required 26% by 2014.

The horror of Marikana and the daily grinding poverty of mines like it can be traced to boardrooms in London and elsewhere.

Robust

Moeletsi Mbeki, an economist and brother of the former president, said: "It's a 140-year-old problem. The mining industry in South Africa effectively started in 1870. Marikana is telling us that the change in 1994 was to incorporate the black elite into the socioeconomic system that the white elite had been running for 140 years. It is a formula loaded with conflict in which violence keeps repeating itself."

Mbeki does not expect a national "catastrophe" to follow but warned: "There is a lot of popular discontent; you can't say popular discontent is not endemic. The reason why the government reacted the way it did is that they have got to show the poor they can react like the previous regime and crack down on discontent.

"We have seen it before with service delivery protests around the country. The difference this time is a lot of people died in one place on the property of a foreign company."

Just how far could the rage spill in this, one of the world's most unequal and violent industrial societies?

Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, has cast Marikana as a warning, "a bomb waiting to explode".

Justice Malala, a political analyst, wrote of the disenfranchised: "It might make many of us quiver with fear, but here is the cold, hard, truth: they will opt out of the current social, economic and political arrangements and they will choose anarchy."

Paul Verryn, a Methodist minister visiting Marikana this week where he helped broker talks between striking workers and mine management, said the prospect of more violence "nestles in the consciousness of all of us".

He said: "We've got to look very carefully at history. It teaches us that this kind of disparity between rich and poor doesn't go to bed at night. If we don't shift we are preparing ourselves for a revolution."

But while the scars of apartheid unquestionably run deep, other voices warn against nihilism. They argue that racial disparities are narrowing due to the growth of a black middle-class and a gradual but discernible increase in black ownership of companies, homes and land.

Unlike regimes toppled by the Arab spring, South Africa is a country with robust democratic institutions, courts and civil society.

Asked if South Africa was hurtling towards disaster, Sparks said: "I've read that in foreign newspapers for the last 18 years. This is a substantial country, not just a pile of bricks. This is not a country in imminent crisis but it is a country being badly governed, and the constituency that always supported it is losing faith in it."

Meanwhile, amid allegations that police in Marikana shot some miners in cold blood or ran over them in armoured vehicles, the strike continues to boil.

On Wednesday more than 3,000 workers took to the streets. At the head of the march one man carried a handwritten cardboard sign that read: "Lonmin, who gave you power to kill us on our own land? Protect us Juju [Malema].

One demonstrator said: "We work very hard to earn peanuts. Whenever you enter the [lift] cage you risk your life. If they don't give us 12,500, we'll go back to where we're from and break the bank. We will do whatever we have to do to get money. Even if we have to kill to get money, we'll do it."

Asked if he believed whether violence could ever be the answer, the miner replied: "Sometimes violence is the answer."

Obama's joy turns sour as weak jobs figures threaten election chances

Data that shows US economy added just 96,000 jobs in August cast shadow over buoyant convention performance in Charlotte

Barack Obama pleaded for a second term but acknowledged that progress would be slow. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The Democratic party's euphoria at the close of its party convention in Charlotte evaporated within hours when the US government published a dismal set of unemployment figures that threatened Barack Obama's re-election chances.

Obama had fired up the party faithful with a speech that pleaded for a second term but recognised that economic recovery would be slow. "I won't pretend the path I'm offering is quick or easy," he said.

But on Friday morning, the department of labor revealed that the US economy had added only 96,000 jobs in August, well below expectations. The figures undermined the president's oft-repeated argument that his policies, while slow to bring results, are on the right track.

The Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared the figures to be an indictment of Obama's economic policies. "If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover. For every net new job created, nearly four Americans gave up looking for work entirely," Romney said.

The White House response to the unemployment figures was muted, saying the economy is continuing to recover but more work remained to be done.

Republicans are banking on the sluggish economy to take them to the White House. There are two more sets of unemployment figures still to be published, the last just four days before the election on 6 November. No US president since the Great Depression has won re-election with unemployment so high.

Democrats had been buoyed by their three-day convention, dominated by an inspired speech from Bill Clinton on Wednesday night and Obama's more pragmatic address late on Thursday night.

