Lobola, according to Mostert, was ‘the root and branch of Xhosa society, the basis of its growth’. He elaborates thus:
It provided the laws governing the stability of personal and family relationships, the values of the society as a whole. From it, one way or another, derived the harmonies, balances and rhythms of the most substantial part of Xhosa life, the rationale of their cattle culture.22
Many anthropologists share Mostert’s view, arguing that nineteenth-century missionaries overlooked the function of lobola in promoting social and economic cohesion in precolonial times. Bridewealth paid in cattle linked the pastoral economy of men and the garden economy of women, and marriages performed a political function in establishing, sustaining and restructuring allegiances.23 In colonial society, black women became enmeshed in new power relationships, disadvantaged not only in terms of their sex, but also their race; as black women, they were incorporated into the very bottom layer of urban society, stripped of protections they enjoyed in traditional society.24
According to one missionary, black people had to be taught to work, ‘for as a rule, the barbarous natives have no higher ambition than to live at the side of their huts and cattle-folds, basking in the sun and enjoying the savage luxury of utter laziness’.25 In his study, White Writing, JM Coetzee points to this attitude among VOC officials who ascribed a ‘lazy’ mentality to the ‘Hottentots’ during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.26
From 1871 until 1922, the ‘Industrial Department’ at Lovedale Girls’ School taught hundreds of women to become domestic workers and to do needlework. The aim of Lovedale was to teach ‘Godliness, cleanliness, industry and discipline’ to the women. In its heyday, when Dr Jane Waterston (1843–1932) was twice ‘Lady Superintendent’, the school had between 600 and 800 students and was an example to many similar institutions in the Eastern Cape, such as Lesseyton, Blythswood, Healdtown, Salem and St Matthews – the latter being the school where Sindiwe Magona became acquainted with the poem ‘Amakeia’ in the early 1960s. At all of these schools, domestic science was a core subject, even in academic courses, and very few women managed to progress beyond being a domestic worker – which was always a badly paid job, with very limited power and no prestige. According to Cock, the few black women who did acquire academic skills and became influential people in urban communities were mostly ‘old girls’ from Lovedale, among them being Cecilia Makiwane, M Majombozi, Martha Ngano, F Skota, Frieda Bokwe and Sarah Poho.
Missionary wives and female British teachers played a significant role in the ‘civilisation’ of Xhosa women, but although they themselves often punctured the stereotype of female passivity (some were former servants), they rarely questioned the general assumption that black women should be submissive and domesticated. Although Cock is appreciative of the contribution mission schools made to the development of black women, she is also critical of the role of missionaries: ‘They were bearers of a form of cultural imperialism which bore down upon the position of women in indigenous African society in complex ways.’27 While in some respects a Christian education made black women more assertive, it also weakened their role in precolonial society without offering opportunities for authority or autonomy. Cock goes on to argue as follows:
Thus education operated largely as the crucial agency of social control and cultural reproduction, defining and reinforcing certain social roles and initiating people into those skills and values which were essential for effective role performance. For many African women this involved a new role as domestic workers in the service of the colonisers.28
According to Cock, a complex pattern of coercion propelled Xhosa women into domestic service: ‘These coercive factors ranged from direct, physical force to the more subtle ideological coercion exerted by the missionaries.’29 These missionaries were uniquely influential in the frontier area, ensuring that many Xhosa women went to school, learnt to speak English, and were employed by the settler community. Domestic work was a means of escaping traditional practices that kept women subservient in their homesteads. The option of working in the homes of white settlers offered new opportunities. Even Hena, the daughter of tribal chief Ngqika, fled her home after refusing to marry a heathen polygamist and went to work as a servant for a family of the London Missionary Society. She studied at Lovedale, but domestic work was her entry into the colonial economy.30 The opportunities thus created meant that black women could earn their own living, however badly paid, and live independently of men.
As previously mentioned, Nomahobe Magadlela was herself saved in the 1970s by ‘the church’. A teacher hid her when her brother came looking for her to get married to a much older man who wished to pay lobola to the family. This is the story she tells:
I knew this man Khnabinfene because he was the brother of Nombulelo who was my friend and in the same class – Standard 6. We were schooling at Hlubene. Her family therefore thought they knew me and wanted me to marry this man who was actually not well. Two girls before me also did not want him. His family offered eight cows as lobola. My father and uncles agreed they must bring the cattle. I saw a note they would bring the cattle on 14 April 1971. The day I found out I went to another school. I could run fast. The teacher hid me at his brother’s house in Alice, next to Fort Hare.
Many decades later, she recalls the name of the teacher with much gratitude: Godfrey Mbambo. Eventually, however, she had to return home: ‘The same day I arrived I took a stick, I waited, I opened the gate and chased the lobola cattle out. My uncle wanted to hit me. My father was also cross. My mother was crying. Everybody was cross, but afterwards they accepted. They were Methodist.’
After completing Standard 6, Nomahobe went to Cape Town. Her brother Mlulame, who lived there, paid for the trip and she stayed in a hostel in Langa. After meeting Lindelo, who worked with her brother as a builder, she became pregnant. Lindelo then had to pay five cows ‘damage’ (ukuhlawula) to her parents, and did so in five cash instalments of two pounds and ten shillings. Because he was ‘useless’, she returned to the Eastern Cape, where she gave birth to Nokubonga Carli. Nomahobe goes on to explain: ‘She was three or four years old when I left her with my mother and went to Johannesburg. That was after 1976; Soweto was already over.’ Having decided that her employers should call her Cecilia, she went on to live in Johannesburg for close on forty years before retiring to Cofimvaba at the end of 2014.
Migration to the City
‘A means of escape’
On 2 February 1990, FW de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, made a historic announcement, unbanning liberation movements, and extending the vote to all citizens. After lengthy negotiations, the first democratic election took place on 27 April 1994, the African National Congress was voted into power, and Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president. A quarter of a century later, the ANC is still the governing party, and a large percentage of black women still earn a living as domestic workers in a country where the unemployment rate reached 26.7% in the first quarter of 2018 – one of the highest rates in the world.
In order to understand this trend, and the reasons for so many women like Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela leaving home to work in cities as nannies, servants and housekeepers, it is necessary to trace developments during the twentieth century.
Historian Cherryl Walker maintains that although black women have all too often been described as victims, as ‘dispossessed’ and ‘surplus’, migration from rural areas to the cities was the only way to establish some form of independence.31 Although it is true that women had lost some of the protection they traditionally had in precolonial times, migration offered an alternative to total control by men, allowing for greater personal autonomy and mobility. During the first decades of the twentieth century, women wishing to escape the poverty of the rural areas often went first to ‘white’ towns and soon afterwards to the cities. Johannesburg always held the biggest attraction for these workers.32 The phenomenon of ‘runaway brides’ originated in