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Representations of Domestic Workers

They are like buttons you press to make things work, like stoves and kettles.

Nico Smith — Rapport, 16 August 2009

Aibileen and Poppie

In August 2009 on a night flight between Cape Town and Amsterdam, I sat next to a woman engrossed in a book on her lap. Throughout, she kept her reading light on. I noticed a sepia photograph on the cover showing two black women chatting to each other; one of them was wearing an apron and a white cap, and she stood next to a pram with a white child in it. The title of the book was The Help, and the author Kathryn Stockett.¹ Just before we landed at Schiphol airport, my neighbour told me how deeply moved she was by what she had been reading. Although The Help is situated in the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, it had starkly reminded her of the ‘servant situation’ in South Africa: of the women who had cared for her and of those who had helped her to raise her own children.

In December I was back in Cape Town again, and in book shops everywhere I noticed piles of The Help; Exclusive Books had awarded the novel its annual Boeke Prize. The American novel with the domestic worker Aibileen as its main character was touching the hearts and minds of thousands. Not since Elsa Joubert’s The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (originally published as Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, 1978) had a novel with a black protagonist so captured the imagination of South African readers.² The movie version of The Help was an even bigger success, drawing crowds comparable to those that had flocked to see the play Poppie thirty years before.³

Some two years later, in February 2011, Ablene Cooper accused Kathryn Stockett of having stolen her story. Cooper had for years been a servant in the household of Stockett’s brother. Stockett fiercely denied the accusation and had to publicly confront important questions regarding appropriation: the right of an outsider to speak for or write on behalf of ‘the other’.⁴ Something similar had happened years before to Elsa Joubert. Although she was never confronted by the black woman who had wholeheartedly collaborated with her by sitting for hours telling Joubert her story, certain white critics accused her of speaking ‘for’ Poppie, and not formally acknowledging her as co-author even though it later became known that ‘Poppie’ had a share of the royalties.⁵ At her own request, her real name was never revealed during her lifetime. Joubert also received much hate mail from conservative Afrikaners accusing her of hanging out the dirty linen of an Afrikaner National Party government that was ‘only doing its best’ to prevent ‘surplus’ black rural people from inundating ‘white’ cities. This is an oblique reference to the hated pass laws, which were eventually repealed in 1986, and the Group Areas Act which was repealed in 1991.

Clearly, without the literary mediation of Joubert, most white South Africans would, at the time, not have understood the magnitude of the plight of Poppie and the thousands of black women like her. Without the novel, the structural violence and cruelty of the pass laws would most certainly not have been so fiercely debated at the time. The publication of Poppie Nongena, with Joubert’s effective narration of this individual woman’s life story, caused white South African readers to be shocked into a realisation of the harsh effects of pass laws on suffering black families. Years later, historian Hermann Giliomee wryly remarked in his highly-acclaimed study, The Afrikaners (2003): ‘An average Afrikaner family could easily relate to the book, because they had someone like Poppie […] working as a servant in their home.’⁶ The same applies also, of course, to white English-speaking families.

The Cycle of Representation

In the wake of Poppie Nongena, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, literary scholars such as Vernon February, Jakes Gerwel and Judy Gardner researched and meticulously documented the representation of many black characters by white authors in South African literature. Today, theoretical and ethical issues pertaining to representation and appropriation in the arts are robustly debated, with many questions being raised.⁷ Is it possible for a white author such as Dan Sleigh or Trudie Bloem to comprehend the life of Krotoa-Eva, let alone represent her adequately? May white authors presume to tell the story of a black person, as do André Brink in his tale of Philida, a slave woman, and Nadine Gordimer in her story of the manservant, July, and JM Coetzee in his chronicle of Michael K? Is it appropriate for Koos Kombuis (André du Toit) to sing a song about his nanny, Kytie? Similar questions are topical in the fine arts domain. Marion Arnold’s ‘Portraits of Servitude’ in her study, Women and Art in South Africa (1996), examines the work of Irma Stern, Dorothy Kay and Keith Dietrich, showing that paintings of servants are among the most problematic visual representations in South African art.⁸ Such portraits convey influential societal values, and stereotypes may either be confirmed and perpetuated or questioned and disrupted.

