‘Platinum’ by Jack Shenker and photographer Jason Larkin.

South Africa: Marikana

On 16 August 2012, sixty-nine seconds of video footage raced across laptops, television screens and mobile phones around the world. The footage, shot from a single camera, showed armed South African police officers at the bottom of a hill opening fire on a group of men running down towards them. The men were striking mineworkers, and by the end of the day thirty-four of them would be dead. Amid clouds of dust raked up by the bullets, an explanation for what happened swiftly emerged. These miners were violent extremists, responsible for the deaths of several members of the security forces as well as many of their fellow workers in the preceding few days. Their strike was illegal, and opposed even by their own trade union, and it was dragging South Africa’s economy into the mire. High on drugs and persuaded by a local witchdoctor that they were invincible to ammunition, several of the miners had charged recklessly towards police lines, brandishing traditional weapons. In fear for their lives, officers had no choice but to gun them down.

This explanation gained credibility as it was repeated, again and again, by police commanders, by business leaders, by government ministers and by many journalists. “You had a situation where workers were armed to the teeth, and they were killing their colleagues,” explained South Africa’s national police commissioner, who later congratulated her officers for displaying “the best of responsible policing” during the tragedy. “Police retreated systematically and were forced to utilize maximum force to defend themselves.”

We now know that almost every aspect of that explanation was a lie. If you shift the camera and view the same events from a different angle, a totally contrasting story emerges: one in which the miners did not charge at the police, but were instead deliberately herded towards them; one in which the police did not shoot reluctantly in self-defense, but rather pursued unarmed, fleeing workers and executed them at close range; one in which the tragedy of Marikana was not really a tragedy at all, but a deliberate massacre borne out of a toxic collusion between international corporations and the state.

Writing about another famous miners’ strike more than half a century ago, the late anti-apartheid activist Ruth First claimed it was “one of those great historic incidents that, in a flash of illumination, educates a nation, reveals what has been hidden, and destroys lies and illusions.” What happened at Marikana has forced many in South Africa and beyond that country’s borders to ask themselves what other establishment narratives might have been assembled out of lies and illusions, and about the lenses we all use to make sense of the relationships between power, money and exploited labor forces. The answers aren’t always comfortable. South Africa’s story—of a “rainbow nation” that successfully liberated itself from the shackles of apartheid—has been an inspiration to people in every corner of the planet. But if you shift the camera angle very slightly, what does liberation really look like?

Read the book by Pulitzer Center grantee Jack Shenker, with photographs by grantee Jason Larkin, here. The text is also available in Xhosa.

Last week marked the second anniversary of the end of South Africa’s six-week long Marikana miners’ strike. More than 30 miners were massacred by police at the start of the strike and, as Pulitzer Center grantee Jack Shenker writes in Foreign Policy, the episode “brought South Africa’s post-apartheid fault lines to the surface and shocked a nation.”

South Africa’s wealth lies beneath the surface, and for more than a century and half, the business of extracting this wealth has shaped the country’s political and economic fortunes. Jack and photojournalist Jason Larkin have been taking a deep look at the lasting impact of the mining industry’s exploitation of labor.

“Under apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) declared that the wealth below South Africa’s soil belonged to the people and vowed to eject white monopoly capital from the mines,” Jack writes.

“Once in power though, the party’s rhetoric shifted dramatically. Although many well-connected black South Africans have joined the boards of major mining corporations, the traditional structure of the industry has remained intact and become part of what some critics say is a “co-dependent comfort zone” of power and wealth in the new South Africa, melding together certain business, political, police, and trade union interests in support of a lucrative—for some—status quo.”

In a penetrating feature story for The Guardian’s weekend magazine, Pulitzer Center grantees, journalist Jack Shenker and photographer Jason Larkin, revisit Marikana and find that the fault lines dividing Africa’s richest economy have continued to deepen.

“This region is once again in the eye of a storm which commingles wealth, power and an extraordinary battle for change from below – the outcome of which could not only reshape South Africa, but echo much further afield as well.”

“Sometimes I ask myself, why me? Why did this have to happen again?” says 31-year-old Andile from the Khayelitsha township in Cape Town, South Africa. “But the problem is I could have got it anywhere, on the bus, in a taxi, in my work. It’s everywhere.”

Andile has extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), a form of the airborne disease that is resistant to the four main groups of drugs used to treat it, meaning treatment can take years and requires alternative drugs that have more side effects.

He’s had tuberculosis for more than two years but it’s not the first time he’s been infected.

“Where I stay, the environment is not right, it’s not clean. I could have got TB there, or on the taxis we use as they never open the windows,” he says.

TB has long been known as a disease of poverty. Dense housing, shared living space, poor ventilation, poor nutrition and poor healthcare systems are the prime conditions for the infection to spread, and thrive. This ancient disease was known as the “White Plague” in 18th century Europe and still kills more than one million people a year globally.

It’s a complicated disease with the potential to affect many parts of the body and it can remain latent in people for many years, leaving them unaware they are infected. The main active form of the disease affects the lungs; if left untreated it can cause considerable lung damage, resulting in eventual death.

