On the morning of Thursday, August 16, 2012, as thousands of striking South African miners marched in circles atop a pile of red rocks, the police lined up their tanks in front of it. Roughly 30 feet high and 50 feet across, the rock pile was the closest thing to a mountain for miles, jutting out of the flat expanse of the mining area called Marikana, 60 miles northwest of Johannesburg. The miners, who had been on the hill for six days demanding a raise from their employer, the platinum giant Lonmin, were unbowed. Cloaked in tribal blankets, they sang protest songs and waved knives and knobkerries, wooden batons given to boys at their tribal initiations as a symbol of power.

The miners’ strike has an integral place in the history of South Africa. Ever since mining began here at the end of the nineteenth century, poor shaft workers have chafed against the mining-enriched white establishment. Mine strikes in the 1980s kicked South Africa’s black-liberation struggle into high gear, setting the stage for the fall of the white-run apartheid government. On the face of it, the strike at Marikana seemed like a continuation of this classic conflict between rich white and poor black: Lonmin is headquartered in London and has mostly white managers.

But something was different this time. The Marikana strikers’ ire was mainly directed at the country’s black political leadership—particularly the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), a trade union that was famously active in the black-liberation struggle and that currently forms part of the African National Congress (ANC)–led ruling coalition. Coming off the hill to speak to reporters, the strikers asserted it was the black leaders of NUM (pronounced “noom”) and the ANC, not the whites, whose insults and cruelties had driven them to strike. “We are being exploited, both the government and the unions have failed to come to our rescue,” one spat. The miners had even repurposed an apartheid-era protest song, swapping out “boers”—the old nickname for white Afrikaners—for NUM.

As the local police—now mostly black—unrolled a length of barbed wire around one side of the rock pile (ostensibly to protect a group of journalists), the strikers only sang louder and shook their knives more enthusiastically. Their anger was palpable. In an opening near the bottom of the rock pile, they had left a suspected police informant’s body as a warning, his head split open and his corpse arranged in the position of a crucifix.

Before dusk, as the shadows from the nearby mine shaft towers lengthened, the police doused the crowd in tear gas. As the throng began to spill off the hill, the police opened fire into the crowd with semiautomatics, killing 34 miners. Medical examinations would later show that some of them had been shot in the back as they fled.