BOOK REVIEW: The Spirit of Marikana: The Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism in South Africa

The dispensability of a miner’s life was underscored by the events that took place at Marikana on August 16, 2012, where striking mine workers were slain or injured by security guards and South African Police. The Spirit of Marikana: The Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism in South Africa, by Luke Sinwell with Simphiwe Mbatha, provides us not only with an insight into the experience of being a miner in South Africa, using the case of Marikana as example, but also with knowledge of what the miners are doing to ameliorate the unbearable exploitation and oppression of their condition. [...]typical of a bottom-up analysis of the agency of the often-overlooked history-makers, the authors provide the reader with a thick descriptive analysis of how the mine workers at Marikana mobilized their thinking capacities to project an insurgent politics within a highly prescriptive environment. [...]to fully account for the effectiveness of the agential activities, there is a need to account for the structure as well, since different structures require different efforts to change them. [...]a prescriptive structure would require the observer to be sympathetic to an agency that fails to transform, it as it is highly resistant to change, while one cannot equally accord agency to a subject that fails to change a performative structure that is susceptible and vulnerable to transformation.