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Redressing Mining Legacies: The Case of the South African Mining Industry

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Abstract

The South African mining industry is challenged by the need to address a number of legacy issues that promote a “rear view mirror view” of the industry and fan discontent leading to potential policy change. This article considers how this industry can engage more constructively and proactively with its past by outlining the choices for an overarching remedial theory and forms of engagement. After considering how the South African mining industry fared before the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the article examines recent conflicts in which the legacies of migrant labour and silicosis have been implicated. The article concludes that the past is unlikely to be addressed through a uniform process, and that the industry would do better to be more attentive to the remedial theories and limitations and opportunities inherent in multiple forms of engagement, as these manifest in flashpoints of conflict that invoke legacy issues.

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Notes

  1. Titles reflecting the positive and negative valence of legacy issues are common in a mining context. See for instance Mineral Policy Centre The burden of gilt: The legacy of environmental damage from abandoned mines and what America should do about it (Washington D.C.,1993); Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives Africa’s Blessing, Africa’s Curse: The Legacy of Resource Extraction in Africa (Kairos, 2005).

  2. A third legacy issue, namely the environmental impacts of mining manifesting at the moment in large-scale generation of acid mine drainage, is not canvassed in this article for reasons of space.

  3. The massacre itself occurred on 16 August 2012 when police and paramilitary units tried both to disperse and disarm a group of approximately 3000 strikers who had assembled with their traditional weapons on a hillock close to the informal settlement of Nkaneng. Thirty-four striking workers were shot by the security forces (Alexander et al. 2012).

  4. Daily summaries of the proceedings of the Farlam Commission can be found here: http://www.marikanacomm.org.za/news.html.

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  1. University of the Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg, 2000, South Africa

    Tracy-Lynn Humby

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Humby, TL. Redressing Mining Legacies: The Case of the South African Mining Industry. J Bus Ethics 135, 653–664 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2380-8

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