In Arnold’s analysis of Kay’s painting, Cookie, Annie Mavata (1956), she points out its power:

Annie Mavata meets the viewer’s gaze boldly. […] Although wearing a uniform, [she] is not stereotyped by it. Her own reality and personhood are established through her assertive body language. She is conscious that she is being scrutinised and she meets the appraisal on her terms. […] The authority of the Mavata portrait is, in part, a product of the naturalistic style adopted. […] Tension is established between the iconic stillness of the woman and the few objects in the painting. Of particular interest is the dark void. […] It asserts that we know nothing more about Annie Mavata than what we see. […] The painting is a portrait; it is not a didactic illustration of a cook in the kitchen.⁹

Kay neither questions the institution of servitude, and nor does she sentimentalise Mavata: instead, she respectfully reveals her subject, leaving interpretation to the viewer.¹⁰

Postcolonial theory has made people aware of the fact that what they perceive as ‘reality’ is in fact heavily influenced by what they read, by films, artworks and the advertisements they see. In 1997, British cultural theorist Stuart Hall introduced the previously mentioned concept of ‘cycle of representation’. Authors and artists represent what they observe, and these representations in turn influence how all of us as consumers of cultural products view ‘reality’. One can safely assume that books have a huge influence on children’s attitudes to life. One such example is the Maasdorp books, an Afrikaans series of boarding school novels read by generations of schoolgirls. The heroine is the beautiful, talented and adventurous Kobie Malan.¹¹ In one episode, Kobie and a friend prepare to pack for school after spending a weekend in the posh Cape Town home of the Malan family. Her friend is about to carry her suitcase downstairs when Kobie breezily says: ‘Never mind. One of the maids will do that.’ The likely reader, by now in awe of Kobie and her family, would probably not have blinked an eyelid at Kobie’s remark. Instead, she would probably have aspired to living in a suburb such as Oranjezicht, with servants in attendance. Also, Mrs Malan is likely to have been the ultimate role model: an elegant woman who confidently leaves her large house in the care of loyal staff as she drives off to a meeting in her shiny black car.¹²

Working Conditions

After the ANC came to power, strict legislation concerning the working conditions of domestic workers was passed. In 1996, the new constitution was adopted with a comprehensive Bill of Rights and a Reconstruction and Development Programme. The Labour Relations Act of 1995 had already legalised the unionisation of domestic workers, while the Domestic Workers’ Act of 1997 prescribes minimum wages on an annual basis, and specifies working conditions such as hours of work, overtime pay, salary increases, deductions, as well as annual and sick leave.¹³ Domestic workers are entitled to four months' unpaid maternity leave as well as severance pay of one week for each year of service. Contracts, contributions to an unemployment fund, and conditions for dismissal are regulated.

In spite of these guidelines, as sociologist Shireen Ally convincingly argues in her study, From Servants to Workers (2010), many South African domestic workers believe that working conditions have not necessarily changed for the better. According to especially older women, the new laws often impact negatively as it is practically impossible to enforce acceptable working conditions in the one-on-one relationship between a worker and her employer behind the closed doors of private homes. Workers know that the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU) can provide assistance, and that grievances should be reported to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA). However, these formal arrangements have removed much of the personal negotiating power domestic workers previously enjoyed when they were considered to be ‘part of the family’. Strategies that included a combination of direct requests, subtle hints and sulky behaviour were often effective in ‘malevolent maternalistic’ environments, though they are not nearly as successful in a more formal post-apartheid relationship where employers suspect that a domestic worker might appeal to labour unions to back her. Should a worker ask for more money or extra days off, an employer might simply refer to the official minimum wage or sarcastically reply that they should instead ‘ask Mandela’ – or Ramaphosa, or whoever happens to be running the country. Ally found that employers, having registered their workers and signed the obligatory contract, will often say that they are no longer personally responsible for anything beyond paying slightly more than the minimum wage.

From Kytie to Katie

Much credit is, however, often given by employers to the important role played by domestic workers, and in 2008 Western Cape Premier Helen Zille proposed that a monument be erected to them.¹⁴ Although Zille’s suggestion was met with widespread public approval, and images of domestic workers such as Mary Sibande’s bold artworks are present in urban spaces, no such monument has yet been erected. In public discourse, white people regularly reflect nostalgically on individual black women who cared for them as children, though these reflections are a disconcerting mix of sincere but often sentimental and sometimes even offensive memories. One example is a Facebook post that went viral in May 2018, where a woman speaks about her love for her ‘second mother’ in the context of a discussion about minimum wages.¹⁵

