Abstract
Labor relations are so much more than what is—still today—mostly at the center of many academic books in our field: supposedly “free” wage labor at a factory or office. It is amazing what you discover when you examine work from its margins. One such insight is that we should “give up the notion that free labour and coerced labour had nothing in common, belonged to distinct eras, and represented completely different social worlds. It makes more sense to think in terms of a continuum in which workers were subject to various forms and combinations of coercion,” as historian Jürgen Osterhammel says (The Transformation of the World, 2014: 707). These continuities can be found especially at the margins, where we see that “the past is never dead. It is not even past” (quoting William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951). Ena Jansen has brilliantly exposed this continuity in her book Like Family: Domestic Workers in South African History and Literature. She has linked the past of household labor with its present, and in doing so she has shed new light on inner and “objective” worlds of an important yet marginalized labor relation of our post-colonial world.
Jansen first wrote this award-winning book in Afrikaans, and Soos Familie (2015) has already been translated into Dutch (2016). She has now added contextual knowledge and translated it into English. The result is a work that examines domestic work in South African poems, plays, novels, and films, in both English and Afrikaans, as well as in paintings. A literature professor by denomination, she embeds her cultural analysis into a historical and sociological account of female black domestic workers from the 17th century to today. This labor relation is, in certain ways, at the heart of this post-colonial as well as post-apartheid society: As the first Dutch settlers brought enslaved servants into their homes, a nexus was founded which became in a sense like family—though never, not in the best of all benevolent paternalist or maternalist cases, of family. Servants would be the only members of the black population to go in and out of white homes and thus became go-between figures between two worlds. As Jansen shows, this continues to be the case for modern-day domestic employees, even though much has changed. In “both actual life and as characters in literary works” (p. 18), domestic workers have been bridging the gap between kitchen door and servants’ quarters, between rural black communities and white urban neighborhoods, between rich and poor, black and white, privilege and deprivation. Their labor power is exploited not only through contract, as is the usual abstract way of capitalist societies, but also, in many cases, through a continuity of personalized, intimate dependence founded in private ownership.
The book starts by giving an introduction into the representations of domestic workers in South Africa (Chapter 1), meaning how authors describe and artists depict them, and how this “influence[s] how all of us as consumers of cultural products view ‘reality’” (p. 10). The author then turns to the past, starting with the story of enslaved servants at the Cape (Chapter 2) in the 17th century and expanding into rural–urban migration in the 18th to 20th centuries (Chapter 3). In search of an alternative to the pre-colonial “total control by men” (p. 50) or to get away from “the deteriorating quality of rural life under colonialism” (p. 51), rural women often ended up in “the backyard of an employer’s house in a white suburb” (p. 52).
In the case of South Africa, black women and men first entered the white household as enslaved servants. Work in the private sphere soon became more and more feminized while men were “forced and lured to the mines and factories” (p. 51). Chapter 4 explores the regulations framing domestic work after the abolition of slavery: For example, a racist Night Pass Ordinance prohibited black men walking through white neighborhoods from 1902 onward; black women were included in the ordinance in 1925, supposedly “preventing ‘immorality’” (p. 66). Between 1956 and 1986, so-called passbooks were required if you lived and worked in white suburban homes.
Moving from the institutional frame to the more personal stories within it, Jansen explores the labor relation from the 1920s to the 1980s through personal accounts (Chapter 5), oral testimonies, and interviews with domestic workers (Chapter 6). She examines the subjective side of it, demonstrating how “sharply the personal stories contrast with the fond nostalgia of those who recall nannies and other domestic workers as having been ‘like part of the family’” (p. 138).
In many ways, Like Family gives an important and unsettling account of domestic work. The first half could have been more systematic in structure and more sociological in content; for example, the author dedicates only one page to the working conditions (p. 10) of domestic workers before turning to the (often degrading) terms used for domestic workers over time. And although Jansen is open and self-critical when talking about her own “family archive,” she could have been even more precautious about her own entanglement in the representation of domestic workers in her life. As she acknowledges, one “seemingly innocent remark” can be used to “ensur[e] they are kept in their place” (p. 280). This lack of caution unfortunately happens when she reveals some real-life stories to the public, including details about personal and love lives, or when she calls a domestic worker “auntie.” If she had anonymized these paragraphs and used self-reflective methods analyzing her own involvement, these parts would have been more appropriate. Nonetheless, Jansen succeeds in connecting the past and the present by giving the reader a close look into the biographies of many women throughout the 20th century.
The second half of the volume is a critical examination of fictional domestic workers in South Africa’s cultural industry and art. It encompasses the tensions around the relationship between (white) children and domestic workers (Chapter 7), sexuality (Chapter 8)—including the hypocritical and voyeuristic depiction of the meetings between domestic workers and employers in various novels—and the differences between the representation of domestic workers in post-apartheid novels by white (Chapter 9) and black authors (Chapter 10).
Like Family provides an in-depth, multifaceted “biography of domestic workers” (p. 279), rather than an intersectional analysis, but manages to tell a larger story through these many individual voices. Jansen explores “kitchens or the threshold space of the back door where interactions between ‘maids and madams’ generally occur, spaces that are best described as ‘contact zones’” (p. 269), “where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 1991: 34). Indeed, contact between domestic workers and their employers is based on the precondition that the former submits to rules and institutions created by the latter and their post-colonial legacy. Whereas the employer might describe a domestic worker as someone who knows her “better than her own sister” (p. 15), the employee herself will probably be dismissed once she is too old to do all the work, falls sick, or becomes pregnant—being treated, after all, as a “mere tool” (p. 12). Through this thorough look into the inner workings of this labor relation, we learn how past institutions and representations, even relationships, live on, shaping not only our daily lives but almost everything from far-reaching politics to individual feelings.