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Introduction: Searching the Archive

The archive – all archive – every archive – is figured […] and requires transformation, or refiguring.

Carolyn Hamilton et al. — Refiguring the Archive (2002)

Shortly after their arrival at the Cape in 1652, Maria and Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch ‘founding father’ of South Africa, employed a Khoi girl to take care of their children. Krotoa, who was about ten years old at the time, would be ‘part of the family’ for the ten-year period before the Van Riebeecks moved on to Batavia in 1662. She learnt to speak Dutch fluently, and Van Riebeeck soon realised she could act as an interpreter during bartering expeditions and negotiations with the locals. A few men, such as her uncle Autshumao (Harry), were already active as interpreters between the Dutch and the Khoi, but Van Riebeeck apparently trusted Krotoa (Eva) more to further the interests of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company. Of course, he could never have been sure of her loyalty, and so researchers have, quite rightly, considered the likelihood that Krotoa used her postition and language proficiency to advance her own interests too. Not simply a pawn in Van Riebeeck’s strategy to gain the upper hand at the Cape, Krotoa had agency.¹

The fact that Krotoa was both the first black nanny to work for a white family at the Cape and an important go-between figure, made me realise that the millions of black women who have worked in white households through the centuries since then are in their own ways also intermediaries, pivotal figures in the interracial South African contact zone.² Like Krotoa, they are ‘outsiders within’; people with an exceptional knowledge of both black and white cultures. My premise is that present-day domestic workers are an important sociological and economic ‘institution’ that started at the time of Krotoa and slavery at the Cape, and continues to this day.

The lasting importance of domestic workers in post-apartheid South Africa is poignantly demonstrated by a character called Eve Sisulu who, more than three hundred years after Krotoa-Eva’s death, was to become the main character in an often hilariously funny and politically relevant cartoon strip. The concept of Eve and her Madam was born when American Stephen Francis together with his South African-born wife visited his in-laws in Alberton in Gauteng. Francis was fascinated by the dynamics between his mother-in-law and her maid Grace. The ‘yelling and complaining of both parties’ sparked an idea, and in the early 1990s he joined forces with two pioneers of satire in South Africa, historian Harry Dugmore and graphic artist Rico Schacherl. A few years later, the million-dollar title Madam & Eve was launched.³ The Weekly Mail (now the Mail & Guardian) published the cartoon for the first time in 1992, in the interregnum between the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections. Currently, it is carried in a multitude of local and international newspapers. ‘Domestic servants are ubiquitous in South Africa,’ says Harry Dugmore on their website. ‘If you have money, you have a servant. It is the South African way.’ To this day, Madam & Eve contains sharp comment not only on domestic situations but also on political events. Sassy Eve has a Western name, but also an isiXhosa surname that links her to the widely-respected anti-apartheid heroes, Walter and Albertina Sisulu.⁴

Through the centuries, the relationship between employers and women like Krotoa-Eva and Eve Sisulu has been the main meeting point between white and black people. The lives of practically all South Africans have been touched by the institution of paid domestic work: either because of the presence of an often motherly carer and cleaner, or by the absence of a mother who does paid housework for others. Suburbs and houses were even built with the expectation that the average middle-class white family would have a live-in black maid and would therefore need servant’s quarters in the backyard.

I am particularly interested in how the often close, but also always distant, domestic arrangements are represented in the South African archive.⁵ The nature of this archive is, as in the case of many archives, particularly in colonial settings, a vexed one, as Carli Coetzee reminds us: it is dominated by a white perspective.⁶ This is, of course, in keeping with the fact that white South Africans have always enjoyed far better education, resulting also in white authors having easier access to publishers and a reading public than black writers could in the past hope to achieve.

The liberal social and economic historian CW de Kiewiet had already suggested in 1946 that the deepest truth about South Africa lies in the realisation that the continued demand for land by white people was the cause of the entanglement between black and white which lead to exploitation and hostility. Parallel to this hunger for land ran the need for workers. ‘Precisely as this dependency grew, so whites tried to preserve their difference through ideology – racism.’⁷ Black people became landless and extremely poor, which led to even greater mutual involvement and interdependence. Because of this, servants are often described as an ‘issue’ or ‘problem’, while no one speaks about the ‘master and madam problem’. The migration of black women to cities and the work they did in the private spaces of white households led to a special kind of entanglement, and, in particular, to the racist assumption by even the youngest white child that black hands do the dirty work. The relationship between black domestic workers and white families over generations has inevitably led to patterns of decorum and behaviour which convey much of the historically-grown entanglement between black and white. Oral history interviews and research by sociologists such as Jacklyn Cock and Shireen Ally stress the fact that black people are often saddened, angered and disgusted by the restrictions and discrimination that result from racism and limited work opportunities.⁸

