When the striking miners were massacred at Marikana the post-apartheid state had been killing unarmed protestors at an escalating rate since 2000, and while most political assassinations were consequent to intra-ANC contestation there had been some assassinations of independent activists. These kinds of killings had often been understood as aberrations, as hangovers from the pre-democratic past, hangovers that would resolve in time as liberal democracy became more fully hegemonic. After Marikana it was no longer widely assumed that time was on the side of justice. The idea that what some in the NGO world had affirmed as a ‘politics of patience’ would be redeemed with the passage of time was put to rest. More
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Pithouse.