But the jobs figures cast a pall over the celebrations. Although the headline figures showed a drop from 8.3% to 8.1% the fall was mainly attributed to people giving up the search for work. Only 96,000 new jobs were created in August compared with 141,000 in July – well below the rate of population growth. Pressure is building on the Federal Reserve, when it meets on 12 September, to intervene to stimulate the economy.

With the conventions over, the election campaign now begins in earnest and voters beginning to pay attention. Obama, within hours of his convention speech in which he formally accepted the party's nomination to fight the election, headed off early Friday morning on a punishing campaign schedule that took in Iowa and New Hampshire and a two-day bus trip across Florida beginning Saturday.

The Obama campaign teams admits the election is going to be close. Polls have shown Obama and Romney almost neck-and-neck for months. A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Thursday put Romney on 45% to Obama's 44%.

Over the next two weeks, with voters more fully engaged in the campaigns, the coming polls will provide the first genuine indication of who is likely to win the White House.

The Obama campaign team and supporting groups splurged on ads over the summer, spending an estimated $120m mainly negative campaigns portraying Romney as rich, uncaring and out-of-touch.

But now it is the turn of the Romney campaign to spend big, releasing on Friday 15 new television ads in eight battleground states. Over the next two months, the Romney campaign, backed by Super Pacs – political action committees formed by small groups of mainly wealthy supporters – is expected to outspend Obama by two to one.

The Democrats nevertheless had the better of the conventions. The Republican event in Tampa, Florida, was disrupted by hurricane Isaac and there was a palpable lack of enthusiasm for Romney as the GOP's presidential candidate. The delegates were overwhelmingly white and generally older.

The Democratic convention was also disrupted by weather. Obama's speech had to be moved from a 73,000-seater football stadium to a 23,000-seater smaller arena, leaving disappointed ticket-holders, mainly party volunteers, to line up for seats at a screening in the nearby convention centre. The thunderstorms that party officials had cited as the reason for the venue change failed to materialise. Republicans claimed it was moved because Obama would not be able to fill the stadium and feared television images of empty seats.

But the Democratic convention had more energy, with a party atmosphere in Charlotte. The delegates were more representative of America, much more diverse than the Republicans in terms of ethnic background, with more young people and a 50-50 split between men and women.

After Clinton's barnstormer on Wednesday, Obama struck a more low-key approach on Thursday, his tone more subdued compared with the sense of euphoria he created at the Denver convention four years ago.

The more sober approach was deliberate, a recognition of the mood of disenchantment among some voters, tired of fine oratory and more interested in his plans for a second term.

Obama hinted that he would, if re-elected, embark on a bold and ambitious Franklin Roosevelt-style New Deal programme, but offered few details.

Instead, he called for patience."You didn't elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth. And the truth is it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades," he said.

Obama was careful to recognise his own shortcomings, at one point telling the crowd that one of the differences from 2008 was that he was "far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said: 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'"

Among Obama supporters leaving the arena after the speech, Sandy Blakney, 54, a psychiatrist from the Raleigh area of North Carolina, said she understood why Obama had adopted a low-key approach.

"He did a little bit of the soaring rhetoric but in general his tone was a little more subdued, a little bit more serious," she said. This reflected the gravity of the economic crisis he faced on taking office.

She added another reason. "He does not want people to think he has become over-confident."

Man who attacked ex to try to bring on miscarriage jailed for 10 years

Former police officer who used balaclava and fake accent branded 'callous, cold-hearted and utterly selfish' by victim

Matthew Cherry was convicted of punching his ex-girlfriend repeatedly trying to bring on a miscarriage in a 'savage attack'. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA

A former police constable jailed for 10 years after repeatedly punching his pregnant ex-girlfriend in the stomach to try to bring on a miscarriage is "callous, cold-hearted and utterly selfish", his victim said. Matthew Cherry, 35, used a balaclava and a fake foreign accent to launch the "savage attack" in Caroline Craft's ground-floor flat in Bournemouth. He punched her in the stomach and back, targeting her unborn child and leaving her "bloodied and bruised", but she was not seriously harmed and gave birth to a boy called Archie – now 15 months old.

