In the years following the Second World War, labor unrest spread across French West Africa. Agricultural workers, railroad workers, port workers—all struck for higher wages and social security. Their highly coordinated actions and the French government's ultimate concessions earned the strikers much renown. In subsequent decades, they have been celebrated in fiction and film and they play a starring role in the story of decolonization and nationalism in West Africa.

Writing in the mid-1990s, however, the American historian Fred Cooper offered a more cautious assessment. The strikers, Cooper argued, were not necessarily nationalists, nor necessarily calling for the end of French Empire. Rather, they demanded to be further implicated in Empire by claiming their equivalence with metropolitan French workers. Their families were the same, their needs were the same, and, thus, their wages ought to be the same. Rather than read their strikes as a powerful statement of anticolonial consciousness, Cooper suggests that we see them instead as the moment when the French began to realize that an empire of equals was too expensive a prospect and that industrial equivalence might be best deterred by negotiating African national sovereignty and, ultimately, African independence. Cooper explained, and Frantz Fanon warned, that in the closed forum of the postcolonial nation, equivalence with French workers would eventually be subsumed beneath the demands of national unity.Footnote ¹

A rash of illegal strikes and work stoppages in 2012 in South Africa have once again raised the question of labor relations in the Global South and the role of equivalence in the complicated politics of postcoloniality. In August 2012, South African police, in an attempt to break an illegal strike at a platinum mine in the country's northwest, shot and killed thirty-four miners in broad daylight. The standoff between the South African state, the multinational Lonmin Company, and striking miners at its Marikana mine, opens up questions about the global political economy, to be sure, but it also fits into a decades’ long narrative about struggles for equivalence—for relative equality—in industrial South Africa and about state, labor, and industry maneuvers that have, from time to time, resulted in spectacular violence. In the past, such maneuvers have resulted in significant political realignments (usually for the worse); only time will tell whether Marikana will result in the same.

In the immediate aftermath of the violence at Marikana, commentators drew a number of analogies from the South African past. Most obviously, they referenced Sharpeville, a segregated black township south of Johannesburg, where, in March of 1960, South African security forces, then defending the apartheid regime, murdered sixty-nine protesters. The victims in Sharpeville had gathered to protest the apartheid state's requirement that adult Africans could only set foot in South African cities if they showed a passbook proving they were employed by local whites.

Marikana presented familiar images—singing protesters dancing in the faces of uniformed, well-armed police, followed by shots and slowly settling dust. Not surprisingly, the South African government and its defenders rejected the comparison. The national police commissioner defended her officers, noting that the strike had been violent—even deadly—before the police arrived. (Ten people, among them two policemen, were murdered in the days leading up to the fateful mass shootings.) On the day of the massacre, miners were armed, some with spears and machetes. Journalists filed reports of strikers marching on the police voicing “war chants.” Yet the Sharpeville comparison can only go so far, as 2012 is not 1960; unlike in those dark days, those murdered at Marikana now enjoy those democratic rights for which the protesters died at Sharpeville. Now the dead, too, can cast their vote, which many of them doubtlessly cast in support of the African National Congress (ANC), the party that has governed South Africa since apartheid's end in 1994.

In the wake of Marikana, other commentators saw beyond Sharpeville to draw different lessons from the South African past. For some commentators, Marikana brought to mind earlier massacres like that at Bullhoek in 1921, when the white Union of South Africa's police forcefully and murderously evicted the popular prophet Enoch Mgijima's followers from the land they occupied in the Eastern Cape, in violation of the country's segregationist statutes. The Israelites were a prophetic, Christian movement, who occupied the land in expectation of Christ's return—and with the faith that his intercession would turn police bullets to water. They were wrong, and in the wake of Marikana, lurid stories circulated that the workers there had prepared to face the police by girding themselves with ritual medicine (known locally as muti), under the guidance of so-called “traditional” healers.Footnote ² Taken together, Marikana, like Bullhoek before it, thus might hearken back to the zero-sum of colonial conquest, when communities mustered every resource at their disposal to resist imperial incursions—and after which, then as now, the poor were disproportionately counted among the dead.Footnote ³

Such comparisons are apt and help to distill meaning out of the violence at Marikana. But it is critical to note that before the violence, what made Marikana outstanding were not the state of labor relations, nor the political economy, nor even the conviction that forces beyond the visible were at play—all of which are typically South African fare. Rather, it was the boldness of the miners’ demands. These workers had the temerity to claim equivalence. Some commentators quickly noted the symbolic value of the R12,500 that the striking miners demanded: R12,500 is the average income of South Africa's white citizens—three hundred percent more than the average amount paid for the work of the Marikana dead.Footnote ⁴ This was a bold demand, at which Lonmin management, some in the ruling party, the media and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) scoffed.