It often happens that, in letters to newspapers or blogs, white people – many of them men – quote from the saccharine Koos Kombuis song, ‘Kytie, jy’s nie net ’n meid nie’ (Kytie, you weren’t just the girl); quite clearly, they are familiar with the lyrics: ‘I remember her as if it were yesterday./ Ever since I was small she was always there./ With her eyes like kaffir beer/ she makes you think the Mona Lisa must have been a coloured./ Kytie Adams was the woman installed in our kitchen/ She would do the dishes and wash our clothes/ care for us children and teach us manners, teach us.’¹⁶

In 2011, Ronelda S Kamfer included a poem called ‘Katie het kinders gehad’ (Katie had children) in her second volume of poetry, grond/ Santekraam (land/ the whole caboodle). By quoting Kombuis in an epigraph Kamfer refers directly to his song, providing a completely different perspective on women like Kytie who inevitably neglect their own families while caring for white children.¹⁷ Women like Kytie, or Auntie Katie as Kamfer calls her, and people like her own mother, are everywhere in white suburbs. In the early morning they alight from combi taxis and walk the streets to front gates behind which they disappear for long hours, except when they walk the dogs on the pavement, push toddlers to the park, or accompany an elderly person to the local supermarket. Although these women have huge responsibilities, their work is rated as the lowest sector of the labour market and is hardly ever adequately rewarded. A quarter of a century after the ANC came to power, a million black women are still employed as domestic workers in predominantly white neighbourhoods.

Although men were the first domestic workers in Johannesburg during the early part of the twentieth century, few white South African households nowadays employ black men, except as gardeners. The most well-known black male ‘literary servant’ is probably July in Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People (1981), and his story is told in a subsequent chapter.

Mere Tools

Discussions about domestic workers have been part and parcel of the South African way of life since the seventeenth century, and issues concerning such workers continue to flare up. In August 2009, journalist Jaco Kirsten, for example, started a debate in the Sunday newspaper Rapport when he used the pseudonymn ‘Wit Umfaan’ (white boy) to write about the ‘unique relationship’ between employers and domestics. He remarked on the fact that young white South Africans consider ‘having’ a domestic worker as a ‘logical step’ the minute they can afford to employ one. Kirsten noted with indignation that such young ‘madams’ and ‘bosses’ are fastidious about the way things should be done, but wouldn’t even consider taking a worker to the bus stop when she works late.

A week later, Nico Smith responded. Formerly a professor of theology at the University of Stellenbosch, Smith was at the time an ordinary Dutch Reformed minister who had taken the extraordinary step of bringing his family to live with him in Mamelodi, a black township outside Pretoria. Many domestic workers were members of his congregation and told him about their hardships, and he came to the conclusion that employers considered these women to be tools rather than human beings. ‘They are like buttons you press to make things work, like stoves and kettles. Who these women are, where they live, what their personal circumstances are, what they dream of and hope for – these aspects of their lives are hardly ever discussed.’ Each time a woman told Smith about inconsiderate and even cruel working conditions, about her disappointment at always only having to listen to her employer’s worries and stories and not being asked about her own life, she begged him never to tell her employer about her complaints. When, on one occasion, he did so, the woman was immediately fired.

The Girl, the Maid, the Help or the Domestic Maintenance Assistant

South Africa has a long tradition of derogatory words directed at people of other races. The same goes for words that refer to people doing paid housework. A derogatory word which English-speaking South Africans often use when referring to even an older servant, is ‘girl’. Although most people deny that they mean anything nasty, this term, like ‘boy’ for black men of all ages, is certainly not neutral.

In much the same way, the Afrikaans word meid objectifies and belittles black women. Though the Dutch meid means ‘girl’ and ‘servant woman’, it does not have the negative connotations the term acquired in South Africa. In Afrikaans, a language derived from seventeenth-century Dutch, the term meid was never used in relation to a white woman. Only a black woman was referred to as meid because of the assumption that black women, irrespective of their age, were servants. However, the term has, for some time now, been regarded as a racial slur and is seldom used – in public, at least. The fact that the term meid appears in the work of Koos Kombuis as well as Ronelda Kamfer shows how widespread its use was during the 1950s when the singer grew up, and how negatively it is viewed by women such as Kamfer and the aunt in her poem.

While the word meid has begun to disappear from everyday Afrikaans, terms such as aia and ousie are still used, especially by rural Afrikaans-speaking people, whether black or white. Poet Antjie Krog, who grew up in the Free State, often uses the term ousie in her writing, and her respect is evident. In Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2006), the young black girl Ofilwe refers to the woman who does her hair as ‘ous Beauty’ – here, the respectful term acknowledges that Beauty is her elder.

