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3

Migrant Women and Domestic Work in the City

For female migrants […] migration was […] a means of escape […], a personal choice, involving flight from the controls of precolonial society initially and the deteriorating quality of rural life under colonialism and settler rule subsequently.

Cherryl Walker — Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (1990)

In 1988 I bought a house in Melville, Johannesburg, and soon discovered that most of the domestic workers in my little cul-de-sac spoke isiXhosa, but were also exceptionally fluent in English. All were ‘live-ins’, and many had been in the city for many years. Given their close ties to their home villages, they were role models, inspiring other women to travel to Johannesburg, often specifically to Melville with its views across to the Koppies. Over Christmas, most of these women returned to the Eastern Cape, to their homelands. Some took ‘Durban line’ buses to the Kokstad area, while others boarded the ‘Bloemfontein line’ in the direction of Butterworth and Queenstown. In early January, by the time the Pride of India trees in Tolip Street were covered in pink blooms, they were back again.

Three decades later, most of these women are in their sixties, and have either gone home to their villages or are making plans to retire there. Winnie, whose surname I never knew, worked for my neighbour and passed away before she could fulfil her retirement dream. Through the years, many of the women had either children or grandchildren living with them, and most employers helped to send these children to former whites-only ‘Model C’ schools. Some children even attended university in the late 1980s and 1990s. None became domestic workers, most got good jobs and found accommodation in the city centre, though two have since died of illnesses related to HIV/Aids.

Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela

The woman in Tolip Street I know best is a year older than me: Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela, born on 16 June 1950.¹ She grew up in the Butterworth area and left when she was nineteen years old, after her parents tried to force her to marry an old man she did not love. She climbed onto a ‘van’, she says, and ran away to Cape Town where she met the father of her first child. He was, however, ‘useless’ and she was forced to return to her parents when it was time to give birth. A few years later, she left her four-year-old daughter with her mother and, taking ‘just a little bag’ with her, took a train to Johannesburg. She would spend more than forty years in the city, and all this time she lived in ‘white’ neighbourhoods. The happiest time was when she and her Malawian common-law husband, London Banda, were both ‘live-ins’ in Melville. Together with their daughter, Noluvuyo Rachel, they lived next door to me in a cottage on a large property with a few Mediterranean-style houses on it.² London was the gardener of the residential complex called Klein Geluk (small happiness) and came to work in my garden on Friday afternoons. One Sunday morning in April 1997, he died of a heart attack. London Banda’s burial in West Park cemetery was attended by his family and black friends as well as many white people.

Cecilia – as she was known to her employers – did ‘piece jobs’, and for over twenty years she came to my house every Thursday, also working for my tenants after 2001 when I relocated to Amsterdam. I visited South Africa regularly, and we kept close contact. In July 2014, I sold the house after Cecilia announced that she wanted to retire soon and return to her home village. In spite of the fact that many other members of Cecilia’s family lived and worked in Johannesburg and in cities such as Welkom, Bloemfontein and Cape Town, her closest ties were with the Eastern Cape, despite its troubled history: ‘When Kaiser Matanzima took over he moved us, also close to Queenstown. That was in 1963. Since then my mother was blind. There was a lot of fighting in 1963; the PAC, the ANC, Poqo.’³

Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela retired at the end of 2014, twenty-five years after I first met her and the many other domestic workers in Melville’s Tolip Street. After her husband’s death in 1997, her life remained very much the same, although she no longer relied on various piece jobs. She went to work full time at A Room With a View, a guesthouse just up the road from Klein Geluk. Her employer contributed to an unemployment insurance fund and she lived in a small but comfortable flat with electricity and hot and cold running water. In the main room with its kitchen section stood a double bed, a cupboard and some chairs. She also had her own bathroom with a tub and a toilet. Her days were long, as she made breakfast for guests, serviced the bedrooms, and did the laundry. After-hours, she chatted to other domestic workers on the street or in her room, where she often watched TV. On one of her two off-days per week, she came to work at my house just down the road, and continued to do so until she went on pension.

Over the years, her extended family, both in the Eastern Cape and Johannesburg, has had to deal with deaths caused by HIV/Aids, accidents and even a murder. Her eldest brother died in 1980, her mother in 1999, and her sister Beatrice in 2000. As the eldest living child of her deceased parents, she bears a huge responsibility in the family, and throughout her working years she went back to her village near Cofimvaba for funerals – always travelling in overnight buses.