The NUM was once a radical force for change in South Africa, as was the alliance between labor and civil society. Yet in the run up to killings, as they pleaded with the miners to go back to work, the state and its allies advocated positions in some ways beholden to the logic of the colonial and racial past. As Cooper and other students of the history of development have noted, colonialism in Africa spun a story of social progress through the analogy of individual advancement. Africans were children; Europeans were adults. As children, Africans’ needs and desires were necessarily different, less sophisticated, and simpler than those of Europeans doing comparable work. Empire promised maturity, but it did so by repeatedly cautioning its charges to go slow, lest they stumble; just in case, colonial administrations erected apparatuses like customary law and indirect rule to ensure that African children were protected from too headstrong a plunge into supposedly “universal” modernity, as well as the host of segregated cities, color bars, wage bars, and other restrictions thought necessary to prevent maturation that was too rapid. As Karen Fields argued in her seminal study of millenarianism in colonial Central Africa, struggles within and against colonialism often took the form of contests over time, the “now” of the anticolonial versus the “not yet” of empire.Footnote ⁵ With the coming of independence, Africa was supposed to catch up to time; recall Nkrumah's edict that “we must run while they walk”; witness repeated promises of modernization. Yet as Cooper indicates, in many places, national sovereignty was negotiated at the expense of the promise of time and by the 1970s and 1980s, buffeted by international economic winds, structural adjustment and neoliberal policies, real economic indicators in many African states were going backward, rehearsing the postapartheid regress of South Africa's poor.Footnote ⁶

The comparison between the workers’ demands and colonial discourse is striking and yet serves as further evidence that South Africa has rejoined the rest of the continent in the postcolonial world, with all that entails. Yet for commentators, Marikana still is best explained through reference to the local past. In an article in the news magazine Africa Report, published days after the killings at Marikana, labor lawyer Heinrich Bohmke (who was for a while a key figure in social movement politics in Durban on South Africa's east coast) drew one of the most surprising—and potentially enlightening—analogies by referencing the struggles of Afrikaner workers for equality as white men under British imperial authority.Footnote ⁷ Bohmke notes the similarities between Marikana and the 1922 Rand Revolt, a general strike of white workers across the industrial Witwatersrand, best remembered for white-on-black pogroms during the unrest. The revolt raged for weeks before the Union government called in the military to crush it, killing approximately two hundred strikers in the process.

Historians have long placed the Rand Revolt as a critical moment in the construction of a white-worker/black-laborer dichotomy. Yet in a recent study, Jeremy Krikler has tried to finesse this issue, urging us to see beyond the stark racial violence to the struggles for common citizenship that especially motivated Afrikaner strikers. These “announced themselves as rightless,” Krikler writes, and in their actions we can “see acute pain and fear, a jolting internal dislocation.”Footnote ⁸ They saw themselves as people who “had been cast out of the citizenry” in the wake of dramatic economic change—the decline of small-scale agriculture and industrial decline after the First World War. In their way, these workers struck to bend time back to their side, even if their racialized rhetoric (“workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”) and violence was undoubtedly “repellent,” to borrow Krikler's word. As Bohmke notes, white Afrikaner workers and their English-speaking allies imagined themselves to be losers in South Africa's emerging political economy, with many of the Afrikaners also remembering the erosion of their sovereignty in the wake of the South African War (1899–1902) at the turn of the century. Although then, as now, the state was in the hands of former militants who fought against supposedly foreign control—then, Jan Smuts, a one-time guerilla fighter against the British, who headed the South African Party government; now, Jacob Zuma, a one-time guerilla against the white minority state, now heading the ANC government—this apparent political power provided those who saw themselves on the bottom of the economy little comfort. The workers on the Rand struck, they killed and were killed themselves—and ultimately, they won—first wresting political power away from Smuts in 1924 and then seeing the state embark on a decades-long project to wrest the white poor from abject poverty by developing an oppressive, racialized welfare state, which spoke time's language of modernization. Apartheid was only the culmination of this process, as it lifted the average white South African to unequalled heights of economic security.

