In August, 2012, the world was shocked into grief when over 30 miners in Marikana, South Africa were shot dead for protesting poor wages and requesting better welfare. It brought back memories of Sharpville in 1966. And the camera, an instrument able to witness both the cool and the cruel, never judging, was at hand to capture the act as well as chronicle events leading up to the massacre: a brutal killing, which by the evening of August 16, 2012, had 34 miners lying dead, in undignified poses.

Miners Shot Down from Africiné www.africine.org on Vimeo.

One moment, the miners, sensing they are being boxed in, move; the next, they scamper as several rounds of ammunition ring out, the unlucky men finally dotting the landscape like unbecoming outgrowths. How did this happen? Who was to blame?

The blame, according to Rehad Desai's powerfully-moving documentary Miners Shot Down, is both on a skewed system and on different persons at various points in the power structure.

The filmmakers point out these persons: General Mpembe, who ordered the shootings; executives at Lonmin, the mining company; the heads of police, one of whom is shown after the massacre commending her officers for protecting the safety of the country; and, perhaps more pointedly, politicians, one of whom, Cyril Ramaphosa, was Secretary General of the African National Congress (ANC) and a former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers.

That, however, was a long time ago and since then, Mr Ramaphosa has become a shareholder in Lonmin. It is either a surfeit of self-inflicted innocence or a startling show of remorselessness that sees Mr Ramaphosa as the only one of the tacitly-accused to agree to an interview. And this, even as a document, shows an agitated Ramaphosa pressing the police to end the standoff with the miners decisively.

As if to show the world the difference between the man then and now, flashback scenes show the younger Ramaphosa holding a microphone to a speaking Mandela. At the end, we see Ramaphosa grinning with Jacob Zuma. The moral space occupied by his two companions are largely different-if that space contained oxygen, Zuma would collapse from asphyxiation. In short, Ramaphosa has journeyed considerably.

The film's coda shows 3 miners and Mr Ramaphosa. The difference in narratives are stark: One miner is facing charges of murder, another is permanently disabled and facing murder charges as well, the last is dead, body riddled with 14 bullets. He was the group's spokesperson. Mr Ramaphosa has now been elected deputy president of the ANC.

No arrest of a police officer has been made, even as footage showing chicanery over a dead body is extant. The striking miners received a 7-22% increase.

"A Black man's life is cheap. They will kill us and replace us…" the leader of the AMCU said, pleading for the striking miners to return home just before the killings. He was both observant and prescient.

Ronnie Kasrils, the former anti-apartheid crusader indicts both the finger pulling the trigger as well as those pulling the strings on the dead miners. As he speaks, there is something uncertain about the quality of his voice: it either quavers in rage, or trembles in grief. Or both.

Rage. Grief. The dead are dead. And rage and grief are all that is left.

There is nothing else.

by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo

Paper first published in The Irep Report - 2014 iREP Newsletter, reprint courtesy of Goethe Institut Lagos & Irep.