In spite of many hardships, she has remained remarkably optimistic and energetic. She improved her eating habits after being diagnosed with hypertension, and her eyesight also began to deteriorate a few years ago. Since her husband’s death she has not had a partner. During her last years in the city she never attended church, although she grew up Methodist and her daughters went to Sunday school. Both are unmarried, and both have three children; the fathers paid lobola to Cecilia. The elder of the two, Nokubonga Carli, still lives in the village where she grew up. Sometimes she visits her father in Cape Town, where she usually tries to find temporary domestic work. Noluvuyo Rachel was born in 1984 and her parents managed to keep her at home in Johannesburg thanks to the willingness of their employers at Klein Geluk. With the help of other employers and their friends, Rachel was able to attend good schools in the neighbourhood and after passing her matric at St Katherine’s School in Parktown, she studied marketing at Damelin College. At the same time, she had an administrative job at a small French-South African firm exporting vegetables to Paris. She has been living in an apartment in Newtown in Johannesburg for many years now. Initially she shared it with a few cousins who had come to the city from the Eastern Cape, but now lives there with her three sons and the father of the two youngest ones. The family intends buying a house, probably in Soweto. Rachel works as an assessment manager at an architectural firm in Johannesburg, and her children attend Emmarentia Primary School.

Although she is a real city girl, Rachel loves going ‘home’ to the rural village where her mother eventually retired. During the last five years of her working life, Cecilia built a modern three-bedroomed house on the fairly extensive piece of land which had been ‘given’ to the family decades before by the ‘chief’. It is situated on one of the beautiful gently sloping hills where the family already has two large round rondawels with corrugated iron roofs. Other family members live close by. Despite the fact that Cecilia’s modern house on the property was finished when I went to visit her in January 2015, she prefers to live with other women of the family in one of the rondawels. The new house is for visitors such as Rachel and her young family.

Nomahobe Cecilia has a vegetable garden, she keeps pigs and chickens, and also had plans to learn to drive and even to buy a taxi to take children to school. She has, however, not been well since mid-2017, and used to travel to Cape Town regularly for extensive stays with a cousin while receiving treatment at the Somerset Hospital. During 2018 she was treated for ulcers in Johannesburg, and during this time stayed with Rachel, even though she far prefers being at her rural home.

Nomahobe Magadlela’s life story is unique but also typical of that of generations of women who have worked as domestic workers. Fragments of her story will therefore be entwined with the general history I intend to tell concerning the migration of thousands of rural women to South African cities. This chapter deals specifically with women who hailed from the Eastern Cape, and their working lives in Johannesburg. There are, of course, other migration stories of people from rural KwaZulu-Natal, the Northern Cape, Sekukuniland, former homelands Bophuthatswana and Venda, as well as Lesotho and Botswana, who left for urban destinations such as Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. The conventions, rules and laws governing the lives of these women during the greater part of the twentieth century are discussed in chapter 4.

The Eastern Cape

‘A situational intimacy between them and their servants’

Why is it that there is such a long history of Xhosa women doing domestic work in the homes of urban whites? Jacklyn Cock came up with answers in her groundbreaking work, Maids and Madams (1980), the first major study in which South African domestic workers take centre stage. According to Cock, the practice has its origins in the Mfecane wars that were waged among indigenous peoples in southern Africa from 1818 until about 1840. This resulted in people being uprooted, and spreading all over the country.⁴ Conquered Zizi, Hlubi and Bhele people settled among the Xhosa and became known as the Mfengu (Fingo). The Cape colonial government granted territory to them between the Fish and the Keiskamma rivers, but the area was too small to sustain so many people. Their independence became more and more restricted.

Furthermore, between 1850 and 1853 the Xhosa lost a succession of frontier wars against the British authorities, and shortly afterwards, in 1857, the prophecy of a young woman called Nongqawuse had disastrous consequences. Because she had prophesied that all white people would be driven into the sea and that Xhosa people could then take over their land, the Xhosa killed their own cattle and destroyed their crops. This resulted in a devastating famine. As Noël Mostert convincingly argues in Frontiers (1992), this self-inflicted event succeeded where the many frontier wars waged by the British had failed. The power and social structure of the Xhosa people was broken, and, for the colonists, victory was ‘providentially accomplished’.⁵

An uncomfortable conclusion is that the celebrated humanitarian conscience of Sir George Grey was not about to be manifested when, in surveying the scene before him, he saw his grand design of native control and selective European settlement being effortlessly prepared for him by the Xhosa themselves.⁶