Read the rest of the story and see Pulitzer Center grantee Meera Senthilingam’s project: South Africa: When the Drugs Don’t Work

This Week: The White Plague

RETURN OF THE WHITE PLAGUE

Pulitzer Center grantee Meera Senthilingam, writing for CNN Health and Cosmos, notes that tuberculosis has long been known as a disease of poverty. “Dense housing, shared living space, poor ventilation, poor nutrition and poor healthcare systems are the prime conditions for the infection to spread, and thrive. This ancient disease was known as the ‘White Plague’ in 18th century Europe and still kills more than one million people a year globally.”

These days, South Africa has been particularly hard hit by a resurgence of the disease, including a deadly new strain known as extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) that is resistant to the four main groups of drugs used to treat it.

“We treat half a million cases a year and today, the epidemic has taken a turn with drug resistance,” Keertan Dheda, professor of medicine at the University of Cape Town, tells Meera. “We treat 8,000 cases of resistance a year and now a chunk of those have developed resistance beyond XDR-TB – incurable TB.”

UNDETECTED IN VIETNAM

In Vietnam, another country facing a tuberculosis epidemic, the disease now claims 18,000 lives a year. About half of Vietnam’s TB cases go undetected, contributing to its rapid spread.

Pulitzer Center grantees David Rochkind and Jens Erik Gould, in a report forAl Jazeera America, find that most of the TB cases in Vietnam are easily treatable and survivable if caught in time, but that funding for TB awareness programs and treatment centers is scarce.

INDIA’S PRIVATE SECTOR HEALTHCARE

After the world’s largest democracy went to the polls last month, Narendra Modi emerged as India’s new prime minister. In his former post as Gujarat state’s chief minister, the business-friendly Modi was celebrated for leading an economic surge built around innovative public-private partnerships.

But Pulitzer Center grantee Michael Edison Hayden, whorecently reported on the mixed results of Modi’s public health insurance program in Gujarat for The New York Times India Ink blog, says that while private insurers almost always profit from these partnerships, ordinary citizens often get shortchanged on care.

“The majority of doctors I spoke to trashed the plans, saying that they relegate poor patients to the same problematic government hospitals they always used before,” writes Michael in a story forOzy. “The difference, they said, was now private insurance companies were seeing a rise in revenue from state-related losses, as state hospitals fell deeper and deeper into debt.”

Until next week,

Tom Hundley
Senior Editor

South Africa: Return of the ‘White Plague’

“Sometimes I ask myself, why me? Why did this have to happen again?” says 31-year-old Andile from the Khayelitsha township in Cape Town, South Africa. “But the problem is I could have got it anywhere, on the bus, in a taxi, in my work. It’s everywhere.”

Andile has extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), a form of the airborne disease that is resistant to the four main groups of drugs used to treat it, meaning treatment can take years and requires alternative drugs that have more side effects.

He’s had tuberculosis for more than two years but it’s not the first time he’s been infected.

“Where I stay, the environment is not right, it’s not clean. I could have got TB there, or on the taxis we use as they never open the windows,” he says.

TB has long been known as a disease of poverty. Dense housing, shared living space, poor ventilation, poor nutrition and poor healthcare systems are the prime conditions for the infection to spread, and thrive. This ancient disease was known as the “White Plague” in 18th century Europe and still kills more than one million people a year globally.

It’s a complicated disease with the potential to affect many parts of the body and it can remain latent in people for many years, leaving them unaware they are infected. The main active form of the disease affects the lungs; if left untreated it can cause considerable lung damage, resulting in eventual death.

Read the rest of Pulitzer Center grantee Meera Senthilingam’s article, published on CNN and part of her project: South Africa: When the Drugs Don’t Work

Halting the Spread of TB

South Africa is one of only two countries where the incidence of tuberculosis is still rising. To make matters worse, many cases are now resistant to drug treatment, meaning some patients are being sent back home while they are still infectious.

In a report for the BBC, Pulitzer Center grantee Meera Senthilingam follows a team from the University of Cape Town that is using new tools to investigate how the return of patients to their communities affects the spread of the disease.

Our Destination Is in Sight

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison—a free man after twenty-seven years. Tall and thin, he carried his head high as he always had. But something was different. His good friend Bishop Desmond Tutu said he had grown in generosity of spirit for now he understood the fears and anxieties of his adversaries. He had left his anger behind, saying, if he had not done so “then they would still have me.”

Mandela was relentless in his fight against apartheid and he beckoned the world to come to his side. “We have walked and not fainted,” he told a crowd of two thousand gathered at Riverside Church in New York that June as he asked for support in maintaining sanctions against South Africa. “Our destination is in sight. Our victory will be your victory.”

Unrest, bloodshed, secret talks, and negotiations followed. In April 1994, while South Africa held its first free elections tens of thousands stood in long lines or slept on the ground waiting to vote. On May 10, one billion television viewers witnessed the inauguration of the country’s first black president.

Mandela served a five-year term all the while embracing the power of truth to heal. He gave women a voice, he granted individualized amnesty, he advocated for free health care, and he supported the Springboks (mostly white) rugby team.

