Asanda Benya

It has been fifteen years since women joined the underground workforce in South Africa’s mines. Currently there are close to 50,000 women in mining, about 10.9% of the permanent mining employees. While close to 11% of the mining workforce are women, and legislation facilitating and accelerating their inclusion has been adopted, the industry continues to imagine and present itself implicitly as masculine and depicts only men or...

In South Africa’s large and highly mechanized mining industry there are over 48,000 women working in underground occupations, mainly in platinum and gold mines. These women form part of the core workforce and labor as miners or general workers, installing support structures, water and ventilation pipes or operating different machines used underground. For three months in 2008 I set out to study a platinum mine in South Africa as an ethnographer...