LIKE FAMILY
LIKE FAMILY
DOMESTIC WORKERS IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE
ENA JANSEN
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
Copyright © Ena Jansen 2019
Published edition © Wits University Press 2019
Images © Copyright holders
First published 2019
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12019043511
978-1-77614-351-1 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-352-8 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-353-5 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-354-2 (Mobi)
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Like Family received the support of research funds held by the author at the University of Johannesburg and the University of Amsterdam. Like Family is an updated and reworked translation of Soos familie: Stedelike huiswerkers in Suid-Afrikaanse tekste, 2015.
Project manager: Elaine Williams
Copyeditor: Lynda Gilfillan
Proofreader: Janine Loedolff
Indexer: Sanet le Roux
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typesetter: Newgen
Typeset in 10.5 point Plantin
CONTENTS
Introduction: Searching the Archive
1Representations of Domestic Workers
2Enslaved Women at the Cape: The First Domestic Workers
3Migrant Women and Domestic Work in the City
4Legislation and Black Urban Women
5Domestic Workers in Personal Accounts
6Oral Testimonies, Interviews and a Novel
7Domestic Workers and Children
8Domestic Workers and Sexuality
9Domestic Workers in Troubled Times
10Domestic Workers in Post-apartheid Novels by White Authors
11Domestic Workers in Post-apartheid Novels by Black Authors
12Domestic Workers Bridge the Gap
Acknowledgements
The South African tradition of white people employing domestic workers has meant that, from infancy, black women have been part of my life. The two who took care of my twin sister and me I knew only as Thandi and Katrina. But there were other ‘like family’ women, too, in the world I grew up in. Trui and Meisie worked for my Ouma and Oupa Myburgh in Darling, and Eisa worked for the Broeksma family in the Strand. Ou-Minnie, who came from Genadendal, was Alba Bouwer’s housekeeper, and I met her in Cape Town during my stay with Alba, who had given me and my sister her Rivierplaas books about the Free State farm where she and our father had grown up.
Without Gerty Appolus, I cannot even imagine my parents in Somerset West, as Gerty has been taking care of their household every Wednesday for close on twenty years. June Esau, Alice Motau, Loretta Leonard and Krissie Pietersen have been their daily carers ever since 2016. Minnie Engelbrecht, who helped raise the four children of my sister Christine and her husband Kosie Smit in Stellenbosch, is fondly remembered. Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela worked for me on Thursdays in Johannesburg until she retired to the Eastern Cape. Without the help and friendship of Mantwa Regina Lobie, San Bernardo in Cape Town, where I partly live, would not be the same.
Like Family has had many sources of inspiration. Among the most important was my time in Johannesburg, in Tolip Street, when Cecilia started working for me in 1989. I wrote a short story about her daughter Rachel and three other black children who lived in Tolip Street; it was included in a textbook called Lees is lekker! (Reading is fun; 1996). The previous year, the story had been translated into Dutch by Riet de Jong-Goossens and was included in Kort Afrikaans (1995). At the time, Riet regularly stayed with me in Johannesburg and embarked on the initiative of establishing an education fund for Rachel.
The original Afrikaans version of this book, Soos familie (2015), as well as the Dutch translation, Bijna familie (2016), are dedicated to Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela. Our lives first became entangled in 1989, and it was her personal life story that opened my eyes to the ingenuity that migrant women employ in making use of opportunities in Johannesburg, but also to the extreme difficulties of their lives.
I decided to dedicate Like Family to Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela and to the memory of Auntie Meisie Cleophas, who worked for my grandparents in Darling near Cape Town in the 1950s. Year after year, she looked after my twin sister and me during school holidays, and she also accompanied our family to the Strand. In one lovely photograph taken on 11 September 1955, my sister and I are running hand-in-hand with her along the beach. Meisie is wearing white shoes and socks. She could easily