Like Family

Domestic workers in South African history and literature

Ena Jansen

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781776143535
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Lavoro e relazioni industriali

1

Representations of Domestic Workers

They are like buttons you press to make
things work, like stoves and kettles.

Nico Smith — Rapport, 16 August 2009

Aibileen and Poppie

In August 2009 on a night flight between Cape Town and Amsterdam, I sat next to a woman engrossed in a book on her lap. Throughout, she kept her reading light on. I noticed a sepia photograph on the cover showing two black women chatting to each other; one of them was wearing an apron and a white cap, and she stood next to a pram with a white child in it. The title of the book was The Help, and the author Kathryn Stockett.¹ Just before we landed at Schiphol airport, my neighbour told me how deeply moved she was by what she had been reading. Although The Help is situated in the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, it had starkly reminded her of the ‘servant situation’ in South Africa: of the women who had cared for her and of those who had helped her to raise her own children.

In December I was back in Cape Town again, and in book shops everywhere I noticed piles of The Help; Exclusive Books had awarded the novel its annual Boeke Prize. The American novel with the domestic worker Aibileen as its main character was touching the hearts and minds of thousands. Not since Elsa Joubert’s The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (originally published as Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, 1978) had a novel with a black protagonist so captured the imagination of South African readers.² The movie version of The Help was an even bigger success, drawing crowds comparable to those that had flocked to see the play Poppie thirty years before.³

Some two years later, in February 2011, Ablene Cooper accused Kathryn Stockett of having stolen her story. Cooper had for years been a servant in the household of Stockett’s brother. Stockett fiercely denied the accusation and had to publicly confront important questions regarding appropriation: the right of an outsider to speak for or write on behalf of ‘the other’.⁴ Something similar had happened years before to Elsa Joubert. Although she was never confronted by the black woman who had wholeheartedly collaborated with her by sitting for hours telling Joubert her story, certain white critics accused her of speaking ‘for’ Poppie, and not formally acknowledging her as co-author even though it later became known that ‘Poppie’ had a share of the royalties.⁵ At her own request, her real name was never revealed during her lifetime. Joubert also received much hate mail from conservative Afrikaners accusing her of hanging out the dirty linen of an Afrikaner National Party government that was ‘only doing its best’ to prevent ‘surplus’ black rural people from inundating ‘white’ cities. This is an oblique reference to the hated pass laws, which were eventually repealed in 1986, and the Group Areas Act which was repealed in 1991.

Clearly, without the literary mediation of Joubert, most white South Africans would, at the time, not have understood the magnitude of the plight of Poppie and the thousands of black women like her. Without the novel, the structural violence and cruelty of the pass laws would most certainly not have been so fiercely debated at the time. The publication of Poppie Nongena, with Joubert’s effective narration of this individual woman’s life story, caused white South African readers to be shocked into a realisation of the harsh effects of pass laws on suffering black families. Years later, historian Hermann Giliomee wryly remarked in his highly-acclaimed study, The Afrikaners (2003): ‘An average Afrikaner family could easily relate to the book, because they had someone like Poppie […] working as a servant in their home.’⁶ The same applies also, of course, to white English-speaking families.

The Cycle of Representation

In the wake of Poppie Nongena, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, literary scholars such as Vernon February, Jakes Gerwel and Judy Gardner researched and meticulously documented the representation of many black characters by white authors in South African literature. Today, theoretical and ethical issues pertaining to representation and appropriation in the arts are robustly debated, with many questions being raised.⁷ Is it possible for a white author such as Dan Sleigh or Trudie Bloem to comprehend the life of Krotoa-Eva, let alone represent her adequately? May white authors presume to tell the story of a black person, as do André Brink in his tale of Philida, a slave woman, and Nadine Gordimer in her story of the manservant, July, and JM Coetzee in his chronicle of Michael K? Is it appropriate for Koos Kombuis (André du Toit) to sing a song about his nanny, Kytie? Similar questions are topical in the fine arts domain. Marion Arnold’s ‘Portraits of Servitude’ in her study, Women and Art in South Africa (1996), examines the work of Irma Stern, Dorothy Kay and Keith Dietrich, showing that paintings of servants are among the most problematic visual representations in South African art.⁸ Such portraits convey influential societal values, and stereotypes may either be confirmed and perpetuated or questioned and disrupted.

