PALUBA

MARIKANA, South Africa — The police fired on machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine here on Thursday, leaving a field strewed with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality.

Speaking to a local talk radio station on Friday morning, South Africa's police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, said that 30 people had been killed in the shooting.

In a scene replayed endlessly on television that reminded some South Africans of the days when the police of the apartheid government opened fire on protesters, heavily armed officers shot into a charging crowd of workers who walked off the job last Friday, demanding higher wages.

The strike has pitted the country's largest mine workers union, which is closely allied with the governing A.N.C., against a radical upstart union demanding sharp increases in pay and faster action to improve the grim living and working standards for miners.

Thirty four people were killed after police opened fire on striking miners at a South African mine on Thursday, the police chief has said.

Riah Phiyega said police had been forced to shoot after armed protesters charged them, "firing shots", at the Marikana mine in the north-east.

At least 78 people were injured in the confrontation, she added.

President Jacob Zuma has announced an inquiry, calling the deaths "tragic".

Andrew Harding reports.