Although Jacklyn Cock’s Maids and Madams (1980) is considered the most influential book about domestic workers in South Africa, the word ‘maid’ is no longer used in academic discourse. When in 2010 I typed ‘maid’ into the search engine of the library catalogue at Wits University, I was informed that the library does not use the term and advised to search ‘domestic worker’ instead. Though this is currently the most acceptable term, Eve’s preference in Madam & Eve is ‘domestic maintenance assistant’! And while some might think they are being civil in referring to ‘the help’ (huishulp), Nico Smith has argued that such terms in fact denigrate domestic work.

If someone is only considered to be a help, this is degrading. She is then not considered to be part of the management of the household, not seen as a person who has a co-responsibility for the maintenance of the factory which the household is.¹⁸

The Afrikaans word bediende carries much the same slight as ‘servant’, and while neither word may be regarded as abusive, they are perceived to be less acceptable than huiswerker or ‘domestic worker’. It was in fact Nico Smith who initiated the shift from bediende and huishulp to huiswerker. The latter is today considered the most apt translation of ‘domestic worker’ by unions and in government publications.

For the greater part of the twentieth century – and often still – the person working for a typical white South African family would clean the house, look after the children, do the cooking, wash and iron clothes and act as ‘general factotum’. Usually she would sleep in a ‘servant’s room’ in the backyard, and, in contrast to ‘live-outs’ or ‘sleep-outs’, be called a ‘live-in’ or ‘sleep-in’ domestic. She would prepare breakfast for the family and be on call for most of the day until the dishes were washed after supper. Because of her constant presence, she is soon considered to be ‘part of the household’, often even described as ‘like family’.

Like Family

While considering a suitable title for this book, I noticed that family relationships are often used in descriptions of domestic workers: ‘she is like family’, ‘she was like a mother to me’ and ‘she knows me better than my own sister’. Employers may consider this flattery, but it is in fact the direct effect of workers spending long hours in their homes, often for years on end, with the result that employees have little time for their own families. This is not only the case in South Africa; it happens also in a country such as Chile. In the film La Nana/ The Maid (2009), which screened for weeks in South Africa, the nana is getting older. She is often ill and fears being dismissed. In vain she keeps repeating to herself: ‘I am part of their family.’ She has based her identity entirely on the love she presumes the family’s children will forever have for her, and refuses to believe that one day she will simply be dismissed and replaced.

The family imagery relating to servants is prevalent not only in South Africa but in Britain too, and harks back to Victorian times when housewives’ duties were a matriarchal version of the ‘white man’s burden’. The assumption was that supervision and control would make the servant class ‘grow up’ to be ‘good citizens’. This vision was given new impetus during the Industrial Revolution. ‘Patriarchy was revived not because domestic servants had become more unruly or households more complicated to manage, but because the rest of the work force had gone out of control,’ writes Bruce Robbins in The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986).¹⁹ However, patriarchal or paternalistic ideology, considered to be the model for society as a whole, had far less influence on the new industrial working class.

When I came across Robbins’s explanation of the connection between the words ‘servant’ and ‘family’, it was clear what the title of my book would be: Like Family. I now realised that the original meaning of the word family, which stems from the Latin famulus, was servant. According to Raymond Williams, a typical household in the early eighteenth century consisted of blood relatives as well as servants.²⁰ During World War I, and more especially in World War II, many British working class women tasted the freedom attached to factory work and would never return to the hard, lonely work ‘downstairs’. Decades later, local servant women in England and many other first world countries would be replaced by migrant women from especially Africa, Asia and South America.

In today’s global society, one in five domestic workers is a migrant who often works continents away from where she grew up and where her own family lives. Women from Indonesia, the Philippines, Columbia and Ghana work, for example, in North America, Europe and the Middle East. They provide indispensable services, contributing to the wealth of ageing societies and to the sustainability of these countries’ welfare and employment systems. However, they receive little recognition, and the highest praise that such workers and nannies in all corners of the globe are given seems to be that they are ‘like family’ – like, but never quite.²¹

Domestic Workers in Literature

Robbins links the increasing estrangement between the classes in Britain to the expository roles that servants continue to play in contemporary British novels, films and TV series such as Downton Abbey. While servants’ experiences contribute to the plot, their main function is to add flavour or contrast to the problems and pleasures of their employers ‘upstairs’.²² Similarly, this is often the function of servant characters in South African literature, for example in popular novels by white South African authors reflecting changing circumstances during the early 1990s. Some of these novels were reviewed very positively, but satirist Robert Kirby described the new subgenre with some disdain as ‘post-apartheid weepies’.²³ Stereotypes from the ‘good old days’ of ‘traditional maid and madam’ relationships were simply too common.

