Selection of media coverage in the context of the Plough Back the Fruits campaign. The campaign focuses on BASF’s connection to Lonmin and the Marikana massacre.
And finally, Tagesthemen introduced a news report from the site in Marikana – a settlement in the Platinum Belt north-west of Johannesburg where precious metal mines are located – with the headline ‘Police shoot mineworkers’.1
The initial dismay at the violence was soon followed by cautious attempts to establish the event’s background: on 23 August 2012, the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that ‘A whole nation is distraught because it cannot grasp what has happened here on the hill in Marikana’. It continued by arguing that ‘The young democracy in South Africa has been cut to the core’. The reporters evidently viewed these events as extremely important: Marikana, they stressed, was set to become a ‘symbol’ of the violence occurring in post-apartheid South Africa. For both German and international news outlets, the massacre marked a ‘turning point’ in South African history.
Reports from Marikana described the grief and anger expressed by the workers and their families after the massacre. They also addressed the poor and unhealthy living conditions that people are exposed to in the slums, and the lack of running water and electricity, just as much as the low wages the workers receive of around 400 euro monthly, which, of course, were the reasons why the workers had gone on strike in the first place.
Analyses of the events focused on two aspects. In the first place, reporters attempted to determine who had been responsible for the escalation of violence: were the security forces or the workers mainly at fault? Whereas Der Spiegel (27 August 2012) accused the police of having ‘lost their nerve’ and of ‘firing automatic weapons into the crowd’, Die Zeit expressed understanding for the action that the police had taken. The newspaper quoted security expert Johan Burger from the Institute for Security Studies in Cape Town as saying, ‘In that situation, I also would have given the order to open fire.’ Similarly, Welt am Sonntag (19 August 2012) and Tagesspiegel (3 September 2012) stressed that it was the strikers’ aggressiveness and readiness to use violence that provoked the security forces’ sharp response.
Secondly, the reports emphasised that the violence pointed towards the existence of a deep domestic political crisis. ‘Marikana’, it was argued, was a symptom of the failure of the governing party – the African National Congress (ANC) – to create better living conditions for all South Africans since the 1994 victory over apartheid. At the same time, the reports linked people’s rise through the ranks of the ANC to promises of personal wealth and implied that this had been the driving force behind the political commitment of people involved in the party. On 24 August 2012, the Süddeutsche Zeitung proposed that ‘There is no one on the horizon to replace Mandela’.
All of these reports published by German correspondents share a common perspective: they treat the massacre in Marikana as a domestic political issue. Despite giving individual explanations for the massacre – a corrupt government, poorly trained police, violent workers or poor working conditions – the reports all depict it as an event whose causes and context were specifically South African.
This chapter does not question these claims. In fact, our research demonstrates that there are good reasons why the journalists came to these conclusions. However, in the days that followed the massacre, no one had as much time or opportunity to cover the events as meticulously as Greg Marinovich, the South African investigative journalist, whose recently published book, Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre (2016), lays out the tragedy’s background in detail. Marinovich had discovered internal police documents proving that senior officials in the security forces had planned early on to end the protests violently rather than to deal with the workers’ demands for increased wages and improved living conditions – and that they had done so with the support of influential politicians such as Cyril Ramaphosa, a former trade unionist and colleague of Nelson Mandela. Marinovich’s research culminated in the discovery that the police had murdered at least 34 miners in cold blood: some of the strikers had been shot in the back of the head after they had withdrawn from the main site of the protests to another area (Small Koppie) a few hundred metres away.
Instead, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the reports published by German correspondents in August 2012 had something essential in common: they all blanked out the question of what the massacre had to do ‘with Germany’. None of the reporters attempted to highlight possible links between Marikana and Germany. As such, news readers and viewers would have assumed that no such link existed. From the German point of view, therefore, the massacre was purely a foreign policy issue.
All of the television and most of the newspaper reports portrayed Lonmin – the company which was mining platinum in Marikana, and which was at the centre of the workers’ protests against low wages – as a South African venture. This, of course, was not wrong, but a number of correspondents were more precise, referring to Lonmin as a ‘South African-British company with its headquarters in London’. Even Greg Marinovich, whose book was published four years after the events, fails to provide further details.
Only a few of the German newspaper articles published in August 2012 vaguely indicate that South Africa’s platinum mines are indeed embedded in the global economy. Bartholomäus Grill, a correspondent for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit at the time, stated on 23 August:
There is a brutal labour struggle raging in Marikana, and it is a reflection of global conflicts. On the one side, we have a multinational corporation attempting to extract raw materials from the mine as profitably as possible; on the other, an army of wage slaves who feel exploited – and in between, irresponsible managers, power-hungry trade union bosses and state bodies that are failing miserably.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung (23 August) explained to its readers that Lonmin was finding it difficult to accept the workers’ demands for higher wages because world market prices for platinum had crashed owing to the ‘weak European car industry’.
