If one were to pick a moment when the narrative of postapartheid South Africa as a nation, for all its faults, generally stumbling forward in the right direction ended, no moment stands out as clearly as the Marikana Massacre. On the afternoon of Thursday, August 16, 2012, thirty-four striking mine workers at a platinum mine in North West province were gunned down by the police on live TV.

Over the course of the ten years since the massacre, the country has become poorer (GDP per capita has declined from just over $8,000 to under $7,000), the basic functions of government have collapsed in large swathes across the country, the labor movement has grown weaker and more divided, and the threat of political violence to activists is ever greater. The latter point is all the more apparent considering that since the massacre, at least twenty-two mine workers or union activists from Marikana and the Platinum Belt have been murdered, as detailed by Luke Sinwell and Nicholas Smith. The ongoing violence emerges in the context of worsening economic conditions, most evident in soaring unemployment — now close to 50 percent. The conditions for the communities of the Platinum Belt have, if anything, deteriorated.

In Setswana “Nkaneng,” the name of the informal settlement where the Marikana mine workers and their families live, literally means “difficult place,” a pointed signifier of the scattered wastelands of the Platinum Belt that still lack the most basic municipal services. It is one of the thousands of communities of its kind in the country, where people are still waiting for housing applied for at the turn to democracy in 1994.