In Pamela Jooste’s People like Ourselves (2004), Tula, the granddaughter of domestic worker Adelaide, is permitted to stay with her granny in her backyard room. In exchange, the employer, Julia, expects Adelaide to provide additional services such as being an ally and a silent witness to the constant bickering between Julia and her unfaithful husband, Douglas. The manner in which Jooste represents the relationship between Julia and Adelaide is sharply criticised by literary scholar Mary West, who accuses Jooste of including Adelaide merely to reflect Julia’s problems. In West’s view, an entire chapter focusing on Adelaide is an illustration of what Adrienne Rich has described as the typical behaviour of white women trying to be ‘nice’, a mode of behaviour that enables them to assuage the guilt they feel towards black women. In the very next chapter, Jooste pushes aside Adelaide’s personal crisis concerning her grandchild as callously as her character Julia does. West declares that the least white authors can do is to portray these women not merely as domestic workers but as daughters, mothers and grandmothers, women who have personal lives and individual needs.²⁴

‘Farm Novels’ and ‘City Novels’

As with the occupants of the ‘upstairs’ and the ‘downstairs’ of British manor houses, white and black families, for generations, lived together but separately on South African farms. This entangled lifestyle has been portrayed in all its contradictory complexity, blending racism with a feudal form of benevolence, and constitutes a major genre in Afrikaans literature, the plaasroman (farm novel).²⁵ Excellent farm novels such as Etienne van Heerden’s Toorberg (1986; Ancestral Voices, 1992) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004; The Way of the Women, 2007) have met with huge international acclaim after being translated into many languages. Portrayals of black and white families living side by side, even sharing mutual family secrets, cut to the core of South African race relations. Representations of highly unequal labour relations and complex family ties, which are integral to the genre, seem to speak to readers worldwide.

In cities, and therefore also in South African city novels, the feudal relations which were once so typical of life on farms, are rare. Urban employers, ensconced in their comfortable, protected neighbourhoods, hardly ever see the husbands, children or parents of their domestic workers, so that it is possible to ignore their private lives, and not think of them as wives, mothers or daughters with their own domestic obligations. During the heyday of apartheid with its homeland system, it was especially easy to profess powerlessness when it came to assisting one’s domestic worker in maintaining ties with her children far away.²⁶ She was seen as someone whose time, attention and care could quite naturally be claimed as solely for the employer’s benefit, whether she worked as a char for a few hours or full-time as a ‘sleep-in’. This domestic worker, however, regularly crossed the divide between black and white living spaces and had an intimate knowledge of the huge differences that existed. When she returned to a small township house or a cramped hut in the homelands she would surely have shared something of her experiences in the ‘big white city’, imparting knowledge about the luxury of comfortable living conditions to people who did not have this first-hand knowledge. White employers generally lack experience of townships and homelands and are dependent on their domestic workers for the little they know of places such as Soweto and the ‘Transkei’. Domestic workers are therefore extremely important go-between figures: both in actual life and as characters in literary works.

Florence, the ‘sleep-in’ domestic worker of Mrs Curren in JM Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990), is one such go-between, as are the many servant women in light-hearted collections like Minnie Postma’s Ek en my bediende (1955; My servant and I) and Riana Scheepers’s Katriena books of the 1990s. Collectively, they create a clear picture that kitchens of the white middle classes are important contact zones, spaces in which black and white women are able to talk to each other about their hugely different worlds, though not nearly enough, unfortunately.

Urban stories by both white and black authors inevitably reflect social reality in South Africa in some way or another. The presence of servant characters signals interracial contact, though they are also a reminder of exclusion. Though a quarter of a century has passed since apartheid ended, few black domestic workers enjoy the comfort of modern kitchens and bathrooms in their own homes; few can allow themselves the same plans for the future of their children as their employers have. All too often, their children and elderly parents live in remote, economically-deprived outposts in the former homelands. In Antjie Krog’s cycle of poems called ‘servants talk’ in her volume Synapse (2014), for example, the problems of Victoria who works in Oranjezicht and lives in a nearby township mostly have to do with family members living far away in the Eastern Cape, close to the town of Qumbu.²⁷ As discussed in the chapters that follow, the entanglement of black and white South Africans, of rural areas and cities, is nowhere so powerfully illustrated as in the relationship between domestic workers and their employers.