Grey had, since 1855, rather unsuccessfully tried to recruit Xhosa men to work on road construction for the colonial government and, for a pittance, to give up their pastoral independence, changing ‘from barbarism to pauperism’, in the words of CW de Kiewiet.⁷ After the events of 1857, the famished Xhosa were forced to search for assistance in colonial towns such as King William’s Town, though Grey strongly disapproved of private charity initially provided by the ‘Kaffir Relief Committee’. The prevailing attitude of the British Settlers was expressed by the Graham’s Town Journal, in which it was stated that a distinction had to be drawn between ‘feelings and sympathies’ and ‘sense and reason’: ‘every [Xhosa] then that is saved from starvation … is just one more enemy fattened and rendered effective at our expense. We cannot hope that gratitude will quench a spark of that enmity.’⁸ In a cynical attempt to enslave the Xhosa and break their resistance, Grey stipulated that only those who were willing to sign themselves up as labourers and servants would be assisted in the famine. Xhosa and Fingo people were forced to beg for work on white-owned farms and in the frontier towns of the Cape Colony. The Xhosa population in ‘British Kaffraria’ dropped from an estimated 105 000 to 37 000 during 1857;⁹ by the end of that year more than 30 000 were already working for whites, so that it soon became customary for frontier farmers to have many black labourers in their employ.¹⁰ Labour was regulated by a pass system and by way of contracts. The extremely low wage paid to women workers was justified in terms of the ‘unskilled’ nature of domestic work and the fact that workers were usually provided with board and lodging.

Diaries and letters written by 1820 British settlers were the main sources used by Cock in her article ‘Domestic Service and Education for Domesticity: The Incorporation of Xhosa Women into Colonial Society’ (1990).¹¹ In her efforts to ascertain the nature of their employment, Cock found that black women were sometimes ‘kidnapped’ during the first decades of settlement in the border area and incorporated into farm households like slaves. Working relationships were feudal, and kitchens especially became an intriguing social space. ‘Because on the frontier colonial women did a good deal of domestic work themselves, there developed a situational intimacy between them and their servants,’ writes Cock.¹² White women were mainly concerned that black women should do the work required of them, and structural inequality underpinned their interactions.¹³ According to Cock, it is debatable whether their physical closeness had much impact on breaking down racial stereotypes, and whether it gave white women any better understanding of the ‘common humanity’ of black women. Contradictory feelings of intimacy and distance determined the ambivalent nature of the relationship, and black women would always know infinitely more about white women and their households than the other way around.

‘Amakeia’

‘Give us the white child or you’ll be killed!’ ‘Over my dead body,’ Amakeia proudly answered.

Notwithstanding the highly unequal working relationship, Jacklyn Cock provides illuminating examples of intimate bonds between black women and white children, something which is also evident in ‘Amakeia’, a poem based on an event that took place in 1834, when yet another war was raging between white frontiersmen and Xhosa people. Written by AG Visser, the much-anthologised poem, first published in 1930, has since been read by thousands of South African schoolchildren, thereby contributing immensely to the still prevalent image of loyalty and faithfulness associated with black nannies. Numerous variations of ‘Amakeia’ are to be found on the internet, and several of these employ more politically correct terminology.¹⁴

It is not only white people, however, who have been moved by Visser’s image of a black woman giving her life to save that of the white child entrusted to her by its dying mother. For example, author Sindiwe Magona (born in 1943), first read the poem as a student at the college she attended in the Eastern Cape. Years later, in a moving article for Rapport newspaper, speaking from her own experience as a nanny in the 1960s, Magona commented on the trust white children put in their carers, and their absolute dependence upon them.¹⁵ In her autobiography, which I discuss in chapter 5, Magona not only confirms the intense emotions evoked by Visser’s poem, but also the findings of sociologist Jacklyn Cock. The tragic story of Amakeia continues to move both white and black readers – though for different reasons, no doubt. White readers are given a nostalgic reminder of the women who cared for them as children, while black readers are undoubtedly aware that Amakeia probably had children of her own who do not feature at all in the poem.

Annie and Sabina

‘Our little Sabina is everything to us.’

