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ON THE radio a day or so ago they were talking about efforts to alleviate the suffering the platinum strike has caused. Dr Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers was taking food up to the North West Province; so was Grace Bible Church.
Other people were helping a local soup kitchen with supplies. There were families with children going hungry – one woman was quoted who had not eaten a thing for three days.
And in the middle of all of this, up pops an SMS which the host reads out, words to this effect: “Why are you helping these people? You are just prolonging the strike. I don’t want any children to starve, of course, but if they don’t have food, the strike will end quicker.”
In other words, let’s use the suffering of little children as leverage. Although ‘of course’ you don’t want children to starve.
Do you have any idea what starvation is like, I wonder? I’ve experienced hunger in my life, and it’s not pleasant, but the person I know who really starved was my own father.
Taken prisoner at Tobruk, he ended up in the Sudetenland, mining coal for the duration of the war.
The Germans didn’t have enough food for their own population, so they didn’t have much to spare for the prisoners. My father told me once how the prisoners would use tea leaves over and over again, until the very last trace of colour had been squeezed from them – then they would draw lots for who got to eat the used tea-leaves.
'Like a Belsen victim'
He was rescued and demobbed in England, where he and his friend Len spent two months travelling around and scoring freebies (beer, sandwiches and so on) from a population which was happy to share its rations with the boys from the colonies who had helped beat Hitler.
Then he got on a Union Castle liner and spent another month sailing to South Africa. After three months of plentiful food, my aunts told me, “he looked like a Belsen victim when he got off the boat at Cape Town’s docks”.
No, starvation is not pleasant, it hurts; and those children in the platinum belt are not likely to recover as well as my father did. They are growing still: little bodies and minds could be affected by stunting or failure to reach developmental goals.
And if you can’t feel compassion for them, at least you could consider this: the more a child’s development is held back by hunger, the less likely he is to turn into a productive working adult. And here we go round the mulberry bush again.
This strike has been portrayed in the media as being all about an unreasonable demand for R12 500 basic salary, when in fact it’s really about something else. It’s about a demand for change.
Scream for an end to poverty
It’s a scream for recognition of the never-endingness of poverty, and a plea for hope – for our children if not for us – and a sense of the dignity of all humans, not just the middle and upper classes.
I have not seen any inspired thinking from the mine bosses or government about how to deal with this. We don’t seem to have the kind of leadership that breaks deadlocks in an imaginative, humane way - not any more.
They have all seemed quite prepared to sit it out, letting the suffering work for them, rather than trying to read the greater situation and understand that this is the time for a different kind of thinking, the sort of thinking that sees mineworkers and mine bosses as part of the same society, inextricably linked and interwoven. For good or ill.
Thomas Paine wrote:
“Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained.
"All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.
“This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labour that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.” (Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, 1795)
Humans are like their primate cousins; they have a very strong sense of fairness (see this pair of monkeys). Thomas Paine recognised the imbalances in a society where one person accumulates huge wealth off the backs of others who suffer deep poverty lifelong – and what he saw ultimately led to the French Revolution.
We’ve been warned about ticking timebombs in South Africa, over and over again; the almost incredible length of this strike is yet another warning. Let’s think very carefully before applying the usual platitudes to this situation; we as a society, as a whole, need to take responsibility for the deeper meaning of what is happening here.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
Other people were helping a local soup kitchen with supplies. There were families with children going hungry – one woman was quoted who had not eaten a thing for three days.
And in the middle of all of this, up pops an SMS which the host reads out, words to this effect: “Why are you helping these people? You are just prolonging the strike. I don’t want any children to starve, of course, but if they don’t have food, the strike will end quicker.”
In other words, let’s use the suffering of little children as leverage. Although ‘of course’ you don’t want children to starve.
Do you have any idea what starvation is like, I wonder? I’ve experienced hunger in my life, and it’s not pleasant, but the person I know who really starved was my own father.
Taken prisoner at Tobruk, he ended up in the Sudetenland, mining coal for the duration of the war.
The Germans didn’t have enough food for their own population, so they didn’t have much to spare for the prisoners. My father told me once how the prisoners would use tea leaves over and over again, until the very last trace of colour had been squeezed from them – then they would draw lots for who got to eat the used tea-leaves.
'Like a Belsen victim'
He was rescued and demobbed in England, where he and his friend Len spent two months travelling around and scoring freebies (beer, sandwiches and so on) from a population which was happy to share its rations with the boys from the colonies who had helped beat Hitler.
Then he got on a Union Castle liner and spent another month sailing to South Africa. After three months of plentiful food, my aunts told me, “he looked like a Belsen victim when he got off the boat at Cape Town’s docks”.
No, starvation is not pleasant, it hurts; and those children in the platinum belt are not likely to recover as well as my father did. They are growing still: little bodies and minds could be affected by stunting or failure to reach developmental goals.
And if you can’t feel compassion for them, at least you could consider this: the more a child’s development is held back by hunger, the less likely he is to turn into a productive working adult. And here we go round the mulberry bush again.
This strike has been portrayed in the media as being all about an unreasonable demand for R12 500 basic salary, when in fact it’s really about something else. It’s about a demand for change.
Scream for an end to poverty
It’s a scream for recognition of the never-endingness of poverty, and a plea for hope – for our children if not for us – and a sense of the dignity of all humans, not just the middle and upper classes.
I have not seen any inspired thinking from the mine bosses or government about how to deal with this. We don’t seem to have the kind of leadership that breaks deadlocks in an imaginative, humane way - not any more.
They have all seemed quite prepared to sit it out, letting the suffering work for them, rather than trying to read the greater situation and understand that this is the time for a different kind of thinking, the sort of thinking that sees mineworkers and mine bosses as part of the same society, inextricably linked and interwoven. For good or ill.
Thomas Paine wrote:
“Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained.
"All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.
“This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labour that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.” (Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, 1795)
Humans are like their primate cousins; they have a very strong sense of fairness (see this pair of monkeys). Thomas Paine recognised the imbalances in a society where one person accumulates huge wealth off the backs of others who suffer deep poverty lifelong – and what he saw ultimately led to the French Revolution.
We’ve been warned about ticking timebombs in South Africa, over and over again; the almost incredible length of this strike is yet another warning. Let’s think very carefully before applying the usual platitudes to this situation; we as a society, as a whole, need to take responsibility for the deeper meaning of what is happening here.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
