WHEN THE BLOOD STILL CRIES FROM THE GROUND
Fourteen Years Later
“Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” — Genesis 4:10 (NIV)
Today is 16 August 2026. It may look like an ordinary date on the calendar, but it is far from ordinary. For many South Africans - and especially for the families, survivors and communities directly affected - it remains one of the tender moments in our national story. Fourteen years have passed since Marikana. My fear is that, unless we choose to remember with purpose, this date may quietly drift into the forgotten history of our country.
My heart is burdened by such memories because, in late February 1996, I attended the Sesiyakha Manje Conference in Pietermaritzburg. The then Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, Bishop Stanley Mogoba, challenged us with words that have never left me: where are the modern-day Pauls, Silases and Timothys - those prepared to speak truth to power? It was only months after another terrible moment of bloodshed in our country. When that booming voice reached the name Timothy, I felt as though the question had found me personally.
Today, that old question returned in an unexpected way.
After church, returning home from the car wash, I saw three young children - aged about eleven, six and four - loading firewood onto a worn wheelbarrow and a makeshift cart in Egerton, an area once reserved for white residents. They were taking it to the backrooms where they live. Why? The electricity had run out. The wood was needed to make a fire and keep warm.
The scene took me straight back to the beginning of winter, when I encountered three children in Steadville, none yet ten, collecting plastic and cardboard. They told me they were taking it home to Gogo to burn so that the family could keep warm.
Two sides of one town. Two groups of children. The same cold. The same need.
Something is deeply wrong when children forage for fuel in a country endowed with extraordinary mineral wealth. South Africa remains among the most unequal societies on earth. Marikana therefore cannot be remembered only as a policing tragedy. It must also force us to look again at the distance between wealth and want, power and vulnerability, boardroom and shack
THE BLOOD CRIES. THE WORKERS CRY. THOSE WITH WEALTH ARE COMMANDED TO SHARE.
Genesis 4:10 • James 5:4 • 1 Timothy 6:17-19
The Day I Could Not Believe What I Was Hearing
I remember 15 August 2012. I remember hearing AMCU president Joseph Mathunjwa pleading on SAFM that something terrible could happen if there was no intervention. The following day I heard the gunshots over the radio. I remember thinking: surely that cannot be live ammunition. I convinced myself I must be hearing rubber bullets.
Then the last shot was fired, and the terrible reality emerged.
The official Marikana Commission was later established to investigate the events of 11 to 16 August 2012, which left approximately 44 people dead overall, more than 70 injured and about 250 arrested. On 16 August, 34 striking mineworkers were killed by police. Those figures belong in the historical record. But a Christian reflection cannot allow human beings to disappear inside figures.
Thirty-four is not merely a number. It is thirty-four human lives. Behind them were families, children, parents, neighbours, co-workers, hopes and unfinished conversations.
God’s question to Cain still reaches across the centuries: “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” (Genesis 4:10)
Where Did It All Go Wrong?
There is an irony in this story that I find impossible to ignore.
In 1987 Cyril Ramaphosa was General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers. NUM led a historic national mineworkers’ strike. Kate Philip records in Markets on the Margins that around 40,000 workers lost their jobs. In the aftermath, NUM established a job-creation programme and pursued worker co-operatives and wider enterprise-development strategies to help workers and their communities survive.
The photographs below are especially poignant. In 1990, Ramaphosa is pictured at the Flagstaff Co-op in the Transkei discussing the problems faced by co-op members; in another photograph, members carry him through the streets after meeting with them.
Paul’s Command to Those Who Are Rich
Scripture does not require us to hate the wealthy. Nor does it pretend that wealth carries no moral responsibility.
Paul’s instruction to Timothy is strikingly direct: command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant or to put their hope in uncertain wealth. Instead, they are to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share (1 Timothy 6:17-19).
James is equally uncomfortable: “The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you.” (James 5:4)
This is where an A4T response must go deeper than capitalism versus socialism, employer versus employee, ANC versus EFF, NUM versus AMCU. Economic systems are made and inhabited by human beings. Whatever system we operate, Scripture refuses to allow those with abundance to become indifferent to those whose labour, lives and communities exist at the margins.
Amos gives us the standard: “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24)
And the early Church gives us an economic picture that continues to challenge every generation: “There were no needy persons among them.” (Acts 4:34)
An A4T Response: Before the Cry Becomes a Scream
Marikana warns us what can happen when people stop hearing one another.
Workers cry. Employers defend positions. Unions compete. Politicians calculate. Police prepare. Communities become desperate. Human beings slowly become categories - striker, policeman, manager, unionist, shareholder, politician - and we stop seeing the father who must return home, the mother waiting for news, the child who needs food, the police officer with a family, the worker bearing the image of God.
The A4T challenge is therefore simple enough to say, but demanding to live: hear the cry before it becomes a scream.
BELIEVE that another way of relating is possible. PRAY until our hearts are softened towards people on every side of the divide. LOVE sufficiently to cross the distance between boardroom and community. SHARE so that prosperity does not coexist comfortably with desperation.
Acts 4 does not give us an economic slogan. It gives us a community whose possessions became instruments of neighbour-love. Those with much moved voluntarily towards those with need. The result was not forced sameness, but a remarkable testimony: there were no needy persons among them.
That is the Kingdom question Marikana still places before South Africa: how can those who have much move towards those who have too little before inequality hardens into anger, alienation and tragedy?
Mr President, Perhaps You Simply Need to Go
President Cyril Ramaphosa has acknowledged and apologised for language he used around Marikana. Yet another piece of unfinished business remains.
At the funeral of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in 2018, he publicly recalled her wish that he and Julius Malema should go to Marikana and help heal the wounds of the families and widows. Fourteen years after the massacre, the moral power of fulfilling that promise would be immense.
Mr President, perhaps South Africa does not need another explanation from you. Perhaps you simply need to go.
Go to Marikana. Sit with the families. Listen to the widows and survivors. Hear what remains unresolved. Where an apology is required, apologise. Where government can still act, act. Where promises remain unfinished, finish them.
Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:23-24 that reconciliation cannot simply be postponed while we continue with religious observance. First go and be reconciled. And in John 13, the Lord of all takes the posture of a servant and kneels.
A President does not become smaller by going to Marikana in humility. Leadership can become greater when it is willing to kneel low enough to listen.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said, “for they will be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)
Never, Never and Never Again
Marikana must never become merely an anniversary package in the news cycle. The blood spilled there must continue to disturb our consciences until remembrance produces change.
We must remember the mineworkers killed on 16 August. We must remember those who died in the preceding days, including police officers and security personnel. We must remember the injured, the widows, the children, the surviving workers and the community that still carries the scar.
And we must allow Marikana to warn us.
Never again should desperation be allowed to deepen while powerful people speak past one another.
Never again should the poor have to shout until their humanity is noticed.
Never again should a labour dispute in democratic South Africa end with bodies on the ground. Never, never and never again.
Fourteen years later, perhaps the blood crying from the ground is asking South Africa one final question:
HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING?
-Historical note-
Historical facts in this Reflection draw on the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, Kate Philip’s Markets on the Margins, and public reporting of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2018 undertaking concerning Marikana. Personal recollections and observations are the author’s own.