Sociologists and historians generally, of course, rely not on poems, but on written archival sources in their efforts to fathom what race relations were ‘really’ like during nineteenth-century South Africa. Unfortunately, however, material is scarce. According to Cock, this is because women tend to underestimate the value of their experiences, ‘feeling their world and experiences to be trivial, insignificant and not worth recording’. Diaries by male settlers such as Charles Bell and Joseph Stirk ‘give fascinating details of busy, productive lives, but the domestic aspect lies in the shadows.’ There is no known written record of domestic life by a black woman, though fortunately a few letters remain in which servants are mentioned by white women.¹⁶

Although employers often complained in letters to friends and family about the alleged laziness of servants, their lack of initiative, their stupidity, ungratefulness and ‘taking ways’, Cock has come across evidence of some exceptionally good relationships, for example, between Mary Taylor and her Mfengu servant, Annie, and between the wife of John Ross and her two domestic workers. A Mrs Philipps also wrote with great appreciation of her young servant:

Our little Sabina is everything to us, she waits at Table and her remarks and cleverness in repartee is a source of amusement to all. She is a most uncommon child, talks English perfectly, and neither in word nor action has ever betrayed conduct unworthy of a British subject. She is genteel in her appearance and was everything from the first. Her mother is a very superior person and now that we can understand her, we find her possessing extraordinary sentiments of right with an abhorrence of wrong.¹⁷

Mary Taylor describes her servants as ‘quite happy and contented’, while Mrs Philipps finds it rather extraordinary that ‘they should immediately place such confidence in us, from the first moment they did not seem to have the least fear, but to think everything we did was right and for their good’. Time and again, employers mention servants’ characteristics that they appreciate: loyalty, trust and submissiveness – however, as Cock warns, ‘These are, par excellence, the qualities of subordinates.’ Of course, subservience has through the centuries and all over the world been valued by employers and is not unique to the South African servant situation. Cock sums up the specific nature of subservience in the eastern part of the Cape Colony:

The key structural characteristics of the position of African women who entered into domestic service with the colonists were their powerlessness and their vulnerability. Relationships with their employers were consequently marked by an extreme inequality. Their content was coloured by both the racism of the frontier and […] settler notions of female inferiority.¹⁸

Even the most positive descriptions of servants, such as that of Mrs Philipps, are steeped in paternalism. Black servants, like slaves before them, were regarded as children. ‘The child analogy involves a fundamental denial of equality, and is often a component of racist, sexist and classist ideologies,’ writes Cock. As far back as 1965, HA Cairns had pointed out that race relations in colonial situations are organised along the same unequal lines as social class relations, though doubly so – a view that Cock endorses.¹⁹ South African race relations are indeed an extension of the class distinctions with which settlers coming from England were familiar: the upper and middle classes attributed qualities of ‘irresponsibility, immaturity, excitability and emotionalism’ to those from lower classes, especially servants. Most of those who settled along the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony from 1820 belonged to what were considered subordinate groups in Britain. However, because they became landowners and employers, they rose to a higher status, and did so far more swiftly than would ever have been possible in their home country. Significantly, their elevated status was primarily a result of skin colour – a factor that still determines social class in South Africa. Thus, in English-speaking households, domestic service was instrumental in transforming nineteenth-century class-based attitudes into racial hierarchies. As we have seen, these had existed among the Dutch at the Cape from the time of slavery, and they would continue to shape South African society in coming centuries.

Mission Education and the Ideal of Civilisation

‘Godliness, cleanliness, industry and discipline’

The many mission stations in the border area of the Cape Colony had a significant impact on relations between black and white people in the nineteenth century. They brought literacy to black women, and provided refuge to widows wishing to escape the so-called levirate or brother-in-law marriages.²⁰ Reverend R Shepherd, the last missionary who was principal of Lovedale College, had observed that women were often not much more than slaves in their own households, and generally helpless in a society that bound them to traditional rules and conventions: ‘They were subordinate. They were beasts of burden. They were exposed even at a tender age to customs that brutalised. And after maturity they were disposed of in marriage often without their consent and frequently as minor wives to polygamous husbands.’²¹ That this situation would continue well into the second half of the twentieth century is proven by Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela’s own flight during the 1970s from a forced traditional marriage.

The ideology of domesticity that missionaries promoted was deeply rooted in European gender roles. The missionaries’ Western norms and Victorian cultural upbringing often led to an aggressive sense of superiority regarding all women who, according to them, had first to be good servants before becoming good housewives. Both roles presupposed an attitude of subservience. Regarding black ‘heathens’, the missionaries considered polygamy a huge stumbling block to the Christian way of life, and black women were therefore encouraged both by missionaries and teachers to escape such marriage arrangements. The missionaries were also against intonjane, the initiation rites that young girls had to undergo. Furthermore, they were adamantly against the system of lobola, which obliged a bridegroom to pay the parents of his bride a certain number of cattle. They believed that the baptism of women would contribute to the ‘civilisation’ of the Xhosa people as a whole, and much attention was therefore given to women’s education, in particular their socialisation into Western domestic roles. However, this was done without altering prevailing attitudes regarding the subordinate position of women.