And that is where they remain to this day. The Rand Revolt reminds us that industrial actions are historical events, which emerge from a particular context to leave a legacy for the future. In many ways the Marikana strikers still inhabit the world made by the Rand Revolt: one in which the immiseration of the black masses was a political compromise worked out by white labor, white capital, and white political power. Times have changed, but this fact needs to be restated: Eighteen years after the end of legislated segregation and despite the number of spectacularly wealthy black businesspeople like the former NUM leader Cyril Ramaphosa, poverty is racialized in South Africa. (The South African media and some white observers made Ramaphosa their focus.) Whites are relatively rich and economically secure while blacks are not.

So what does it mean for the dead at Marikana to have demanded R12,500 and to have died in the cause of equivalence? They essentially said that this will not stand, that the state and Lonmin had run out of time. It is a commonplace today to hear South Africans debate over how much time has passed since the end of apartheid. The ANC government argues that 1994 is just past and that they need more time to undo the damages of centuries of wrong; the poor claim a different mandate, bemoaning that, despite the years, nothing has changed. Time has not moved, Marikana's workers seemed to say, and so we will move it—just as Afrikaner workers claimed against the dictates of the state and their former allies in 1922. Those workers called for a revolution, a concept that, at its core, relies on a conception of time—processing. As Cooper reveals, in postwar West Africa, the French government managed to hold on to time by parrying calls for economic equality with calls for political commensurability at the UN and other international fora. Nationalism was popular and symbolically important, to be sure, but even as enthusiasm for the nation-state bubbled over in the late 1950s, commentators such as Frantz Fanon recognized that nations were in themselves “minimal demands”—states did not guarantee the end of wretchedness by dint of their existence.Footnote ⁹ Decolonization displaced the demands of workers to be seen as coeval with imperial power, to be acknowledged as inhabiting the same temporal space, just as their nations had come to occupy recognized spaces on the map. Every sweatshop revelation and industrial accident that reveals massive suffering in the former colonial world reveals the success of the displacement, as conditions are explained away in the language of difference, just as in the old days.Footnote ¹⁰

Indeed, the world being the way it is, with inequality expanding amidst austerity programs and financial meltdowns, there is no guarantee that the Marikana workers’ bold demands will yield a more just South Africa. Like 1994, Marikana may also bring a false dawn. It may continue the postapartheid “tradition” of small scale, disparate movements that fail to gain wider traction. To be sure, the public was outraged by the scale of the killings, but some suggested that the protesters were little more than “thugs,” and mainstream white economists and bloggers alike insisted the miners were paid too much anyway.Footnote ¹¹ And Marikana may still embolden demagoguery and, crucially, may also embolden authorities. (The expelled ANC youth leader Julius Malema tried to place himself alongside the miners for a while.)

But then again, this change might stick. After Marikana, there are signs that the old days are being relegated at last to the past. Labor unrest has begun to spread across South Africa; impatience is widespread. The strike is now over; the workers did not earn everything they wanted, but they won massive concessions, which NUM and the company would doubtlessly have scoffed at not too long ago. And they have set off copycat strikes beyond the mining sector, all of which share in common the demand to short-circuit time, rather than negotiate for a marginally larger wage. A worker representative of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), the small trade union behind the Marikana strike, trumpeted: “This would have taken us fifteen years to achieve with the unions.”Footnote ¹² It cost many lives, but history suggests that the struggle for equivalence always has. Violence has been and, apparently, remains, the quickest way to short-circuit time, to catch up with those impersonal and abstract forces that say go slow, even as their beneficiaries march farther ahead. It took time to crystallize the wages of violence in the wake of 1922—but we see them clearly now. Only time will tell whether or not the workers’ blood invested at Lonmin's mine will yield similar dividends for South Africa's future.