What was Marikana? Police killed 34 striking miners. Nobody has answered for it.

The footage is the part people remember. A line of police, a moving crowd of miners, then volley after volley of automatic fire, and men falling in the dust and scrub. It went around the world, and for South Africans it landed hard, because this was the sort of thing that was supposed to have ended in 1994. It happened in 2012, under a government the liberation struggle had produced.

Here is what happened. In August 2012, several thousand rock drill operators at Lonmin's platinum mine near Marikana, in North West province, walked off the job in an unprotected strike, demanding a basic wage of R12,500 a month. Over one violent week, ten people died. Then, on the afternoon of 16 August, the police opened fire and killed 34 strikers and wounded scores more. No act of state violence had killed that many South Africans in a single day since Sharpeville, in 1960.

What follows is the story in order: the wage the men were after, the week that turned violent, the shooting itself, what the official inquiry made of it, and why, fourteen years on, no one has gone to prison. And then the part that still splits the country, which is what all of it did to the way South Africans see their own government.

To understand Marikana you have to start underground. Rock drill operators do among the hardest and most dangerous work in mining, boring the holes that hold the explosives, in heat and dust, for shifts on end. In 2012 their basic pay at Lonmin sat at roughly R4,000 a month, out of which many supported large families and paid rent in the shack settlements that had grown up around the shafts. Their demand was blunt and specific: a basic wage of R12,500.

Set against the profits coming out of the ground, it was not a wild figure. But it fell outside the wage agreement already in place, and so outside the National Union of Mineworkers, the old, established union tied to the governing alliance. When the NUM would not carry the demand, the men went around it. Striking without the union meant they had no legal cover, and it left them with no one on their side: not the union they had walked away from, not Lonmin, and, when the company called for help, not the police.

The shooting on 16 August came at the end of a week the authorities never got under control. The strike began around 9 August. On 11 August, as strikers marched on the NUM office, union officials opened fire and wounded two of them; word went round that men had been killed, and the mood hardened. Over the next few days, fighting between strikers, police and Lonmin security left ten people dead, including two police officers hacked to death in one clash and two mine guards.

By the morning of 16 August, thousands of strikers had gathered on a rocky hill, a koppie, near the Nkaneng settlement. Negotiations led by police and both unions had failed. In the early afternoon the police moved to disperse and disarm the crowd, unrolling barbed wire and bringing up live-fire units. What the plan was supposed to do, and what it did, would be argued over for years.

The killing happened in two places, and it matters which one you mean. At the first, near the main koppie, a group of strikers moved toward or through the police line and officers opened fire in one long volley. Around 17 men were killed there in seconds. The police said they were facing an attack and shooting in self-defence, and the inquiry accepted that some of that firing may have been lawful, while leaving open that some of it was not.

Then there was the second place. About 300 metres away, at a smaller outcrop the miners called the small koppie, another 17 men died, most of them out of sight of the cameras, some shot at close range as they ran or hid among the rocks. The forensic and photographic evidence put to the commission raised hard questions about whether those men were any threat at all when they were killed. Scene 2 is the reason people call it a massacre rather than a shooting.

President Jacob Zuma appointed a commission of inquiry under retired judge Ian Farlam. It sat for the better part of three years, heard from police, miners, unions and companies, and delivered its report in mid-2015. Its findings were sweeping in some directions and strikingly cautious in others.

It laid the heaviest blame on the police operation itself, finding the plan defective and dangerous, and it questioned the fitness for office of the national police commissioner and the North West provincial commissioner who oversaw it. But it declined to find that any politician or executive had caused the deaths. It cleared the police and mineral-resources ministers, and it cleared Cyril Ramaphosa, then a Lonmin director, of legal responsibility, while faulting the tone he had taken toward the strikers. A commission cannot convict anyone in any case, so it did the next thing: it recommended that prosecutors investigate individual officers. The prosecutors took the referral and let it stall.

Fourteen years on, here is where it stands. The state has paid real money in civil claims: to injured survivors, to men who were wrongly arrested, and to families who lost a breadwinner. On the criminal side there is nothing. No one has been convicted of the 34 killings. The only officers ever put on trial were charged over other incidents, and every one of them walked, the cases worn down by the years that had passed.

No single thread makes Marikana more uncomfortable for the governing party than the role of the man who now leads the country. In August 2012, Cyril Ramaphosa was a non-executive director and shareholder of Lonmin. In the days before the shooting, as violence mounted, he emailed government ministers and company executives describing the strikers' conduct as dastardly criminal and urging what he called concomitant action to bring it under control.

His critics read that as a nudge that helped set the police loose. The inquiry found no grounds to charge him with anything, and he has always denied doing wrong. What no one disputes is the sequence: a powerful insider leaned on the government to get tougher on the strike, and days later the police shot 34 strikers dead. There is an extra sting to it. Ramaphosa had founded and led the mineworkers' union in the 1980s; by 2012 he was sitting on the board of the company whose strikers were killed. He went on to become deputy president in 2014 and president in 2018, and the families' lawyers chased him through the civil courts for years. Whatever the courts decide, the politics are fixed: Marikana follows him, and through him it follows the ANC.

The shooting did not stay in Marikana. It drove a wedge between the governing party and the union movement it had grown up with, and it fed the rise of a harder, angrier union on the platinum mines. It handed a new opposition party, the EFF, its founding cause. And it did lasting damage to a simple assumption people had held since 1994: that the police, and the government behind them, were on the side of ordinary people.

Every August, families and workers climb the koppie again and read out the names. The strikers did get their wage in the end, and more. What they never got, and what the country never got, is a straight answer to one question: who gave the order, and who is answerable for the 34 men who died.