None of the journalists, however, mentioned that BASF, a major German corporation with its headquarters in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, was Lonmin’s most important customer – a detail they could have picked up from Lonmin’s publicly available annual reports. In fact, the company’s reports clearly state that no one else buys as much platinum from Lonmin as BASF and Mitsubishi (Japan). They also point out that the company would face serious economic difficulties if it were to lose either of its two major customers. It is therefore interesting to note that the connection between Lonmin and these companies was first highlighted not by a media outlet, but by the historian Jakob Krameritsch, editor of the collected volume Das Massaker von Marikana. Widerstand und Unterdrückung von Arbeiter_innen in Südafrika (2013).
BASF is a chemical company that requires large quantities of platinum to build catalytic converters for cars and diesel-powered cars in particular. Platinum is a precious metal with catalytic properties: it converts the nitrogen oxides produced during fuel combustion into less harmful carbon dioxides – at least in theory. It is clear that catalytic converters are not keeping the air clean, at least not to the extent to which industry wanted everyone to believe they would, and this is particularly the case with diesel engines. However, this point is mentioned here only to emphasise the irony of the irony. What matters is that BASF, like Bosch, the automotive supplier, was a member of the German automotive industry’s ‘diesel cartel’ from the outset, a cartel that attracted extensive media scrutiny during the summer of 2017. In acquiring the American catalyst manufacturer Engelhard in 2006, BASF’s executive board had taken the strategic decision to become the industry’s global market leader. In Port Elizabeth, some distance away from the source of the platinum – which is indispensable to BASF – the company claims to have ‘built a world-class factory’ for the production of vehicle catalysts. The catalyst sector now accounts for about 10 per cent of BASF’s total sales of around 70 billion euro.
Lonmin continued to speak openly about its excellent business relations with BASF right up until the publication of its 2012 annual report. The 2012 report was published in 2013 – close to the time when the massacre took place; and in the years that followed, BASF discreetly disappeared from Lonmin’s reports. Yet this has not at all affected the companies’ close business relations: during a press briefing on BASF’s annual results held in February 2016 in Ludwigshafen, Kurt Bock, chair of BASF’s board of executive directors, confirmed that ‘We are a very, very large customer of that company [Lonmin]’.
BASF annually buys platinum worth 500 million euro from Lonmin – platinum that miners have hauled up to the surface from 1,200 metres below the veld. Without its German customer, Lonmin’s business model would collapse. Are these just abstract financial details, interesting only to economic experts? Is it not in the public interest in Germany or Europe as a whole to publish this information? Or are these actually important, relevant facts that help complete the media’s coverage of an event like the bloodbath that took place in the Platinum Belt?
This chapter should be understood as arguing in favour of the wider importance and broader relevance of these seemingly marginal details; not mentioning the links between BASF and Lonmin constitutes a failure on the part of the media. In what follows the chapter therefore considers the reasons why this failure occurred, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them.
Describing the events that occurred in Marikana and her reaction as she watched them unfold on television from Johannesburg, Martina Schwikowski, a correspondent for the newspaper taz, recalled: ‘It was a shocking experience; with the bullets raining down, the focus on the people dying in front of the camera. I jumped up as if I had been electrified. It was a traumatic experience’ (ZAPP, 27 April 2016). Her reports for taz reflected that experience and then analysed the domestic political situation. This horror, amplified by the TV images, may well have been the initial reason why the massacre gained international media attention.
But ‘unnatural deaths’ in the numbers that occurred in Marikana happen every day somewhere in Africa, whether it is violent clashes in eastern Congo, famine in Somalia or a combination of both in South Sudan (to mention just a few recent examples). The world’s press, however, rarely takes notice of these catastrophes, which are scarcely less terrible than those that occurred in South Africa. There must therefore be other reasons that triggered those relatively detailed reports from Marikana. On the one hand, many international Africa correspondents are stationed in Johannesburg or in Cape Town, making South Africa the second-largest reporter hub after Nairobi in Kenya. Even in today’s era of social media, citizen journalism and other recent forms of news distribution, the physical presence of professional foreign correspondents certainly helps to ensure that information coming from ‘their’ countries is disseminated across the world.