Cherry was angry and upset that Craft, 27, would not have an abortion and the pair split up, Winchester crown court heard during the eight-day trial. Cherry wept and nearly fainted when the jury delivered the unanimous verdict, and he kept repeating "I didn't do it" as he was jailed.

But in a statement Miss Craft, who is also a police officer, said she had no sympathy.

"The past 18 months have been a living hell. The actions of Matthew Cherry on that day were callous, cold-hearted and utterly selfish. I will never forgive him for what he did to me and what he so nearly could have done to my baby," she said.

Cherry, now living in Southampton, denied attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent in March last year in the "well-planned" attack.

But the jury convicted him, rejecting his claim that he was not the attacker and was several miles away renovating a house.

Organic food no better for vitamins and nutrients, suggests US study

Organic produce in Illinois: the US study says organic food generally reduces exposure to pesticides and bacteria. Photograph: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images

Organic produce and meat typically is no better for you than conventional food when it comes to vitamin and nutrient content, although it does generally reduce exposure to pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to a US study.

Crystal Smith-Spangler, who led a team of researchers from Stanford University and Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care, reviewed more than 200 studies that compared either the health of people who ate organic or conventional foods or, more commonly, nutrient and contaminant levels in the foods themselves.

Organic food: nutrition study leaves health question unanswered

The researchers were unable to give consumers hard information about the impact of pesticide contamination on health. Photograph: Garry Gay/Getty Images

It seems there is little evidence that organic foods are more nutritious than conventionally grown foods, according to the most comprehensive study to address the question to date. However, the findings by researchers at Stanford University, California, do suggest that eating organic foods can reduce the likelihood of consuming pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Lead author Crystal Smith-Spangler and a team of researchers looked at 240 published studies of the nutrient and contaminant levels in organic and conventionally grown foods, as well as studies of humans consuming the two types of food.

The researchers reviewed 17 studies (six of which were randomised clinical trials) of populations consuming organic and conventional diets, and 223 studies that compared either the nutrient levels or the bacterial, fungal or pesticide contamination of various products (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, milk, poultry and eggs) grown organically and conventionally. The duration of the studies involving human subjects ranged from two days to two years.

cara melahirkan anak tanpa rasa sakit

cara melahirkan anak tanpa rasa sakit-Sepanjang hidup ni, saya belum pernah lagi dengar dari mulut seorang ibu yang mengaku mereka tak rasa sakit pun ketika melahirkan anak. Mestilah sakit, kan? Selalunya mereka akan cakap hanya Tuhan saja yang tahu betapa sakitnya masa tu. Lebih-lebih lagi "time" melahirkan anak sulung. Pengalaman pertama lah katakan. Huhh... Betapa besarnya pengorbanan seorang ibu terhadap anaknya sejak awal-awal lagi.

Namun begitu, saya pernah terbaca mengenai petua tradisional yang dikatakan dapat membantu para ibu melahirkan anak tanpa berasa sakit. Ataupun mengurangkan rasa sakit.

Hah! Ada ker cara melahirkan anak tanpa rasa sakit. Gi mana tu?

Oh, begini bunyinya petua yang saya maksudkan tu;

1. Sewaktu kandungan anda berusia 6 bulan, mula amalkan meminum 1 sudu minyak kelapa. Minum sebanyak 3 kali dalam seminggu.

Kemudiannya...

2. Apabila kandungan anda mencecah 9 bulan, tukar kekerapan pengambilan minyak kelapa tadi. Dos nya tetap sama iaitu 1 sudu dan minumlah setiap hari sehingga tiba hari kelahiran anak anda.

Lagi satu, sebaik-baiknya anda buatlah minyak kelapa tu sendiri. Ia bertujuan memastikan anda benar-benar meminum minyak kelapa yang bersih dan selamat.

Di samping itu, janganlah anda lupa untuk selalu berdoa kepada-Nya agar segala urusan melahirkan anak berjalan lancar serta dijauhi daripada segala perkara yang tak diingini. Amin.