Why the majority of South Africans don’t know about the Marikana massacre: A recent survey found that only 40% of South Africans know enough about Marikana massacre to be able to explain it to a friend
Awareness of the Marikana massacre was similar to the FeesMustFall Movement, with 16% having heard of the latter, 41% displaying limited knowledge and 40% no awareness. Familiarity of the 1976 Soweto youth uprising was marginally lower, and significantly lower in the case of the Sharpeville massacre.
“But those are very complex issues particularly when there are issues of accountability and culpability, which haven’t yet been addressed … Can the state go and provide memorials when they are seen as potentially part of the perpetrators of what happened 10 years ago? But what is sad is that there is no fundamental basic awareness, particularly when we want to deal with the trauma and deal with the pain.
“What does it mean about the society we live in and what does it mean about what kind of society do we want? It goes back to The most surprising finding is the relatively low awareness among those in the North West. “This raises the question of whether this may partly reflect an attempt to actively forget or suppress traumatic memories associated with the August 2012 events in Marikana.”
Those that believed that historical events were important for people living in South Africa today were two and a half times more likely to confidently explain the events of Marikana relative to those believing that such events are unimportant .
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