Gidi gidi
The sound of their dusty feet
Oversized overalls with gumboots
Sweating,anger all over their face
Sore lips, puffy eyes, tremble voices

I watched their action
I heard their shouts
Yelling, grumbling and threatening
''Increase our salary,increase our salary''
They know thy self
They know thy enemy

I heard a thunderous voice shouting
''We should fire them''
Tears rolled down my cheek
Why so easy to put one down
Sifelani isizwe ngenxa yemali?

I heard gunshoots people screaming sadly
Yhoo yhoo yhoo
The scene was like genocide
All run for their lives
But too late to escape the deathline
They were killed like flies
Blood gushed all over the place
Their life flashed with the blink of an eye

Tears rolled like waterfalls down my cheek
Why so easy to **** someone?
What about their loved one?
Griefing,suffering,anger they will have

I fell down unconsiously
Thoughts crooked my mind
Why killed when you save your life from the yoke of slavery
Why killed when you ask for equity

Marikana you drained our power
Kids are now fatherless
Wives are now widows

-LakhanaMnyani

The dark cloud of that day still hovers over us like a stubborn ghost,
A dark moment, sad and excruciatingly tormenting,
Democracy was plunged under a huge and portentous threat,
Just like the lives of each and every miner in solidarity,
Every miner that felt they had been uproariously ***** and beyond measure,
Lives being disparaged and sacrificed for money,

Some fat ugly capitalist politician proclaimed them criminals,
To impress his blood ******* immigrant masters,
The brutish British multinational super exploiters,
The stinking atrocious colonizers who stole our land and our humanity,

And as criminals they should be treated,
Declared the egocentric mercenary politician,
Indeed, as criminals they were treated,
And as criminals of apartheid, they fell,

Heavy machine guns roared,
And the whole environment smelt heavy of burnt gunpowder and blood,
The whole place depicted a war zone,
With bodies lying everywhere,
And the police force claiming victory,
The dead, really dead,
And the living, really leaving,

This is the Marikana story,
A story that has neither beginning nor ending,
A story that is told with very sad and shocking connotations,
A story that is neither a cause nor an effect,
A story of a high disregard for human life,
A story of split unions,
A story of greedy and hyper-selfish politicians,
A story of police brutality,

But above all, a story of innocent lives lost like garbage,
And fingers not pointing at no one,
The Marikana story.

Like dogs they lived,
Like dogs they worked,
Like dogs they earned,
Like dogs they died,
And like dogs they were forgotten,
The Marikana heroes.

16 August, 2012,
Today, we speak,
And today, we act,
We are tired of working like animals,
They stressed,
We are tired of being treated as such,
They asserted,
Today, all that will end,
They declared,
Indeed “today”, all that ended,
As like animals, “today” they were slaughtered and recklessly,
On the soil under which lay their livelihood,
Away from their comfort zones,
Away from where their naval cords were buried,
Subjected to undignified deaths that had no honor,
While politicians and capitalists farted in their comfortable seats,
And like animals, they were forgotten,
The grandchildren of Black ancestry,
The poor hardworking breadwinners of their poor families,
Plunging their lives into sheer deep insignificance,
Shame Black men of honor,
Shame!

Their hands no longer occupied by books,
Pens and thoughts of hypotheses.
Now bricks and fire destroy, their angered looks
Their minds racing with empty promises.
Their shouts cry out in the night #feesmustfall
Like echoes down empty halls
Desolate, scorched earth become their battleground
With clicks, hisses and flashing calls,
The media like hyenas abound
“We demand to be heard”, angrily protest
Against our government that they so detest.
Where are the promises? only broken dreams
Replaced by violence and frustrated screams.
For in the end, who will fall…silence fades,
Rubber bullets, pierce the air, stun grenades
Trigger-happy bravado only displayed
The air, left smouldering burning down
“Down, down, down to the ground”
Where will it end?
When a political tyrant, with their diplomatic rhetoric tries to mend?
Down the barrel of a gun like karma
Our memories flock to scenes of Marikana
Or ’76, the struggle songs, where heroes fought
They fall, we fall, we all fall, so spare a thought

648 police deployed,
4000 rounds of ammunition,
4 mortuary vehicles,
It was neither an accident,
Nor the act of an angry God,
It was neither a miscarriage of duty,
Nor the act of marauding ancestors,
They planned to **** us,
And indeed they killed us,
Like in the Sharpeville massacre,
On the Marikana soil of our livelihood,
Despite that our hands were up in the air,
Begging and running for our cheap lives,
Mission accomplished,
Typical of the filthy barbaric apartheid engine,
In a modern democratic South Africa,
Mission accomplished.