Why (almost) everything I learnt on social media about the Buffelsfontein tragedy turned out to be wrong

The SAPS’ operation Vala Umgodi which led to more than a 100 miners starving to death in shaft 10 and 11 at the Buffelsfontein mine required the complete erasure of the individual human beings who became the victims of this operation, so that they could be treated as an imagined entity whose members collectively deserved to be punished for any number of heinous crimes ascribed to the group collectively.

Last week I learnt on social media that artisanal miners in South Africa are all undocumented immigrants, that they all terrorise the communities they come from, and that they all commit the most heinous crimes – including murder and rape – on a daily basis. I learnt that these miners (but not the mine owners who had failed to secure their mines after their closure) sabotage the country’s economy to the tune of R3 billion (sometimes it becomes R6 billion) each year by extracting gold from abandoned mines, gold which would otherwise have remained underground forever. (more…)