Marikana massacre hovers over ANC’s celebration

THE African National Congress convenes its 114th anniversary on January 8 in the Bojanala District of the North West Province, a terrain upon which the deepest contradictions of South Africa's democratic order have been etched with unforgiving clarity.

- ZAMIKHAYA MASETI

Founded in 1912, the ANC remains Africa's oldest liberation movement in continuous existence. Longevity, however, is not a virtue in itself. History is indifferent to age.

It is attentive only to purpose, conduct, and consequence. January 8 must therefore be understood not as a ritual of nostalgia, but as a moment of reckoning, a disciplined pause demanding introspection and strategic clarity.

The choice of Bojanala is neither accidental nor politically neutral. It is a choice laden with material meaning. The Bojanala Platinum District Municipality constitutes the economic heart of the North West Province, contributing just over half of the province's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Anchored by Rustenburg and structurally dominated by the platinum group metals mining complex, the district occupies a central position in South Africa's extractive economy.

Accordingly, to gather in Bojanala is to gather at the nerve centre of mineral accumulation, labour exploitation and state mediation. The wealth extracted from Bojanala’s soil has long sustained corporate balance sheets, export earnings, and sections of the national fiscus. Platinum, like gold before it, has been woven into South Africa’s accumulation regime as both lifeblood and curse. Accumulation, however, is never merely technical. It is social, political, and coercive.

Consequently, Bojanala represents a spatial concentration of contradiction: immense mineral wealth coexisting with worker precarity, informal settlements, environmental degradation and chronic municipal distress. The district thus embodies the unresolved tension of the National Democratic Revolution — political power secured, yet economic relations largely intact.

This contradiction is structural. The post-apartheid state inherited an extractive economy organised around cheap labour, migrant systems and spatial dispossession.