Lobola, according to Mostert, was ‘the root and branch of Xhosa society, the basis of its growth’. He elaborates thus:

It provided the laws governing the stability of personal and family relationships, the values of the society as a whole. From it, one way or another, derived the harmonies, balances and rhythms of the most substantial part of Xhosa life, the rationale of their cattle culture.²²

Many anthropologists share Mostert’s view, arguing that nineteenth-century missionaries overlooked the function of lobola in promoting social and economic cohesion in precolonial times. Bridewealth paid in cattle linked the pastoral economy of men and the garden economy of women, and marriages performed a political function in establishing, sustaining and restructuring allegiances.²³ In colonial society, black women became enmeshed in new power relationships, disadvantaged not only in terms of their sex, but also their race; as black women, they were incorporated into the very bottom layer of urban society, stripped of protections they enjoyed in traditional society.²⁴

According to one missionary, black people had to be taught to work, ‘for as a rule, the barbarous natives have no higher ambition than to live at the side of their huts and cattle-folds, basking in the sun and enjoying the savage luxury of utter laziness’.²⁵ In his study, White Writing, JM Coetzee points to this attitude among VOC officials who ascribed a ‘lazy’ mentality to the ‘Hottentots’ during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.²⁶

From 1871 until 1922, the ‘Industrial Department’ at Lovedale Girls’ School taught hundreds of women to become domestic workers and to do needlework. The aim of Lovedale was to teach ‘Godliness, cleanliness, industry and discipline’ to the women. In its heyday, when Dr Jane Waterston (1843–1932) was twice ‘Lady Superintendent’, the school had between 600 and 800 students and was an example to many similar institutions in the Eastern Cape, such as Lesseyton, Blythswood, Healdtown, Salem and St Matthews – the latter being the school where Sindiwe Magona became acquainted with the poem ‘Amakeia’ in the early 1960s. At all of these schools, domestic science was a core subject, even in academic courses, and very few women managed to progress beyond being a domestic worker – which was always a badly paid job, with very limited power and no prestige. According to Cock, the few black women who did acquire academic skills and became influential people in urban communities were mostly ‘old girls’ from Lovedale, among them being Cecilia Makiwane, M Majombozi, Martha Ngano, F Skota, Frieda Bokwe and Sarah Poho.

Missionary wives and female British teachers played a significant role in the ‘civilisation’ of Xhosa women, but although they themselves often punctured the stereotype of female passivity (some were former servants), they rarely questioned the general assumption that black women should be submissive and domesticated. Although Cock is appreciative of the contribution mission schools made to the development of black women, she is also critical of the role of missionaries: ‘They were bearers of a form of cultural imperialism which bore down upon the position of women in indigenous African society in complex ways.’²⁷ While in some respects a Christian education made black women more assertive, it also weakened their role in precolonial society without offering opportunities for authority or autonomy. Cock goes on to argue as follows:

Thus education operated largely as the crucial agency of social control and cultural reproduction, defining and reinforcing certain social roles and initiating people into those skills and values which were essential for effective role performance. For many African women this involved a new role as domestic workers in the service of the colonisers.²⁸

According to Cock, a complex pattern of coercion propelled Xhosa women into domestic service: ‘These coercive factors ranged from direct, physical force to the more subtle ideological coercion exerted by the missionaries.’²⁹ These missionaries were uniquely influential in the frontier area, ensuring that many Xhosa women went to school, learnt to speak English, and were employed by the settler community. Domestic work was a means of escaping traditional practices that kept women subservient in their homesteads. The option of working in the homes of white settlers offered new opportunities. Even Hena, the daughter of tribal chief Ngqika, fled her home after refusing to marry a heathen polygamist and went to work as a servant for a family of the London Missionary Society. She studied at Lovedale, but domestic work was her entry into the colonial economy.³⁰ The opportunities thus created meant that black women could earn their own living, however badly paid, and live independently of men.

As previously mentioned, Nomahobe Magadlela was herself saved in the 1970s by ‘the church’. A teacher hid her when her brother came looking for her to get married to a much older man who wished to pay lobola to the family. This is the story she tells:

I knew this man Khnabinfene because he was the brother of Nombulelo who was my friend and in the same class – Standard 6. We were schooling at Hlubene. Her family therefore thought they knew me and wanted me to marry this man who was actually not well. Two girls before me also did not want him. His family offered eight cows as lobola. My father and uncles agreed they must bring the cattle. I saw a note they would bring the cattle on 14 April 1971. The day I found out I went to another school. I could run fast. The teacher hid me at his brother’s house in Alice, next to Fort Hare.