When Mandela left office he devoted himself to the welfare of children—working towards an integrated school system, rebuilding dilapidated schools, creating new ones in rural areas, starting school feeding programs to keep children in school. Although he came late to the cause he fought the stigma against HIV/AIDS, saying, “AIDS knows no custom. It knows no colour. It knows no boundaries.”

Returning to his home in Qunu when he saw that people washed their clothes in the stream, the same water they used for drinking, he took on the fight for access to clean water.

On July 18, 2013, crowds gathered outside the hospital in Pretoria to sing “Happy Birthday, Madiba” in celebration of Mandela Day, the 95th birthday of their former president. Brass bands played and vuvuzelas blasted in what may have been the biggest birthday party ever. People from all walks of life painted houses, cleaned streets, planted trees, and volunteered in schools. Meanwhile birthday greetings poured in from Africa, Australia, Europe and the Americas. Bishop Tutu told the world that Mandela “makes us walk tall as South Africans.”

Mandela’s long walk ended yesterday, on December 5. He died having shown the world what one individual can achieve by putting aside bitterness to pursue a dream. Many Mandela Days still lie ahead.

– Kem Knapp Sawyer, Associate Editor via her blog

With the sad news of Nelson Mandela’s death, my thoughts went back to a glorious February afternoon in 1990.

What will he say? What will Mandela say after 27 years in prison?

That was the feverish question infecting the multitudes who had gathered in the center of Cape Town on the day when the leader of the African National Congress walked to freedom. I was in the crowd, as the South African-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. For hours we waited as Mandela, who had been freed earlier that day, reunited with his family, friends and comrades in the struggle against apartheid.

Suddenly, he appeared — a thin, gray stranger, for nobody except a precious few had seen him in nearly three decades. And then he spoke, and a familiarity settled in.

In a deliberate, thoughtful cadence, he uttered pretty much the same words that had landed him behind bars all those years earlier. He repeated the tenets of the ANC’s Freedom Charter, the words he spoke the last time he had been heard in public, at his treason trial: Above all, the end of exclusive white rule, the abolishment of apartheid and racial oppression and the government that enforced it, the demand for equality, dignity, freedom; but also, the continuation of the mass struggle until a new democratically elected government would be formed and the economy reordered to share the country’s great natural wealth for the benefit of all races. Though more than one-third of his life had been taken away from him, he spoke not of revenge but of reconciliation. South Africa needed to come together, not remain apart.

It was a masterful performance, I thought, a demonstration that he hadn’t lost his touch. Mandela needed to convince his supporters, and his foes as well, that he hadn’t changed during all those years away. Physically yes, but in substance certainly not; he was still the same.

This was imperative to maintain the support of the ANC’s hard-edged youth, who knew Mandela only as an imprisoned myth and who had been raised on a campaign of resistance to authority. Here standing before them now wasn’t an old man who had sold out, who had gone soft. The white government hadn’t gotten to him. Nelson Mandela would still be their champion; like the boxer he had once been, he hadn’t backed down. Now he exhorted his countrymen of all races to seize the moment, to be strong and move forward with him.

Read the rest of Pulitzer Center grantee Roger Thurow’s piece about Mandela. 

“Think of it like this. We have an unemployment rate in this community that has been estimated up to 80 percent. There is no work. You live in poverty, and suddenly there is the hope of getting a monthly income via the disability grant. I’ve heard it described to me as winning the lottery,” Jabu Van Niekerk said as she told the story of a Raphael Center client forced to make the decision between life and death in order to feed her family.

The disability grant is available to residents who are deemed too sick to work—especially those with worsening stages of HIV and AIDS. One of the ways an HIV positive person would qualify for the grant is to have a CD4 count that is lower than 350 or 200 depending on the measure.

Read the full story here, by Pulitzer Center student fellow Samantha Thornton.

Photo: Clients at the Raphael Centre are encouraged to participate in workshops in this brightly painted building. Image by Samantha Thornton. South Africa, 2012.

Ntuthu Mxalisa talks to Pulitzer Center student fellow Samantha Thornton about her changing dreams after becoming infected with HIV in South Africa. She had been a journalist, but after contracting HIV, she started working at the Raphael Centre in Grahamstown, an HIV resource center, as an activist and educator. She tells Thornton that with education and information, she was able to achieve another dream – to be a mother with an HIV negative child. Read more about the Raphael Center and Ntuthu here.

Ntuthu pauses and smiles during a video interview in which she tells the story of becoming a mother while living with HIV. Image by Pulitzer Center student fellow Samantha Thornton. South Africa, 2012. Read more stories from HIV women in South Africa.

Long waits and too few providers are consigning more and more women to illegal abortions in South Africa. Photo of Nurse Sharon Hobo, an abortion provider, in the procedure room at the women’s clinic in the Dora Nginza Hospital in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Image by Jake Naughton. South Africa, 2012. See the whole slideshow here.

Richard Nzwana, blind since the age of 12, walks to the neighborhood church behind a small residence without the aid of a walking stick or guide. Image by Pulitzer Center student fellow Samantha Thornton. South Africa, 2012.