During the census of 1896, held a decade after the discovery of gold, the Gezondheids Comité (health committee) of Paul Kruger’s Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) government established that out of a total of 14 195 black people in Johannesburg, 1 234 were women. Only 553 of these women did paid domestic work compared to 3 948 men. Most women were supported by men or earned their money by brewing and selling beer. By 1904 the black population had risen to 55 765, of whom 3 840 were women, while in 1911 there were 97 614 black people living in Johannesburg, of whom 4 357 were women.
A growing need for food in the expanding city led white farmers to farm larger areas of land. It suited them that the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913 prohibited the practice of serfdom or sharecropping, and that areas of the country allotted to black farmers totalled less than 10% of the entire land mass of the Union of South Africa. This was later expanded to 13%, comprising the ‘native reserve’ areas, which was under ‘communal’ tenure vested in African chiefs – land that could neither be bought, sold nor used as surety. The Act forbade black tenant farming on white-owned land, and since many black farmers were sharecroppers or labour tenants, the new law had a devastating effect, although its full implementation was not immediate. The Act strengthened the power of chiefs, who became part of the state administration, and it forced many black men into wage labour in ‘white’ areas. Leaders such as John Langlinalele Dube (1871–1946) and Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932) waged a long protest against the Land Act, but to no avail. Black families became increasingly dependent on their daughters to work the small patches of land they still had, which was one of the reasons they were so unwilling for them to go to the cities. According to European law, women were regarded as of full age at 21 years old, which clashed with traditional law, which considered women to be minors until they got married, though even then they were subject to fathers and husbands in many ways. As discussed in chapter 3, many young black women, especially those educated at mission schools, rebelled against traditional structures. Moreover, drought and infectious cattle diseases such as the rinderpest forced families to reconsider their mores. After sending their strongest young men to the cities they often had no choice but to allow their daughters to follow, though of course some women chose to run away from their villages.
At first women found work in households in rural towns, then some moved away, travelling by train to the Witwatersrand. Many went in search of their husbands or accompanied them to the towns and cities. Before 1928 there were no hostels for single women, and the only mission haven in Johannesburg, St Agnes, had beds for only a handful of women who were taught domestic skills. Initially this field of work, for which women would ‘naturally’ be eligible, was still dominated by men. White housewives had been released from domestic work, and were now part of ‘proper’ urban society. Charles van Onselen gives a fascinating description of this era in his Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914.5 The fact that employment contracts, health conditions and the wages of black men were regulated and documented in their passbooks made them appear reliable to employers, but because black women were not yet subject to pass laws, they were deemed to be unreliable, unregulated and therefore untraceable should they break their contracts. An official called AH Faure put it thus:
You hire her this morning, and she may sleep on your premises one night, but she may take it into her head to walk away the next day … If the Transvaal housewife is given some hold on the girl, it would be quite different. She would not mind the trouble of training the girl, but as it is today, I would not take the trouble, I would much rather take an untrained kaffirboy … I feel sure of him for at least the month.6
Black women demanded equal wages, but were considered less able than men. While very few of the 70 000 men who worked in kitchens had any formal training, the general opinion was that women would need to be trained. Furthermore, it was a widely-held view that all black people were carriers of venereal disease, and because the women were often considered to be either prostitutes or sellers of home-brewed liquor, white people were afraid of allowing black women into their homes. Interestingly, however, the Contagious Diseases Commission never considered testing women. Van Onselen found, furthermore, that white women feared that sexual relations might develop between their husbands and young black housekeepers.7 Servant women were, of course, considered to be immoral and licentious by nature – a theory that has a complex history, as Eales suggests:
In broad outline, it was the product of a number of strands of elite white Western thinking spanning several centuries which, though contradictory at times, merged to produce a damning conventional wisdom about black urban women.8
An example of this common wisdom of the day may be found in BF Nel’s 1942 study, Naturelle-opvoeding en onderwys (native education and tuition). According to Nel, the moral standards of all black people are extremely low and even lower in the case of the ‘degenerate native in our towns and cities’. The mere thought of such people being employed as nannies disgusts him, and he considers it an extremely dangerous situation that ‘our public parks and playgrounds teem with servants with one or two children under their care’.9
Theories concerning the carnal, primitive nature of dark-skinned people were not the preserve of South Africans. In Europe the ‘degenerate nature’ of black female sexuality was considered to be on par with that of white working class women. Cultural and literary historian Sander L Gilman contends that the notion of the moral and sexual corruption of ‘the servant girl’ was ‘common knowledge’. It was generally accepted that lower class women were ‘sexual predators’ and ‘naturally’ inclined to prostitution.10 The fact that many young women were forced – in European cities as well as in Johannesburg – to prostitute themselves to keep body and soul together only served to strengthen the stereotype. In the South African context, the myth of the noble savage underpinned the idea of the city being the locus of sexual degeneration of the native.11 The contorted thinking of officialdom held that the allegedly ‘idyllic’ lives of rural black people needed to be protected. Many prejudices had still to be overcome, however, before black women would be elevated to an ‘honourable’ familial status in city households.
The country’s urgent need for manpower eventually created the breakthrough for black women in the domestic worker market. Both the Chamber of Mines and the Commission for Native Affairs found it outrageous that able-bodied men were washing dishes and making beds. They began to insist that ‘houseboys’ go and work in the mines – but something else needed to happen to get the men out of the kitchens. When, during 1911 and 1912, a few instances of sexual assault occurred on the Witwatersrand and the culprits were found to be mainly ‘houseboys’, the so-called Black Peril was the leverage for radical change in the domestic worker market.12 The state as well as prominent women’s groups such as the Vrouwen Federatie and the Ladies Temperance Union did their utmost to allay the fears of white employers, with the result that more and more households opted for black women servants. According to the Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into Assaults on Women (1913), the option of importing white servants from England was far too expensive; they would in any case get married soon after arriving and become ‘madams’ themselves. Local white working class women, especially the daughters of Afrikaners still struggling to get back on their feet after their losses in the South African War, loathed the thought of doing ‘kaffir work’, while racially-mixed women from the Cape resented the racial restrictions placed on them by the Transvaal government. Black women were, therefore, the perfect option.13
In February 1912, the Transvaal Provincial Council began to draw up regulations that would assist black rural parents in controlling daughters who moved to cities, and allay fears of losing lobola or boghadi payments from men who impregnated their daughters. At the same time, employers needed to be given an assurance that they would have some form of control over the women. Family metaphors were lavishly employed: ‘fatherly control’ by the state, and regular medical inspections as well as the ‘motherly care’ of female employers would protect the women. Eales notes the following:
Between the self-interest of