In Arnold’s analysis of Kay’s painting, Cookie, Annie Mavata (1956), she points out its power:

Annie Mavata meets the viewer’s gaze boldly. […] Although wearing a uniform, [she] is not stereotyped by it. Her own reality and personhood are established through her assertive body language. She is conscious that she is being scrutinised and she meets the appraisal on her terms. […] The authority of the Mavata portrait is, in part, a product of the naturalistic style adopted. […] Tension is established between the iconic stillness of the woman and the few objects in the painting. Of particular interest is the dark void. […] It asserts that we know nothing more about Annie Mavata than what we see. […] The painting is a portrait; it is not a didactic illustration of a cook in the kitchen.⁹

Kay neither questions the institution of servitude, and nor does she sentimentalise Mavata: instead, she respectfully reveals her subject, leaving interpretation to the viewer.¹⁰

Postcolonial theory has made people aware of the fact that what they perceive as ‘reality’ is in fact heavily influenced by what they read, by films, artworks and the advertisements they see. In 1997, British cultural theorist Stuart Hall introduced the previously mentioned concept of ‘cycle of representation’. Authors and artists represent what they observe, and these representations in turn influence how all of us as consumers of cultural products view ‘reality’. One can safely assume that books have a huge influence on children’s attitudes to life. One such example is the Maasdorp books, an Afrikaans series of boarding school novels read by generations of schoolgirls. The heroine is the beautiful, talented and adventurous Kobie Malan.¹¹ In one episode, Kobie and a friend prepare to pack for school after spending a weekend in the posh Cape Town home of the Malan family. Her friend is about to carry her suitcase downstairs when Kobie breezily says: ‘Never mind. One of the maids will do that.’ The likely reader, by now in awe of Kobie and her family, would probably not have blinked an eyelid at Kobie’s remark. Instead, she would probably have aspired to living in a suburb such as Oranjezicht, with servants in attendance. Also, Mrs Malan is likely to have been the ultimate role model: an elegant woman who confidently leaves her large house in the care of loyal staff as she drives off to a meeting in her shiny black car.¹²

Working Conditions

After the ANC came to power, strict legislation concerning the working conditions of domestic workers was passed. In 1996, the new constitution was adopted with a comprehensive Bill of Rights and a Reconstruction and Development Programme. The Labour Relations Act of 1995 had already legalised the unionisation of domestic workers, while the Domestic Workers’ Act of 1997 prescribes minimum wages on an annual basis, and specifies working conditions such as hours of work, overtime pay, salary increases, deductions, as well as annual and sick leave.¹³ Domestic workers are entitled to four months' unpaid maternity leave as well as severance pay of one week for each year of service. Contracts, contributions to an unemployment fund, and conditions for dismissal are regulated.

In spite of these guidelines, as sociologist Shireen Ally convincingly argues in her study, From Servants to Workers (2010), many South African domestic workers believe that working conditions have not necessarily changed for the better. According to especially older women, the new laws often impact negatively as it is practically impossible to enforce acceptable working conditions in the one-on-one relationship between a worker and her employer behind the closed doors of private homes. Workers know that the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU) can provide assistance, and that grievances should be reported to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA). However, these formal arrangements have removed much of the personal negotiating power domestic workers previously enjoyed when they were considered to be ‘part of the family’. Strategies that included a combination of direct requests, subtle hints and sulky behaviour were often effective in ‘malevolent maternalistic’ environments, though they are not nearly as successful in a more formal post-apartheid relationship where employers suspect that a domestic worker might appeal to labour unions to back her. Should a worker ask for more money or extra days off, an employer might simply refer to the official minimum wage or sarcastically reply that they should instead ‘ask Mandela’ – or Ramaphosa, or whoever happens to be running the country. Ally found that employers, having registered their workers and signed the obligatory contract, will often say that they are no longer personally responsible for anything beyond paying slightly more than the minimum wage.

