“The South African Student Movement stressed black self- reliance and taking care of your own business and honouring what you are and what you have and taking responsibility for what you can do and can become.”
~ Bishop Malusi Mpulwana1
Dear Nhlanhla
I cried as I read the press release announcing MARIKANA STILL…….FONTEIN at the Market Theatre on 22 August 2026 at 19:30. Of course, in August, we are forced to face the “fungibility of Black lives” as articulated in the press release. Often it is bandied about without “a call to reclaim a Pan-African imagination rooted in dignity, memory and collective liberation”. Rarely is it made by individuals or organisations who accept the responsibility of responding to and investing in that call. Many are willing and available to point to the devaluing and dehumanisation of Black life. Yet too busy for the spiritually stretching, mentally expanding and back-straightening work of pouring life into our people one action at a time.
The fortunate understand that the demand for justice for Marikana, for Stillfontein, for Usindiso, for the Scenery Park 21 killed at the Enyobeni tavern is at its core about Black life.
It is about the Black life that iPhupho L’ka Biko and The Forge fight to preserve and revive at Amanzi Sessions calling youth in Johannesburg towards sobriety. Insisting that recreation can and must happen without alcohol. A critical call of our time.
We see how the band championed the renaming of De Beer Street to Mthokozisi Ntumba Street. Playing a part in reminding the residents of Johannesburg that the South African Police Service’s approach to protest stole a young man from his wife, children, family, community and nation. A critical intervention considering IPID and the National Prosecuting Authority’s failure to obtain criminal accountability for his murder.
We remember Marikana because we wonder what mining-affected communities would look like if the group of young people who conceptualised a strike that would grind a nation to a halt between soccer matches were still together. Youth who pondered, spoke, and planned to hand their children brighter lives than the ones they spent walking in dark tunnels so that they could drill platinum. Who questioned the mining elites who benefitted from their labour and gave nothing back to the communities who raised them.
Their demand for a wage commensurate to dignified Black lives, made it out of their conversations, soccer games, their young cohort, the rock drill operators, the Karee shaft, their trade unions, out of their mine and even out of this nation.
They strived for unity and even though there were still detractors, their collective voice frightened Lonmin enough for it to seek reinforcement from the State.
So that the 37 lives killed by the police on 13 & 16 August 2012 lived for Black life before they died for Black life.
So, I was reminded of ukuba iPhupho L’ka Biko lifuzile, nifuze ooDavid Saphendu, nifuze ooBonginkosi Yona, nifuze ooTelang Mohai. Nabo befuzile; they were also walking in the footsteps of the 1976 generation, the generation of the Black Consciousness Movement ooBishop Malusi Mpumlwana, the generation that gave us the Black Community Programmes. The generation who moved out of universities to work with Black communities, as we have seen the Fallists of the 2010s and 2020s do. Generations of activists and organisations who have taken responsibility for what we are and what we will become.
We must continue to honour the surviving and late youth of Marikana:
- From thoughts, to conversations, to actions, to our communities, to our nation and the world
- From the unit to the tens, the thousands, always constrained by the need to build unity.
Let us continue to live for our people.
1. Pg 30 Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa by Leslie Anne Hadfield