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TimesLive reports that a lawyer representing the families of the mineworkers killed at Marikana in 2012 on Friday revealed the trauma the families have gone through, with at least one of the miners’ children committing suicide.
Forty-four people died, 34 of whom were shot by police, during the strike-related unrest at Lonmin’s Marikana operations in August 2012. Without revealing details, Adv. Teboho Mosikili said the child concerned had been a young teenager. He advised: “She had been complaining about depression and not liking the school she was in. They found her hanging at the school earlier this year.” She was one of a number of children of the killed Marikana miners that Lonmin has been paying school fees for. Mosikili claimed that the children did not have much of a choice of which schools they were enrolled at and many of them were unhappy about the schools, which the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) said were substandard. The children also complained of how they had been labelled as the “Marikana children” at these schools. According to Mosikili, Lonmin had done nothing to change the situation following the child’s suicide. Mosikili spoke on Friday of the pain suffered by the children of the miners who, after hearing their fathers were killed at Lonmin, had to deal with the fact that their mothers were now working at that same mine. This while the children were at boarding schools.
- Read the full original of this report by Naledi Shange at TimesLive
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