Among the many images to have emerged from Thursday's memorial service for the Lonmin miners was one that I feel has been quite effective in placing the shootings firmly in the context of a troubled and bloody history.
And no, it was not of expelled ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, who had hijacked the service, turning it into a political rally in which he attacked the government -- although this has been a dominant theme in the media.
The photograph was of two women dressed in black sitting on rocks on a hill near the site where the 34 miners were mown down by police. It was a simple image, and the caption identified them only as members of a local church.
But there was a timelessness about it and, if you didn't know better, you'd be hard pressed to say when exactly this photograph was taken. It could have been this century; it could have been during the last. In fact, the women's dresses were so formal and severe, that were this in sepia, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a scene from the 1890s or even earlier.
It is a cliche, used by the lazy and hard of thinking, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but here essentially was a South African narrative: in a country shaped and formed by a scramble for its mineral resources, a country where the battle for those resources continues and grows more violent with each passing day, women appear forever destined to gather in groups and mourn in the dust of the mining compounds.
History repeats itself. That's another tired saw, one that historians find intensely annoying. What is meant by this, though, is that we ignore the lessons thrown up by our past. It is not unreasonable, then, that some editorial writers have compared Marikana with Sharpeville and others referred to it as our democracy's Boipatong.