On this day in 2012, the Marikana Massacre took place when South African police fired on striking workers, killing 34 and injuring 76 in the most lethal use of force by the state in half a century.
The shootings have been compared to the infamous Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when police fired on a crowd of anti-Pass Law protesters, killing 69 people, including 10 children. The Marikana Massacre took place on the 25-year anniversary of a nationwide strike by over 300,000 South African workers.
On August 10th, miners had initiated a wildcat strike at a site owned by Lonmin in the Marikana area, close to Rustenburg, South Africa. Although ten people (mostly workers) had been killed before August 16th, it was on that day that an elite force from the South African Police Service fired into a crowd of strikers with rifles, killing 34 and injuring 76.
After surveying the aftermath of the violence, photojournalist Greg Marinovich concluded that "[it is clear] that heavily armed police hunted down and killed the miners in cold blood."
Following the massacre, a massive wave of strikes occurred across the South African mining sector - in early October, analysts estimated that approximately 75,000 miners were on strike from various gold and platinum mines and companies across South Africa, most of them doing so illegally.
A year after the Marikana Massacre, author Benjamin Fogel wrote "Perhaps the most important lesson of Marikana is that the state can gun down dozens of black workers with little or no backlash from 'civil society', the judicial system or from within the institutions that supposedly form the bedrock of democracy."
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I just cooked 250 burgers today + like fifty pounds of fries + made a really nice tasting sauce for chicken tomorrow. I also pulled a dead squirrel out of a grease tank intake with a pair of tongs, What a day
Fifty pounds of French fries is the sort of thing my family would present me with before giving me the old yeller treatment.
The squirrel does not sound fun though.
55 french fries
That should not be an intake, the grease should be going out and it's a biohazardous material that specialized people deal with, not someone working with food. That's a health and labor code violation here
It's a grate on top of a grease tank for used fryer oil outside, the squirrel was stuck between the lid and the grate
They didn't necessarily make me deal with it, the sous chef was showing me how to clean out the fryer when we found it and I was like, "want me to get some tongs?" nasty and I ain't touchin it but I'm not worried about the biohazard potential of tongin' a dead animal, at least for me
Idk if it's a health code violation to run those tongs through the dishwasher but like idk I handed them to the dishwasher, said "they touched a dead animal so like idk maybe run them through 3-4 times, idk" and went back to whatever it was I was doing