In this way slave women were not only brought into the bosom of the family, so to speak, but also became, in a literal sense, the bosom of the burgher family. Wet-nursing was frowned on in metropolitan Holland at this time, but settler women had slaves to employ to feed their infants. […] So important was the wet nurse to the slave society that two terms entered the colonial creole language: minnemoer or mina (love-mother) and aiya (old nursemaid). These words have survived, as has the nanny herself.44
In rural areas the words aia and outa are often used as a sign of respect by Afrikaans children, but this custom is nowadays frowned upon because of their racial overtones: such terms are strictly reserved for older black people.
On 1 December 1838, the 38 000 enslaved men and women in the Cape Colony were finally set free after a four-year period when they were known as apprentices. Although some ex-slaves opted to stay with their former owners for a while, with many even accompanying them on the Great Trek into the interior, the vast majority deserted their owners during the immediate post-emancipation years. One newspaper headline read: ‘Emancipation exposed the emptiness of the slaveholders’ claims to paternalism: Cape settlers were shocked to discover’, in an article stating that ‘those very slaves and apprentices who have been best treated, and were considered actually as members of the family, were the first to leave their masters.’45
The fact that white South Africans still seem to take it for granted that they have a right to cheap, subservient and dependable domestic workers and fond nannies for their children is, however, an indisputable consequence of the institution of slavery. Shell’s chapter ‘Tender Ties’ concludes as follows:
Because their role in the owner’s household was domestic, the legacy of slave women was vast, one of an unfathomable psychological magnitude. But they were intimately suborned into the domestic hegemony of the settler family and household, their very womanhood sacrificed to the domestic interests, predilections, and impulses of the settler men and their families. As a result of their respective roles in society, Cape women, slave and free, tended to consolidate the slave society rather than to challenge its injustices.46
From the outset of colonial occupation, slave women were more closely woven into the settler family than were slave men, a practice that continues in current employment arrangements. Black female domestic workers are often benevolently considered to be ‘like family’ – and thereby hangs a tale, one that this book strives to tell. The precarious and ambivalent position of modern-day domestic workers echoes in troubling ways many aspects of the slave period, which, according to Shell, was ‘the true gestation period of South African culture’. He therefore stresses the ‘fact’ of a ‘common legacy’: ‘the painful historical sojourn [of enslaved people] as members of the slave owners’ households’. This ‘amalgam of human relationships’ might therefore contain the ‘trace elements’ of a ‘single domestic creole culture’, a culture that ‘neither descendants of slaves nor of owners in South Africa can yet bear to acknowledge’.47
These relationships between employers and domestic workers, with their long and difficult history, have created a peculiar, often contradictory form of duty and dependency. Even today, in post-apartheid South Africa, employers who have decided either to relocate or emigrate often go to great lengths to ensure that their domestic worker, who may have become totally dependent on them, is placed in a comfortable and familiar environment. Torn away from her own family, she may have worked for the family for many years, helping to rear children. Small wonder, then, that there is an element of guilt on the part of employers who move away. As in the time of slavery, a domestic worker is frequently described as being ‘part of the family’ or ‘like a mother’, though this is certainly not meant to be taken literally.
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