Many decades later, she recalls the name of the teacher with much gratitude: Godfrey Mbambo. Eventually, however, she had to return home: ‘The same day I arrived I took a stick, I waited, I opened the gate and chased the lobola cattle out. My uncle wanted to hit me. My father was also cross. My mother was crying. Everybody was cross, but afterwards they accepted. They were Methodist.’

After completing Standard 6, Nomahobe went to Cape Town. Her brother Mlulame, who lived there, paid for the trip and she stayed in a hostel in Langa. After meeting Lindelo, who worked with her brother as a builder, she became pregnant. Lindelo then had to pay five cows ‘damage’ (ukuhlawula) to her parents, and did so in five cash instalments of two pounds and ten shillings. Because he was ‘useless’, she returned to the Eastern Cape, where she gave birth to Nokubonga Carli. Nomahobe goes on to explain: ‘She was three or four years old when I left her with my mother and went to Johannesburg. That was after 1976; Soweto was already over.’ Having decided that her employers should call her Cecilia, she went on to live in Johannesburg for close on forty years before retiring to Cofimvaba at the end of 2014.

Migration to the City

‘A means of escape’

On 2 February 1990, FW de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, made a historic announcement, unbanning liberation movements, and extending the vote to all citizens. After lengthy negotiations, the first democratic election took place on 27 April 1994, the African National Congress was voted into power, and Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president. A quarter of a century later, the ANC is still the governing party, and a large percentage of black women still earn a living as domestic workers in a country where the unemployment rate reached 26.7% in the first quarter of 2018 – one of the highest rates in the world.

In order to understand this trend, and the reasons for so many women like Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela leaving home to work in cities as nannies, servants and housekeepers, it is necessary to trace developments during the twentieth century.

Historian Cherryl Walker maintains that although black women have all too often been described as victims, as ‘dispossessed’ and ‘surplus’, migration from rural areas to the cities was the only way to establish some form of independence.³¹ Although it is true that women had lost some of the protection they traditionally had in precolonial times, migration offered an alternative to total control by men, allowing for greater personal autonomy and mobility. During the first decades of the twentieth century, women wishing to escape the poverty of the rural areas often went first to ‘white’ towns and soon afterwards to the cities. Johannesburg always held the biggest attraction for these workers.³² The phenomenon of ‘runaway brides’ originated in Basutoland, but was observed elsewhere too.³³ According to the 1911 census, about 100 000 black women were already to be found in ‘white’ towns during the first decade of the twentieth century (19% of the black population); by 1921 the figure had risen to 147 000. Between 1921 and 1936 the number increased by 142.3%, while there was only a 78.4% increase among men. The 1936 census shows that 52.6% of all black women were at the time still living in the ‘native reserves’, 11% were in urban areas, while the rest lived in rural areas owned and controlled by whites.

The fact that most women remained in traditional villages and homesteads was a direct result of the labour system, which both forced and lured men to the mines and factories. The so-called enslaved state of black women was sometimes condemned by white men, though it was also exploited to suit the needs of the economy. Rural women were expected to care for children and old people ‘back home’ and to look after sick and ageing husbands after they became redundant in the cities.³⁴ South African mining bosses relied on a migrant labour system that depended on a rural ‘catchment’ area, and black men were assisted in maintaining their patriarchal powers in these rural areas. Although the South African government desired recognition as being modern, it advocated ‘traditionalism’ and tribal commitments. White and black men colluded to keep black women entrenched in ‘homestead production’ so that the aspirations of those women who had gone to the cities on their own inititative and had already been living there for many years were obstructed in every way. Single women were considered minors, and in spite of their recently found ‘independence’, they were forced to request the permission of ‘heathen’ parents or to submit to the traditional guardianship of a man if they wished to rent or buy a house in the city. Yet in spite of all this opposition, women were on the whole highly motivated migrants:

For female migrants […] migration was more likely to represent a means of escape than either a means to reinvest in the rural economy or a process of dispossession. It was a personal choice, involving flight from the controls of precolonial society initially and the deteriorating quality of rural life under colonialism and settler rule subsequently. This is in sharp contrast to the pattern of male migration, which, especially at first, represented a societal response to new pressures and opportunities and was characterised by conformity rather than challenge to existing norms and relations of power.³⁵

It became clear that women were more permanently settled in cities than was initially expected. While men were lured back to the rural areas because of wives and children who had remained there, or because they were forced to go back after falling ill on the mines, once women left they had few ties and it was often very difficult for them to reintegrate again. The cost of their independence was high. Usually, it was impossible for them to keep their children with them, which meant that they were forced to separate, often becoming estranged after children were sent back to the so-called reserves or homelands. Once there, children were taken care of by a grandmother, sister or other family member who took over the mother’s role – many heartbreaking examples of which are covered in chapter 6, where I discuss Thula Baba (1987).

