On August 16th 2012, the South African Police Service fired live ammunition into a crowd of striking mineworkers at the Lonmin-owned Marikana mine – the culmination of weeks-long labour and union disputes in South Africa’s platinum belt.
The scene of the first shooting, where 17 people died, was filmed by media agencies that had been covering the strike and its unrest; but in the chaos of this first shooting, strikers running away from the massacre were followed by police into the surrounding landscape. Many of these men became victims of the second shooting, at nondescript rocky outcrop where a further 17 people died, away from the television cameras. In total, 34 men died that day, with then-president Jacob Zuma instituting the Marikana Commission of Inquiry to discover the truth of what had happened that day.
The Marikana massacre constituted one of the most lethal uses of force by South African security forces against civilians since the end of the apartheid era. The aftermath of the massacre, resulted in a series of investigations and civil and criminal court cases both against mineworkers, the police, governmental officials, the mining company and other actors involved.
The past we carry with us
Robyn Gill-Leslie is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, and she has studied truth recovery at both South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.
– What made you interested in studying Truth and Reconciliation Commissions?
– As a child, I remember watching the televised release of Nelson Mandela, as he and his wife Winne walked through streets rammed with spectators 15-deep. A little older, I remember the voice of the journalist Max du Preez as he narrated the television show Truth Commission: Special Report, a weekly round-up of revelations and analysis from South Africa’s truth recovery project. So I have grown up in a country that was transitioning from autocracy to democracy, and trying to understand what this means and what impact this has on the lives of South Africans is my key motivation – it’s both an academic and a deeply personal interest: if we – all South Africans - carry the past with us, then it’s important that we know and understand it as best we can.
Gill-Leslie’s research focus on the role forensic experts play when it comes to the work of these Commissions trying to both finding out the truth about what has happened, as well as make reparations.
Gill-Leslie tells that with Marikana, the scale of the massacre took even these experts by surprise. The scale of injury, the confusion between injuries that could relate to self-defence or were classed as aggressive, the way the autopsies were rushed due to political pressure, and the consequent difficulties in getting independent forensic review of these autopsies were all somewhat unprecedented in democratic South Africa. Even accurately naming the victims was difficult, especially at the second shooting where there was police interference with the crime scene
Forensic science and Criminal Justice
The American Academy of Forensic Sciences explain what is forensic science in the following manner:
The word forensic comes from the Latin word forensis: public, to the forum or public discussion; argumentative, rhetorical, belonging to debate or discussion. A relevant, modern definition of forensic is relating to, used in, or suitable to a court of law. Any science used for the purposes of the law is a forensic science. The forensic sciences are used around the world to resolve civil disputes, to justly enforce criminal laws and government regulations, and to protect public health. Forensic scientists may be involved anytime an objective, scientific analysis is needed to find the truth and to seek justice in a legal proceeding.
Whereas the people working at the scene of the crime is called forensic technicians and what they do as forensic investigations. In Norway, forensic technicians at crime scenes are police educated at the Police University College. To become a crime scene investigator is a specialization within the police and you will need 18 months of continuing education. This is not the case in all countries.
– Who are the forensic experts in South Africa?
– South Africa has many eminent forensic pathologists and forensic anthropologists; as well as many legal personnel trained in medico-legal forensic work, explains Gill-Leslie. One will find that the police have forensic experts, then there are private forensic specialists who consult alongside clinical practice, and then there are ballistic experts and other crime scene experts, both public and private. My work focuses on how family members used the medico-legal and autopsy reports from the Marikana massacre.
What do we do with all this dying?
Gill-Leslie has found that not only can the forensics reports at times be at odds with what the bereaved need to know and focusing on matters the victims families found less important. However, they were also used by the families of victims in rituals of mourning beyond being mere evidence and documentation of what happened to be brought forward in a court. For many communities in South Africa, for appropriate rituals of mourning to take place, it is important to know exactly where and how someone died. This enables the person’s spirit to be collected and guided towards its transition to the ancestral plane. These rituals also enable the families involved to grieve and equally to fulfill their familial obligations. However, at the Marikana massacre’s second shooting, it took significant research and a longer period of time to ascertain which bodies had fallen where; how they had been killed and indeed, who they were. This information was not immediately available. Equally, some of the injuries were so traumatic that family members were unable to view the body in its entirety. In some cases, bodies had to be sent straight from the morgue to a coffin, with no viewing of the body possible. These ruptures in the ways death is managed caused significant stress to family members.
To some degree the autopsy reports provided the details that had been missing. Members of the legal team advocating for the families of the slain mineworkers reported how the families wanted not only to keep the autopsy reports; but take them back to their homes, where they would form an important part of the family’s records.
Bodies of evidence
Gill-Leslie is part of the Bodies of Evidence project (BoE), funded by the Research Council of Norway, headed by Prof Mareile Kaufman and focuses on forensic, legal and cultural practices around death and dead bodies.
In particular, BoE is curious about how local knowledge systems co-mingle, co-exist and exchange information with conventional understandings of what forensic evidence looks like. Whereas criminology has a long tradition of perspectives discussing and taking inspiration from non-Western methods of understanding what is justice, due process, what they look like and should look like. This has not been the case when it comes to research on gathering evidence.
– Gill-Leslie’s work provides innovative perspectives to criminological discussions on “bodies of evidence” in new ways, says PI Prof Mareile Kaufmann.
– Gill-Leslie’s South African heritage and her devoted commitment to legal and forensic post-apartheid politics draws attention away from the overrepresented European and North American literature on death and bodies in socio-legal contexts. Gill-Leslie’s critical inquiries bring official South African narratives about death, the work of truth commissions and abstract rights-based approaches to dead and missing bodies into dialogue with local knowledge, traditions and vocabularies. Her work clearly enrichens the criminological understandings of the body’s role in forensics, harm and healing both empirically and conceptually.
How forensics matters
Whereas forensic science is often presented as a hard science, Kaufmann and Gill-Leslie’s research examines how forensic science not only plays an active part in shaping legal, political and social change – but also the differing of roles forensic data and forensic experts.
Research into medico-legal reports at the Marikana Commission of Inquiry show how forensic evidence has an after-life – its impact is not restricted to the narrow confines of a legal proceeding or a truth recovery event. In a similar vein, recent court proceedings in South Africa examine decades-old inquest documents of those who were tortured to death in apartheid-era detention in the 1970s and 1980s. Medico-legal inquest documents – some upwards of 50 years old – are brought back to life in renewed attempts at accountability for atrocities. This is but another example of the way in which forensic material stretches time and political space – with medico-legal inquest documentation being used to cover up murder in one political moment; and the same documentation used to uncover it, in the next.
The research into forensic science also showcase the original meaning of the word: that forensic is about belonging to the forum or public discussion too. That forensic science are most often at the crossroads of a multitude of concern where the rule of law and will of the people, and who forensics are done for, does not always join.