South African embassy, Trafalgar square, London
4-7pm Friday 16th August 2013
Supporting Groups: Caribbean Labour Solidarity; PASCF, The Pan-Afrikan Voice, All Afrikan Peoples Revolutionary Party, London Miners Support Network, Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE), Global Justice Forum (GJF), Colombia Solidarity Campaign, Algeria Solidarity Campaign
The Marikana massacre was deliberate. S.A. Police killed 34 and injured 78 striking miners. Many were shot in the back &/or on the ground. Razor wire, sub-machine guns , armoured cars. Horses and helicopters were used. 270+ survivors were rounded up and charged with the killings. Witnesses are being regularly murdered as the whitewash official inquiry rolls on. The workers struggle for genuine social transformation continues.
Weekly picket, South African embassy, Trafalgar square, London
Thursday 8th August @ 5-7pm
Community meeting
On Azania South Africa beyond apartheid? Capitalist predation in a neo-colony
Film: Dear Mandela
@ Tuesday 10th Sept. Venue: to be announced
We invite joint solidarity action with all those interested in campaigning on Marikana and like mining atrocities and other forms of anti-people repression by Imperialism all over the World! For more information contact: 07597078221
AFTER APARTHEID? The Global Political Economy of the Marikana Massacre
The Marikana Massacre (16th August 2012) was the deliberate murder of striking miners (34 shot dead, 70+ injured) by the South Afrikan/Azanian state, run by the one-time liberation alliance, ANC-COSATU-SACP. The neo-colonial ANC state murdered in collusion with the UK-based multi-national company LONMIN: it, like others is gorging on Azania’s wealth extracted at a terrible social and economic cost to the workers who labour underground in notorious conditions for starvation wages while living in amenity-deficient shack townships.
Neo-colonialism names the link between ex-colonies and the White Supremacist world of capitalism-imperialism, now disguised as so called ‘globalisation’.
The Marikana Massacre confirms that the ANC is running the world’s latest Afrikan neo-colony. Neo-colonialism involving Afrikans began with Haiti after the Haitian Revolution. It spread in Latin America, following Spanish-Portuguese rule. Then to Africa: Liberia (1820s); Ethiopia (liberated from Italy in 1941); then came The Sudan (1956) and Ghana (1957), the “wind of change” swept in “flag-independent” neo-colonies; finally Azania/South Africa (1994). Ex-colonies involved in anti-capitalism-imperialism are not neo-colonies. All neo-colonies are defined by an internal class/social strata rabidly committed to ripping off and even killing the masses for itself and imperialism that maintains it in office/power. This class arose in South Africa largely after 1994, through “Black/ African Economic Empowerment” programme.
White Supremacy runs today’s neo-colonies through crazy neo-liberal finance capital, using the UN Security Council, and the Breton Woods set-up (World Bank, IMF+) as revised in the late 70s and 80s (Uruguay Round, WTO+). The neo-colonial class signed-up to the lie that this system is benevolent: made up of “aid donors”, the source of neutral, necessary foreign direct investment, protectors (from “terrorism”, “drugs cartels” and “destabilisation”), bringers of the “efficiencies” of the international “free market” of privitisation (only the polluted air remains free), where every country enjoys its own “beneficial, equitable competitive advantage”.
The 1st anniversary of Marikana Massacre should remind everyone of the murderous ruthlessness of imperialism and its servants & agents in the neo-colonies. LONMIN shows up an imperialism busy disembowelling our countries, and demolishing our mountains; driving our people from their lands, their water, their fishing grounds, leased out/privatised for pittances to all comers. Oil, gas, minerals are ripped-off in the same way, leaving behind ruined landscapes – as in the Niger Delta. Jamaica’s main watershed came close to being dug down for bauxite. Imperialism’s new technology-based MNCs have their hands almost directly in the pockets of poor people in the neo-colonies of Afrika, Asia and Latin America.
Nothing is more important now than a proper understanding of this system of world-wide oppression through imperialist neo-colonialism. Unreserved support must be given to those in the Global struggle against it. Above all, the way must be found to defeat a monstrous enemy with its deceptive new face.