As early as the 1920s and 1930s, social scientists were documenting the stress migration was causing among black families in previously closely-knit and kinship-based communities. According to Isaac Schapera’s Migrant Labour and Tribal Life (1947) and HJ Simons’s African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (1968), new kinds of relationship began to develop after tribal marriages, known as ‘customary unions’, were undermined and became threatened with disintegration.³⁶ Sex before marriage had become standard practice during the 1930s, and there were also frequent occurrences of rape and sexual abuse. Many illegitimate children were born, and respect for elders was falling away. The break-up of traditional structures weighed heavily on women. Walker, however, warns that such changes should not be judged too negatively. Women were developing creative ways to deal with change; new family structures and value systems evolved. Strong, female-centred households consisting of a woman, her children and often grandchildren were formed to compensate for the lack of a permanent male head of the family.

Because of the migration of men to the mines and a decrease in polygamous marriages, a rising number of rural women did not have husbands, and those especially who were unhappy with traditional marriage arrangements escaped to cities. The chances of finding a husband in the city were small, and so unmarried women were pushed even farther to the margins of city life.³⁷ Having a ‘safe haven’ in the backyard of an employer’s house in a white suburb was generally the only solution.

Walker explains that the extreme subjugation of black women during the greater part of the twentieth century cannot simply be attributed to the spread of capitalism in South Africa. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act No 21 of 1923 deemed all South African towns and cities ‘white’ and defined urban black men as ‘temporary sojourners’ who had to carry passes. For decades, women were not considered important enough to include in the Act, but the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act No 67 of 1952 changed this. For the first time in the history of South Africa, black women were also required to carry passes. This provision resulted in a widespread strike by women in 1956, though Act No 67 would only be repealed more than thirty years later, by section 23 of the Identification Act No 72 of 1986.³⁸

Elsa Joubert’s Poppie Nongena is the best-known literary example of a black woman’s resistance to laws and conventions forcing her to live in the rural areas.³⁹ After the death of Poppie’s husband, the family’s continued presence is regarded as illegal in ‘white’ South Africa, and so they are sent from Cape Town to his homeland near East London, a place Poppie does not know. Although both traditionalist conventions and ‘modern’ apartheid laws imposed rigid social and judicial restrictions on women such as Poppie, many preferred the relative freedom offered by city life. Poppie therefore did her utmost to return to Cape Town and to sidestep restrictions so that she could at least try to earn a living by doing domestic work.

Political and Administrative Restrictions

‘Notion of the family’

What were the restrictions that black women had to deal with in the cities? Katherine Eales’s research into the administration of ‘African women’ in Johannesburg during the first forty years of the twentieth century reveals that the rules were hugely ambivalent. She shows, however, that precisely because these women did not work in industry and did not fit general assumptions about ‘the native’, they managed, in often miraculous ways, to stay out of reach of ‘native policy’ for many decades. The state had conveniently constructed a ‘way of knowing’ and speaking about ‘the native’ that related to black males only, and so no one was interested in gathering information about women, who were in any case considered far inferior to men.⁴⁰ Until urbanisation started to occur on a large scale in the 1920s, white officials therefore had relatively little contact with black women, who were of course never themselves given a voice. Instead, the state ‘relied very largely on its own intelligence – information that was profoundly influenced by several centuries of Western thought premised on an indefatigable belief in the inferiority of both women and ‘natives’.⁴¹

In keeping with the stereotyping of women as either childlike and angelic or evil whores, administrators were reluctant to sanction laws relating to them. Speeches by white politicians containing references to black people related only to men. The general assumption that white women were subordinate to their husbands was transferred to the relationship of all whites with all black people. White individuals saw themselves as occupying a parental role, and so did the state itself. ‘As against the European, the native stands as an eight-year-old against a man of mature experience’, is a typical example of the prevailing rhetoric.⁴² The comparison of black people with children, as being in need of guardianship, assumes the superiority of whites, the prerogative of power and privilege, and the right to discipline: ‘Indeed, the notion of the family informed the administration’s conception of African social relationships.’⁴³

The dominant assumption underlying urban administration was that black women in towns and cities were inherently inclined to licentious behaviour and that white people should not become involved in matters relating to their sexuality, which would be regulated by black men. If the presence of a father or husband could be proven, the state was unwilling to intervene in the black man’s jurisdiction over women; Johannesburg’s city fathers believed that traditional customary laws would suffice, especially after the Native Administration Act of 1927 came into effect. Patriarchy was therefore a strong weapon in the arsenal of the state. Women without men in their lives were, consequently, a problem. They were by definition considered to be corrupt and corruptive; it was feared that they would undermine the discipline of working men and disrupt moral codes and social relations.

