Like Family. Ena Jansen
while in 2012 Tamara Shefer based her research on information she found in the Apartheid Archives Project, describing domestic workers as ‘a key site for the reproduction of White privilege’. Shefer noticed that family metaphors were widely used by people being interviewed, and that memory stories were often steeped in emotion, especially love and guilt: ‘The nanny is remembered nostalgically as a source of comfort and care.’9 Many white South Africans in post-apartheid times have realised that they, in fact, first became aware of ‘difference’ through experiences with these women, but that they very seldom acted on it. They noticed the discrimination against the women they often dearly loved, and became drawn into a system which made them understand that it was not so much gender or class but colour that determined power relations in South Africa. White children simply conformed to the place and role which society expected of them. Although domestic workers in many ways do function like doors that enable contact between an inside and an outside and create the possibility of opening up to the ‘other’, they are seldom opened widely. The artist William Kentridge put it this way: ‘For a white suburban house the journey through Africa began across the yard in the servant’s room.’ An extended journey was possible but hardly ever undertaken. So it is that Mark Gevisser refers to the ‘frontier of the backyard’.10
Although the political scene in South Africa was radically altered when the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994, not nearly as much has changed with regards to private domestic arrangements. The social and economic division between black and white lingers on in post-apartheid South Africa, and remains largely unresolved. Most white neighbourhoods have retained the demographic character of the twentieth century, and to this day black people generally enter them in their capacity as servants, gardeners and cleaners. As a result, black nannies pushing white toddlers in prams or abba-ing them on their backs are still a familiar sight in parks and on pavements in most of South Africa’s historically white suburbs. White homes in which black domestic workers are employed are therefore still, to use Mary Louise Pratt’s term, ‘contact zones’, that is, the ‘meet, clash and grapple’ contacts between people from hugely different cultural backgrounds.11 To my mind, domestic workers continue to be the most important contact figures in South Africa between white and black, between urban and rural, and between the wealthy and the poor.
Millions of lives of black women remain undocumented, but for every literary figure in a novel, song or poem over the centuries, some ‘real’ woman was the inspiration and model. In some such stories domestic workers take a central role, but in many more even their brief and seemingly incidental appearances in ‘supporting roles’, whether opening doors or carrying trays, are insightful and often distressing. When reading these stories, Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘circuit of culture’, the cycle of representation needs always to be taken into account: the way in which domestic workers are described influences the behaviour of readers.12
It is not only a South African trait to underplay or even forget the role of servants in history and literature. In Dwelling in the Archive (2003), the British historian Antoinette Burton shows that Indian novelists have written very little about servants. Their presence was as self-evident as that of furniture, needing no mention besides perhaps as proof of the owner’s status. Burton describes the lack of literary documentation of servants’ lives as the ‘most dramatic and perhaps paradigmatic example of what can never be fully recovered’.13 The textual silence surrounding the lives of servants is, of course, additional proof of the silence and violence of all archives.
Still, important documentary traces of some of these lives are readily accessible. In the first chapters of Like Family, information from life stories collected mainly by welfare and activist organisations and autobiographical work is combined with an overview of the historical and sociological development of labour relations in South Africa. In the second half of the book I concentrate on literary representations of domestic worker characters, focusing on urban situations where the pass laws impacted extremely harshly on the lives of black people migrating to cities.
Up until the 1990s, the powerlessness of black domestic workers went hand in hand with a lack of political power. Since the first democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the ANC, new legislation contains specific laws pertaining to the rights of domestic workers. In addition, unions such as the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU) have gained political clout in protecting the rights of workers. The question arises whether domestic workers (and literary characters based on them) have become more vocal and assertive. One wonders, too, whether white people are more conscious of the privileges they have enjoyed for generations thanks to affordable domestic help. Have stereotypical images of motherly subservient black women changed during the 25 years since the ANC has been the governing party? Might it be the case that former ‘like family’ relationships have become more formal and distant?
I have searched the ever-expanding archive containing stories which reflect the entanglement between black and white in domestic labour relations in an effort to find answers to these questions. Without suggesting that there is a direct correspondence between ‘servants of art and those of life’, Like Family is meant to be a form of archival restitution.14 This book does not simply view domestic workers as anonymous members of an amorphous workforce, but instead brings into focus individuals who have generally been marginalised. Their names are therefore mentioned in sub-headings: in the case of Sindiwe Magona, for example, her own name as well as her working name Cynthia appears, while in a fictional work such as JM Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Florence’s name is foregrounded.
Like Family is a reworking and update of both the Afrikaans original Soos familie (2015) and the Dutch abridged and revised translation, Bijna familie (2016). By including recent works such as Brett Michael Innes’s Rachel Weeping (2015) and Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country (2017), fresh insights are provided into the manner in which literary stories either ‘normalise’ or interrogate traditional domestic labour situations. Like Family is therefore an investigation into the role and meaning of domestic workers in South African communities and literature, women such as Flora, of whom novelist Elsa Joubert, during the late 1970s, wrote:
She is closer to me than a sister, knows my intimate life on a deeper level than a sister would know me.
But I don’t know her.15
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