Johannesburg - Taiwanese animators have turned the Marikana mine shooting into a tongue-in-cheek YouTube sensation, while criticising the ANC and depicting mine bosses as men on thrones.
The video, titled Blood Platinum: South Africa’s miners’ strike and uploaded a few days ago has had thousands of viewers. The visuals are as bright and colourful as an early 90s computer game, but the tone is disapproving.
Narrated by an upbeat Taiwanese woman and subtitled in English, the video starts with protesters waving posters with the message “More Rand”. With the sound of a gunshot, their peaceful posters suddenly turn into sticks and the miners are engaged in a face-off with armed riot police. The white police, wearing ANC flags on their chests, point pistols at miners, before shooting them.
The miners are then arrested and put in jail while a man in a shack holding a baby watches on television. A white judge rules that the 270 arrested miners must be charged with the deaths of their colleagues. “Woah … wait a minute. ‘Common Purpose Doctrine’” emphasises the enthusiastic narrator in Taiwanese. “Isn’t that from the apartheid era?”
The music switches, protesters break Nelson Mandela from a jail cell, and the video runs on …
The Star