Research attempting to give an overview of the urbanisation of black women in Johannesburg before 1940 is limited to official and newspaper reports, and indirect sources gathered by social scientists. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Deborah Gaitskell wrote scholarly reports such as ‘Laundry, Liquor and “Playing Ladish”. African Women in Johannesburg 1903–1939’, a dissertation entitled ‘Female Mission Initiative: Black and White Women in Three Witwatersrand Churches, 1903–1939’, and an article entitled ‘Housewives, Maids or Mothers Some Contradictions for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–1939’. Charles van Onselen (1982), Tim Couzens (1985) and Luli Callinicos (1987) did important work regarding the history of black people in Johannesburg, and all research results point to the fact that, although the aim of the Natives Laws Amendment Act No 46 of 1937 was to restrict women migrating to cities, it was not implemented on the Witwatersrand until after World War II.

The Church and Manyanos

In her article ‘Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa’ (1990), Gaitskell examines the role played by Christian women’s organisations in the mobility and solidarity of women in urban areas of the Witwatersrand, and focuses specifically on manyanos (manyano is an isiXhosa word meaning ‘unity’).⁴⁴ Manyanos are well established all over South Africa and are usually Methodist, though other church groups and unions also have manyanos. By 1911, about a million (26.2%) of all black South Africans were Christian, and in 1946 the figure had risen to four million (52.6%), with the majority being Methodist or Anglican. Most were women, and they preferred to come together in separate church groups known as manyanos. The sense of community and support of a manyano prayer group is highly valued by members, many of whom endure long and lonely working hours.⁴⁵ Motherhood was an important unifying aspect, and the women’s urge to autonomy is proven by the fact that, by 1937, the Transvaal manyanos had chosen a woman as president. The organisational and fundraising skills of the women were especially noteworthy, and they were immensely proud of their annual gatherings which often lasted a week, with members going to great lengths to attend. The custom of Johannesburg manyanos meeting on Thursday afternoons developed from the washerwomen’s schedule: bundles of dirty washing were fetched from white households on Mondays, washed on Tuesdays, ironed on Wednesdays, and returned on Thursday mornings, leaving the women free in the afternoon. Manyano women wear their uniforms with pride: a black skirt with either a red or white jacket, and a white hat.

The manyano movement was, for some time, perceived to be politically passive.⁴⁶ The groups were, as a consequence, often sidelined in feminist discourse, but research has shown that women in manyano uniforms played a large part in mobilising women during anti-pass demonstrations in Bloemfontein in 1913 and again in Potchefstroom in 1929. Suggesting that more credit should be given to such activism, Gaitskell goes on to make the following point:

Certainly defence of family can be narrow, exclusive, inward-looking – and confining for women: but future investigation of gender relations in South Africa will have to pay sensitive attention to the changing ways in which dominant models of family life have been both valued and resisted by individuals when threatened by the state.⁴⁷

Manyano women demonstrated their Christian beliefs and the value they attached to family, but they also showed that they wished to free themselves from male domination by choosing their own church structures. Beverly Haddad confirms that the manyano movement is a site of struggle, survival and resistance which needs to be recognised as an influential space. For more than a hundred years, manyano women have carried a strong message of female solidarity and forceful African Christianity. Domestic workers, especially, are attracted to the support and succour offered by a manyano group. One of these was Winnie, the woman who worked for my neighbour in Melville: every Thursday afternoon I would watch as, dressed in black, red and white, she walked down Tolip Street with a cheerful smile.

Considering that so many women went to mission schools in especially the Eastern Cape, it is regrettable that no first-person accounts of the urban experiences of black women are available. As yet, there is no known record of any such experience in Johannesburg before World War II, apart from speeches made by activist Charlotte Maxeke (1874–1939). Maxeke was also South Africa’s first black female graduate, having obtained a BSc degree at Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1901.⁴⁸

The life histories of a later generation are, however, a valuable source of information. Ellen Kuzwayo (1914–2006) who grew up in the rural Free State, was sent to school in KwaZulu-Natal and moved to Johannesburg in 1946, provides valuable glimpses in her Call Me Woman (1985). However, as will be seen in chapter 5, it is Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) that contains particularly illuminating references not only to his grandmother, but also to his mother, who were both domestic workers in Pretoria.