From Kytie to Katie

Much credit is, however, often given by employers to the important role played by domestic workers, and in 2008 Western Cape Premier Helen Zille proposed that a monument be erected to them.¹⁴ Although Zille’s suggestion was met with widespread public approval, and images of domestic workers such as Mary Sibande’s bold artworks are present in urban spaces, no such monument has yet been erected. In public discourse, white people regularly reflect nostalgically on individual black women who cared for them as children, though these reflections are a disconcerting mix of sincere but often sentimental and sometimes even offensive memories. One example is a Facebook post that went viral in May 2018, where a woman speaks about her love for her ‘second mother’ in the context of a discussion about minimum wages.¹⁵

It often happens that, in letters to newspapers or blogs, white people – many of them men – quote from the saccharine Koos Kombuis song, ‘Kytie, jy’s nie net ’n meid nie’ (Kytie, you weren’t just the girl); quite clearly, they are familiar with the lyrics: ‘I remember her as if it were yesterday./ Ever since I was small she was always there./ With her eyes like kaffir beer/ she makes you think the Mona Lisa must have been a coloured./ Kytie Adams was the woman installed in our kitchen/ She would do the dishes and wash our clothes/ care for us children and teach us manners, teach us.’¹⁶

In 2011, Ronelda S Kamfer included a poem called ‘Katie het kinders gehad’ (Katie had children) in her second volume of poetry, grond/ Santekraam (land/ the whole caboodle). By quoting Kombuis in an epigraph Kamfer refers directly to his song, providing a completely different perspective on women like Kytie who inevitably neglect their own families while caring for white children.¹⁷ Women like Kytie, or Auntie Katie as Kamfer calls her, and people like her own mother, are everywhere in white suburbs. In the early morning they alight from combi taxis and walk the streets to front gates behind which they disappear for long hours, except when they walk the dogs on the pavement, push toddlers to the park, or accompany an elderly person to the local supermarket. Although these women have huge responsibilities, their work is rated as the lowest sector of the labour market and is hardly ever adequately rewarded. A quarter of a century after the ANC came to power, a million black women are still employed as domestic workers in predominantly white neighbourhoods.

Although men were the first domestic workers in Johannesburg during the early part of the twentieth century, few white South African households nowadays employ black men, except as gardeners. The most well-known black male ‘literary servant’ is probably July in Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People (1981), and his story is told in a subsequent chapter.

Mere Tools

Discussions about domestic workers have been part and parcel of the South African way of life since the seventeenth century, and issues concerning such workers continue to flare up. In August 2009, journalist Jaco Kirsten, for example, started a debate in the Sunday newspaper Rapport when he used the pseudonymn ‘Wit Umfaan’ (white boy) to write about the ‘u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note for Readers
• Introduction: Searching the Archive
• 1 Representations of Domestic Workers
• 2 Enslaved Women at the Cape: The First Domestic Workers
• 3 Migrant Women and Domestic Work in the City
• 4 Legislation and Black Urban Women
• 5 Domestic Workers in Personal Accounts
• 6 Oral Testimonies, Interviews and a Novel
• 7 Domestic Workers and Children
• 8 Domestic Workers and Sexuality
• 9 Domestic Workers in Troubled Times
• 10 Domestic Workers in Post-apartheid Novels by White Authors
• 11 Domestic Workers in Post-apartheid Novels by Black Authors
• 12 Domestic Workers Bridge the Gap
• Notes
• Artists and Photographers
• Bibliography
• Index