Returning Images: Mandela, Marikana, and the Rugged Road to the Future

The article reflects on the ways in which it is still possible to engage with the iconic figure of Nelson Mandela, following his death in 2013 and the apparently definitive hagiographic profiles published by himself, by his biographers and a number of cultural historians. The aim is to inquire whether there are still stories that may be told about Mandela that we have not heard before, or that may be retold from alternative angles, and to intercept signs of his undergoing interventions of historical, biographical or political revision. The article argues that literature and the arts are producing new ways of ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’ Mandela, and it analyzes his appearance in a recent documentary by Rehad Desai, Miners Shot Down (Uhuru Productions, 2014), which is about the massacre that took place at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa, on 16th August 2012. Besides being a precious record of history in the making, the film is a unique exploration of the collusion of local and global economic and political interests governing South Africa in the current phase. The film pits the Marikana story against the rainbow nation’s ‘democratic’ narrative, and goes a long way towards deconstructing the monumental historical frame which has Mandela at its core, thus initiating a process of revision of the myth, if not yet of the man. Miners Shot Down substantiates what Mark Gevisser observed at the turn of the last decade, that in contemporary South Africa there exists a widespread awareness that “the Mandela years had been the era of the dream”, the following presidency of Thabo Mbeki were the years “of the dream deferred”, and the present is “a time beyond dreams” (Gevisser 2009: 320). The film registers the betrayal of the dream in this time beyond dreams, where something like Marikana could happen, and joins hands with a great tradition of South African films – such as Chris Curling and Pascoe Macfarlane’s Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974), Betty Wolpert’s Awake from Mourning (1981) and Lindy Wilson’s Last Supper at Horstley Street (1983) and Gugulethu Seven (2000) – which successfully combine social observation, historical research, and political commentary.