During the last days of the #FeesMustFall movement at the end of 2016, when the tenacity of the students had faltered and many had grown disillusioned at the prospects of achieving decommodified and decolonised education after being met with the iron-handed brutality of the police and an indifferent university management, a group of students decided to make one final push of activism by visiting the community of Marikana.
I had missed large parts of the #FeesMustFall protests while I was an excluded student the year before. I desperately wanted to be involved and experience some part of the action. After several hours, the taxi arrived, by which time I was famished. I got inside and sat by a window so I could look outside and not have to speak to anyone. It was easy to keep to myself because I was an outsider and new to the #FeesMustFall inner circle.
As I sat there crouched, with my arms across my stomach, I wondered if this trip to Marikana might console us for what was lost in the fires of #FeesMustFall. I realised that these young men and women, whom I had admired from afar as revolutionaries engaged in an important struggle, were caught up in the threshold of a quarter-life crisis and lost in the wilderness between who they are and who they want to be.
I wasn’t aware of this back then, but Napoleon had organised the taxi for us. I was told he had sold his laptop to get the money for #FeesMustFall students to visit Marikana. He wanted us to help the youth of the community with career advice, information about university applications and mentor the sons and daughters of the slain miners.
During the fourth day of our stay at Marikana, I volunteered to stay for kitchen duty with three other students, to prepare lunch while the rest of the group went to engage with community members at the taxi rank. Two police officers then approached the weapon-wielding neighbour while shooting their automatic rifles at the ground to prevent him from advancing. But he kept on attacking, swinging and hitting while blowing his whistle. The police finally retreated, with the shirtless man in custody.
I could not believe all that I had just seen. From the man who was fighting the police with guns by himself to a group of men who went and took back their comrade from police custody. The Marikana men started to chase the car and caught up with it a few minutes later at a roadblock. They took over the car and parked it across from Napoleon’s house. The two men who had been driving the car were thrown out and made to kneel on the ground. The men then started to search the car and found papers with an ANC letterhead inside a briefcase in the boot.