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