‘Amakeia’
‘Give us the white child or you’ll be killed!’ ‘Over my dead body,’ Amakeia proudly answered.
Notwithstanding the highly unequal working relationship, Jacklyn Cock provides illuminating examples of intimate bonds between black women and white children, something which is also evident in ‘Amakeia’, a poem based on an event that took place in 1834, when yet another war was raging between white frontiersmen and Xhosa people. Written by AG Visser, the much-anthologised poem, first published in 1930, has since been read by thousands of South African schoolchildren, thereby contributing immensely to the still prevalent image of loyalty and faithfulness associated with black nannies. Numerous variations of ‘Amakeia’ are to be found on the internet, and several of these employ more politically correct terminology.14
It is not only white people, however, who have been moved by Visser’s image of a black woman giving her life to save that of the white child entrusted to her by its dying mother. For example, author Sindiwe Magona (born in 1943), first read the poem as a student at the college she attended in the Eastern Cape. Years later, in a moving article for Rapport newspaper, speaking from her own experience as a nanny in the 1960s, Magona commented on the trust white children put in their carers, and their absolute dependence upon them.15 In her autobiography, which I discuss in chapter 5, Magona not only confirms the intense emotions evoked by Visser’s poem, but also the findings of sociologist Jacklyn Cock. The tragic story of Amakeia continues to move both white and black readers – though for different reasons, no doubt. White readers are given a nostalgic reminder of the women who cared for them as children, while black readers are undoubtedly aware that Amakeia probably had children of her own who do not feature at all in the poem.
Annie and Sabina
‘Our little Sabina is everything to us.’
Sociologists and historians generally, of course, rely not on poems, but on written archival sources in their efforts to fathom what race relations were ‘really’ like during nineteenth-century South Africa. Unfortunately, however, material is scarce. According to Cock, this is because women tend to underestimate the value of their experiences, ‘feeling their world and experiences to be trivial, insignificant and not worth recording’. Diaries by male settlers such as Charles Bell and Joseph Stirk ‘give fascinating details of busy, productive lives, but the domestic aspect lies in the shadows.’ There is no known written record of domestic life by a black woman, though fortunately a few letters remain in which servants are mentioned by white women.16
Although employers often complained in letters to friends and family about the alleged laziness of servants, their lack of initiative, their stupidity, ungratefulness and ‘taking ways’, Cock has come across evidence of some exceptionally good relationships, for example, between Mary Taylor and her Mfengu servant, Annie, and between the wife of John Ross and her two domestic workers. A Mrs Philipps also wrote with great appreciation of her young servant:
Our little Sabina is everything to us, she waits at Table and her remarks and cleverness in repartee is a source of amusement to all. She is a most uncommon child, talks English perfectly, and neither in word nor action has ever betrayed conduct unworthy of a British subject. She is genteel in her appearance and was everything from the first. Her mother is a very superior person and now that we can understand her, we find her possessing extraordinary sentiments of right with an abhorrence of wrong.17
Mary Taylor describes her servants as ‘quite happy and contented’, while Mrs Philipps finds it rather extraordinary that ‘they should immediately place such confidence in us, from the first moment they did not seem to have the least fear, but to think everything we did was right and for their good’. Time and again, employers mention servants’ characteristics that they appreciate: loyalty, trust and submissiveness – however, as Cock warns, ‘These are, par excellence, the qualities of subordinates.’ Of course, subservience has through the centuries and all over the world been valued by employers and is not unique to the South African servant situation. Cock sums up the specific nature of subservience in the eastern part of the Cape Colony:
The key structural characteristics of the position of African women who entered into domestic service with the colonists were their powerlessness and their vulnerability. Relationships with their employers were consequently marked by an extreme inequality. Their content was coloured by both the racism of the frontier and […] settler notions of female inferiority.18
Even the most positive descriptions of servants, such as that of Mrs Philipps, are steeped in paternalism. Black servants, like slaves before them, were regarded as children. ‘The child analogy involves a fundamental denial of equality, and is often a component of racist, sexist and classist ideologies,’ writes Cock. As far back as 1965, HA Cairns had pointed out that race relations in colonial situations are organised along the same unequal lines as social class relations, though doubly so – a view that Cock endorses.19 South African race relations are indeed an extension of the class distinctions with which settlers coming from England were familiar: the upper and middle classes attributed qualities of ‘irresponsibility, immaturity, excitability and emotionalism’ to those from lower classes, especially servants. Most of those who settled along the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony from 1820 belonged to what were considered subordinate groups in Britain. However, because they became landowners and employers, they rose to a higher status, and did so far more swiftly than would ever have been possible in their home country. Significantly, their elevated status was primarily a result of skin colour – a factor that still determines social class in South Africa. Thus, in English-speaking households, domestic service was instrumental in transforming nineteenth-century class-based attitudes into racial hierarchies. As we have seen, these had existed among the Dutch at the Cape from the time of slavery, and they would continue to shape South African society in coming centuries.
Mission Education and the Ideal of Civilisation
‘Godliness, cleanliness, industry and discipline’
The many mission stations in the border area of the Cape Colony had a significant impact on relations between black and white people in the nineteenth century. They brought literacy to black women, and provided refuge to widows wishing to escape the so-called levirate or brother-in-law marriages.20 Reverend R Shepherd, the last missionary who was principal of Lovedale College, had observed that women were often not much more than slaves in their own households, and generally helpless in a society that bound them to traditional rules and conventions: ‘They were subordinate. They were beasts of burden. They were exposed even at a tender age to customs that brutalised. And after maturity they were disposed of in marriage often without their consent and frequently as minor wives to polygamous husbands.’21 That this situation would continue well into the second half of the twentieth century is proven by Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela’s own flight during the 1970s from a forced traditional marriage.
The ideology of domesticity that missionaries promoted was deeply rooted in European gender roles. The missionaries’ Western norms and Victorian cultural upbringing often led to an aggressive sense of superiority regarding all women who, according to them, had first to be good servants before becoming good housewives. Both roles presupposed an attitude of subservience. Regarding black ‘heathens’, the missionaries considered polygamy a huge stumbling block to the Christian way of life, and black women were therefore encouraged both by missionaries and teachers to escape such marriage arrangements. The missionaries were also against intonjane, the initiation rites that young girls had to undergo. Furthermore, they were adamantly against the system of lobola, which obliged a bridegroom to pay the parents of his bride a certain number of cattle.