A complicated image of entanglement is held in the collective South African memory, and during the past couple of years research has shown that white people often construct their memories of apartheid around domestic workers, realising that the ‘learning’ of white dominance hinged on their contact with black women in the home. Melissa Steyn was a trailblazer with her study Whiteness Just Isn’t What it Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa (2001), while in 2012 Tamara Shefer based her research on information she found in the Apartheid Archives Project, describing domestic workers as ‘a key site for the reproduction of White privilege’. Shefer noticed that family metaphors were widely used by people being interviewed, and that memory stories were often steeped in emotion, especially love and guilt: ‘The nanny is remembered nostalgically as a source of comfort and care.’⁹ Many white South Africans in post-apartheid times have realised that they, in fact, first became aware of ‘difference’ through experiences with these women, but that they very seldom acted on it. They noticed the discrimination against the women they often dearly loved, and became drawn into a system which made them understand that it was not so much gender or class but colour that determined power relations in South Africa. White children simply conformed to the place and role which society expected of them. Although domestic workers in many ways do function like doors that enable contact between an inside and an outside and create the possibility of opening up to the ‘other’, they are seldom opened widely. The artist William Kentridge put it this way: ‘For a white suburban house the journey through Africa began across the yard in the servant’s room.’ An extended journey was possible but hardly ever undertaken. So it is that Mark Gevisser refers to the ‘frontier of the backyard’.¹⁰

Although the political scene in South Africa was radically altered when the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994, not nearly as much has changed with regards to private domestic arrangements. The social and economic division between black and white lingers on in post-apartheid South Africa, and remains largely unresolved. Most white neighbourhoods have retained the demographic character of the twentieth century, and to this day black people generally enter them in their capacity as servants, gardeners and cleaners. As a result, black nannies pushing white toddlers in prams or abba-ing them on their backs are still a familiar sight in parks and on pavements in most of South Africa’s historically white suburbs. White homes in which black domestic workers are employed are therefore still, to use Mary Louise Pratt’s term, ‘contact zones’, that is, the ‘meet, clash and grapple’ contacts between people from hugely different cultural backgrounds.¹¹ To my mind, domestic workers continue to be the most important contact figures in South Africa between white and black, between urban and rural, and between the wealthy and the poor.

Millions of lives of black women remain undocumented, but for every literary figure in a novel, song or poem over the centuries, some ‘real’ woman was the inspiration and model. In some such stories domestic workers take a central role, but in many more even their brief and seemingly incidental appearances in ‘supporting roles’, whether opening doors or carrying trays, are insightful and often distressing. When reading these stories, Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘circuit of culture’, the cycle of representation needs always to be taken into account: the way in which domestic workers are described influences the behaviour of readers.¹²

It is not only a South African trait to underplay or even forget the role of servants in history and literature. In Dwelling in the Archive (2003), the British historian Antoinette Burton shows that Indian novelists have written very little about servants. Their presence was as self-evident as that of furniture, needing no mention besides perhaps as proof of the owner’s status. Burton describes the lack of literary documentation of servants’ lives as the ‘most dramatic and perhaps paradigmatic example of what can never be fully recovered’.¹³ The textual silence surrounding the lives of servants is, of course, additional proof of the silence and violence of all archives.

Still, important documentary traces of some of these lives are readily accessible. In the first chapters of Like Family, information from life stories collected mainly by welfare and activist organisations and autobiographical work is combined with an overview of the historical and sociological development of labour relations in South Africa. In the second half of the book I concentrate on literary representations of domestic worker characters, focusing on urban situations where the pass laws impacted extremely harshly on the lives of black people migrating to cities.

Up until the 1990s, the powerlessness of black domestic workers went hand in hand with a lack of political power. Since the first democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the ANC, new legislation contains specific laws pertaining to the rights of domestic workers. In addition, unions such as the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU) have gained political clout in protecting the rights of workers. The question arises whether domestic workers (and literary characters based on them) have become more vocal and assertive. One wonders, too, whether white people are more conscious of the privileges they have enjoyed for generations thanks to affordable domestic help. Have stereotypical images of motherly subservient black women changed during the 25 years since the ANC has been the governing party? Might it be the case that former ‘like family’ relationships have become more formal and distant?

I have searched the ever-expanding archive containing stories which reflect the entanglement between black and white in domestic labour relations in an effort to find answers to these questions. Without suggesting that there is a direct correspondence between ‘servants of art and those of life’, Like Family is meant to be a form of archival restitution.¹⁴ This book does not simply view domestic workers as anonymous members of an amorphous workforce, but instead brings into focus individuals who have generally been marginalised. Their names are therefore mentioned in sub-headings: in the case of Sindiwe Magona, for example, her own name as well as her working name Cynthia appears, while in a fictional work such as JM Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Florence’s name is foregrounded.

Like Family is a reworking and update of both the Afrikaans original Soos familie (2015) and the Dutch abridged and revised translation, Bijna familie (2016). By including recent works such as Brett Michael Innes’s Rachel Weeping (2015) and Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country (2017), fresh insights are provided into the manner in which literary stories either ‘normalise’ or interrogate traditional domestic labour situations. Like Family is therefore an investigation into the role and meaning of domestic workers in South African communities and literature, women such as Flora, of whom novelist Elsa Joubert, during the late 1970s, wrote:

She is closer to me than a sister, knows my intimate life on a deeper level than a sister would know me.

But I don’t know her.¹⁵