The Editorial Working Group of ROAPE is pleased to announce that the winner of our Ruth First prize for the best article by an Africa-based author published in ROAPE in 2015 is Asanda Benya, for her article ‘The invisible hands: women in Marikana’, published in the special issue ‘White gold: new class and community struggles on the South African platinum belt’, volume 42, issue 146, December 2015, pp. 545–560. The ROAPE Prize Committee commented:
This article provides an extremely rich and original analysis of the Marikana strikes and their aftermath by focusing on the role and experiences of women, mainly the partners of the miners. This analysis is very well supported by theoretical literature, making a strong case for a broader gendered analysis of political economy which includes the realm of social reproduction as integral to understanding the social and political dynamics of capitalist society and crisis and class struggle. The paper integrates rich concrete detail with theoretical insight admirably, arguing convincingly that the role and experiences of women in this context goes beyond participation in the domestic sphere or reproductive labour but inserts them integrally within the broader social relations of production/reproduction such that they also develop a strong political consciousness and feel very much internal to and part of rather than external supporters of the miners’ struggle. The analysis brings the situation and struggle to life in a vivid way, and also clearly situates the condition and processes within Marikana and the formal and informal settlements within South Africa in the region’s broader post-apartheid political economy.
This prize-winning article can be read free on the ROAPE pages of Taylor & Francis Online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2015.1087394.
Asanda Benya has also reflected on the difficulties and insights she gained while undertaking her research in a blog piece published on Roape.net, ‘Gendered navigations: women in mining’, available online at http://roape.net/2016/08/09/gendered-navigations-women-mining/.