What is more, South Africa continues to occupy a special role in Europe’s cultural imagination, even after the collapse of the apartheid regime. The country’s ‘peaceful’ transition to democracy and equality that occurred under the guiding hands of Nelson Mandela, and the Truth Commission, which addressed the wrongdoings of the past and planted reconciliation in the hearts of the people, have inspired an idealised image of hope that is essentially romantic. The extent to which the post-1994 media enthusiasm could be viewed as providing a form of recompense for the fact that European countries and companies – including BASF – benefited greatly from their cooperation with the apartheid regime is a subject that will have to be left to the psychologists. Daimler’s promotional film Labour of Love (1994) could be interpreted as another possible example of such an act of recompense. The film, set to stirring music, depicts workers of all colours and creeds voluntarily renouncing part of their wages to build a red 500 SEL in the Mercedes factory in East London for President Nelson Mandela. Daimler’s message was obvious: like South Africa, the car was composed of many different colourful parts that ultimately fit together to form a harmonious whole. Yet in the decades before then, Daimler had built Unimog armoured vehicles for the apartheid regime, which were then used to violently suppress the black population’s struggle for equality. But why have hard feelings? South Africa was now the ‘rainbow nation’.
Against this background, the massacre in Marikana undoubtedly fulfilled the criterion of journalistic relevancy (it was both an unexpected and an extraordinary event); therefore, it was clearly a ‘man bites dog’ story that stood outside the manner in which the ‘new’ South Africa is usually framed.
This meant that the reporters had to quickly find a new way of framing the events. As stated above, they turned to the narrative of ‘domestic political failure’ and perceived ‘endemic levels of corruption’ among the ANC government formed by Mandela’s successors. The Tagesspiegel’s correspondent described the miners’ strike on 3 September as ‘completely out of control’. Marauding hordes were said to have ‘laid entire inner cities lame’, ‘blocked motorways’ and ‘set fire to schools’. The newspaper even went as far as to claim that ‘half of the black population is currently worse off than it had been during apartheid’. The message was clear: perhaps the black population would have been better off had apartheid never been abolished.
This tendency among European journalists to claim that Africa cannot be left to the Africans, at least not without it ‘going to the dogs’, was noted by the anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961): ‘The report intends to verify the evidence: everything’s going badly out there since we left.’ Before the rise of communication studies and its specialised branches, and long before Edward Said’s critical analyses of imperialism, Fanon, a psychiatrist, had already fully understood hegemonic Eurocentric discourse.
The intention here is not to accuse German correspondents of intentionally concealing the links between BASF and the massacre that took place in Marikana: that would be tantamount to a naive conspiracy theory. However, it does seem reasonable to suspect that, during the crisis, the reporters shied away from depicting the bigger picture. In this case, the bigger picture involves the relations of dependency and exploitation established over centuries by European conquerors and colonialists. It would probably be too much to ask of European journalists that they remember Fanon’s point that ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World’. Fanon was arguing that Europe had only been able to become as rich as it is by raiding various colonial territories with the aim of enslaving the people who lived there and stealing raw materials. However, it would certainly help if reporters were to read Fanon’s views about the conditions under which decolonisation takes place. Fanon’s arguments in The Wretched of the Earth, which were based on his own experiences in North and West Africa, have proved to be prophetic in relation to post-apartheid South Africa. Fanon pointed out that after a colony gains political independence, a small local bourgeoisie culturally aligned with the former colonisers takes over political leadership. It secures the economic interests of the former colonial powers despite independence, while the majority of the population continue to live in squalor – a situation that plays into the hands of the multinationals, as they can continue to tap into a reservoir of workers that will never run dry.
In post-apartheid South Africa, the rise of the local bourgeoisie has its own term: Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). For many years, the poor regions of the Eastern Cape and the failed neighbouring state of Zimbabwe have been acting as the Platinum Belt’s bottomless reservoir of workers. BASF and Marikana is just one (extreme) example of how far German and European companies are willing to go in the pursuit of their interests in Africa. It is certainly worth taking a closer look: dam builder Lahmeyer, Siemens, Strabag and other stakeholders from the coal industry are just a few companies that could be mentioned.
Finally, when we asked various South African correspondents why they had not traced the relationship between BASF and Marikana after the massacre at the platinum mine, almost none of them wanted to answer. Only Martina Schwikowski from taz was ready to address the question. In an interview with NDR’s media magazine programme ZAPP (27 April 2016), she stated: ‘It’s a pity that we were more focused on the shocking experiences that were unfolding at the time instead of looking further to see whether there were any links to Germany. In the North, most people don’t really understand what people’s working and living conditions are actually like [in the South]. But we benefit from these conditions, and I think this means that we also have to make people in the North aware of this situation.’
1 See also the Panorama television report broadcast on ARD on 28 April 2016, and the ZAPP report on NDR on 27 April 2016, as well as the article ‘Der Platin-Komplex’ published in Die Zeit on 28 April 2016.
Selection of media coverage in the context of the Plough Back the Fruits campaign. The campaign focuses on BASF’s connection to Lonmin and the Marikana massacre.
