When I came across Robbins’s explanation of the connection between the words ‘servant’ and ‘family’, it was clear what the title of my book would be: Like Family. I now realised that the original meaning of the word family, which stems from the Latin famulus, was servant. According to Raymond Williams, a typical household in the early eighteenth century consisted of blood relatives as well as servants.20 During World War I, and more especially in World War II, many British working class women tasted the freedom attached to factory work and would never return to the hard, lonely work ‘downstairs’. Decades later, local servant women in England and many other first world countries would be replaced by migrant women from especially Africa, Asia and South America.
In today’s global society, one in five domestic workers is a migrant who often works continents away from where she grew up and where her own family lives. Women from Indonesia, the Philippines, Columbia and Ghana work, for example, in North America, Europe and the Middle East. They provide indispensable services, contributing to the wealth of ageing societies and to the sustainability of these countries’ welfare and employment systems. However, they receive little recognition, and the highest praise that such workers and nannies in all corners of the globe are given seems to be that they are ‘like family’ – like, but never quite.21
Domestic Workers in Literature
Robbins links the increasing estrangement between the classes in Britain to the expository roles that servants continue to play in contemporary British novels, films and TV series such as Downton Abbey. While servants’ experiences contribute to the plot, their main function is to add flavour or contrast to the problems and pleasures of their employers ‘upstairs’.22 Similarly, this is often the function of servant characters in South African literature, for example in popular novels by white South African authors reflecting changing circumstances during the early 1990s. Some of these novels were reviewed very positively, but satirist Robert Kirby described the new subgenre with some disdain as ‘post-apartheid weepies’.23 Stereotypes from the ‘good old days’ of ‘traditional maid and madam’ relationships were simply too common.
In Pamela Jooste’s People like Ourselves (2004), Tula, the granddaughter of domestic worker Adelaide, is permitted to stay with her granny in her backyard room. In exchange, the employer, Julia, expects Adelaide to provide additional services such as being an ally and a silent witness to the constant bickering between Julia and her unfaithful husband, Douglas. The manner in which Jooste represents the relationship between Julia and Adelaide is sharply criticised by literary scholar Mary West, who accuses Jooste of including Adelaide merely to reflect Julia’s problems. In West’s view, an entire chapter focusing on Adelaide is an illustration of what Adrienne Rich has described as the typical behaviour of white women trying to be ‘nice’, a mode of behaviour that enables them to assuage the guilt they feel towards black women. In the very next chapter, Jooste pushes aside Adelaide’s personal crisis concerning her grandchild as callously as her character Julia does. West declares that the least white authors can do is to portray these women not merely as domestic workers but as daughters, mothers and grandmothers, women who have personal lives and individual needs.24
‘Farm Novels’ and ‘City Novels’
As with the occupants of the ‘upstairs’ and the ‘downstairs’ of British manor houses, white and black families, for generations, lived together but separately on South African farms. This entangled lifestyle has been portrayed in all its contradictory complexity, blending racism with a feudal form of benevolence, and constitutes a major genre in Afrikaans literature, the plaasroman (farm novel).25 Excellent farm novels such as Etienne van Heerden’s Toorberg (1986; Ancestral Voices, 1992) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004; The Way of the Women, 2007) have met with huge international acclaim after being translated into many languages. Portrayals of black and white families living side by side, even sharing mutual family secrets, cut to the core of South African race relations. Representations of highly unequal labour relations and complex family ties, which are integral to the genre, seem to speak to readers worldwide.
In cities, and therefore also in South African city novels, the feudal relations which were once so typical of life on farms, are rare. Urban employers, ensconced in their comfortable, protected neighbourhoods, hardly ever see the husbands, children or parents of their domestic workers, so that it is possible to ignore their private lives, and not think of them as wives, mothers or daughters with their own domestic obligations. During the heyday of apartheid with its homeland system, it was especially easy to profess powerlessness when it came to assisting one’s domestic worker in maintaining ties with her children far away.26 She was seen as someone whose time, attention and care could quite naturally be claimed as solely for the employer’s benefit, whether she worked as a char for a few hours or full-time as a ‘sleep-in’. This domestic worker, however, regularly crossed the divide between black and white living spaces and had an intimate knowledge of the huge differences that existed. When she returned to a small township house or a cramped hut in the homelands she would surely have shared something of her experiences in the ‘big white city’, imparting knowledge about the luxury of comfortable living conditions to people who did not have this first-hand knowledge. White employers generally lack experience of townships and homelands and are dependent on their domestic workers for the little they know of places such as Soweto and the ‘Transkei’. Domestic workers are therefore extremely important go-between figures: both in actual life and as characters in literary works.
Florence, the ‘sleep-in’ domestic worker of Mrs Curren in JM Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990), is one such go-between, as are the many servant women in light-hearted collections like Minnie Postma’s Ek en my bediende (1955; My servant and I) and Riana Scheepers’s Katriena books of the 1990s. Collectively, they create a clear picture that kitchens of the white middle classes are important contact zones, spaces in which black and white women are able to talk to each other about their hugely different worlds, though not nearly enough, unfortunately.
Urban stories by both white and black authors inevitably reflect social reality in South Africa in some way or another. The presence of servant characters signals interracial contact, though they are also a reminder of exclusion. Though a quarter of a century has passed since apartheid ended, few black domestic workers enjoy the comfort of modern kitchens and bathrooms in their own homes; few can allow themselves the same plans for the future of their children as their employers have. All too often, their children and elderly parents live in remote, economically-deprived outposts in the former homelands. In Antjie Krog’s cycle of poems called ‘servants talk’ in her volume Synapse (2014), for example, the problems of Victoria who works in Oranjezicht and lives in a nearby township mostly have to do with family members living far away in the Eastern Cape, close to the town of Qumbu.27 As discussed in the chapters that follow, the entanglement of black and white South Africans, of rural areas and cities, is nowhere so powerfully illustrated as in the relationship between domestic workers and their employers.
2
Enslaved Women at the Cape: The First Domestic Workers
The main method private owners used to control their slaves, especially the slaves in the household, was by incorporating them into their extended families. […] Cape slave owners went to considerable lengths to keep slaves, especially female slaves, as ‘part of the family’.
Robert