Abstract
Domestic service in southern Africa has, since the 1980s, received close attention from historians and social scientists. Much of this literature is focused on the colonial period (including the apartheid era in South Africa), where the racial oppression of colonial rule took a sharp and intimate form for Black women and men who labored in middle- and upper-class White homes. Yet this is not the whole history of domestic service in the region, as Sacha Hepburn shows. Domestic service dramatically expanded as a category of employment in post-colonial southern Africa, where predominantly Black employers and workers have negotiated economic downturns and shifting social inequalities through a range of formal and informal labor arrangements.
Home Economics is a history of domestic service in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, since the 1960s but with a particular focus on the 1990s through 2010s. Using oral history testimony, archival records, and comparative evidence from other southern African cities, Hepburn aims to expand our understanding of domestic service by bringing “waged and kin-based domestic labor and child and adult workers into a single frame of analysis” (3). This approach allows for a history of domestic service that includes the experiences of workers and employers in poorer Black households. Hepburn's broad definition of domestic service also allows her to show how employers and workers have experimented with formal and informal methods of recruitment, payment, and labor organizing over time—this is no linear history of the formalization of the domestic service sector. A particular strength of Hepburn's approach is that it foregrounds the historical agency of girl workers, who, as children working in extended family settings, have often been left out of both scholarly and activist discussions of domestic service. Home Economics therefore poses important and original questions about domestic service in postcolonial urban Africa, although the limitations of the source material do not always allow Hepburn to answer these with a satisfyingly rich historical narrative.
Oral history testimonies are the most significant source for Hepburn's research. The bibliography cites 64 interviews conducted by the author with assistance from a research associate. Interviewees included both domestic workers and employers, the majority of them women. Hepburn characterizes the majority of employers she interviewed as middle-class. Because the post-colonial Zambian government largely did not regulate or collect statistics on domestic service until the 2000s, documentary sources are scarce on this subject; however, Hepburn does use records from the International Labour Organization (ILO), local Zambian labor and domestic service trade unions, and government records to analyze recent attempts to formalize the domestic service sector.
The first chapter of the book provides a broad overview of domestic service from the colonial era until the 2010s, focusing on the transformation of domestic service from a masculine to a feminine occupation. In colonial Zambia both employers and African families preferred to recruit men into waged work in urban colonial households, while African women and children remained on rural homesteads to carry on unpaid reproductive labor. After independence, the gendered dynamics of domestic service began to change. Educational and employment opportunities expanded for Zambian men and women, Black households overtook White as the most common employers of domestic workers, and the faltering Zambian economy after the 1970s meant that householders were keen to find cheaper sources of domestic labor. These factors pulled an increasing number of women and young girls into domestic service, often in lower-waged and less formal settings. By the 2010s Zambia mirrored trends across Africa, where approximately seventy percent of domestic workers were female.
After this historical overview chapter, the remaining four chapters are organized thematically. Chapters 2 and 3 examine how female employers and workers, especially girl workers, negotiated the opportunities and extra burdens of kin-based labor arrangements. Both middle-class and poorer Lusakan women who worked outside their homes from the 1970s continued to shoulder the primary responsibility for maintaining their own homes and raising their children. To fulfill this responsibility, women relied on “local care chains” (adapted from Arlie Hochschild's concept of “global care chains”), recruiting other women or girls from rural extended family networks to cook, clean, and care for children. Domestic workers themselves found such kin-based arrangements particularly crucial to maintaining their own homes while they labored in a wealthier household. Employers benefitted from relatively inexpensive labor provided by workers who were known to them, but also had to take on caring responsibilities for these family members. By the early 2000s, some middle-class women tried to move away from this model of extended family care and found workers through “maid centers,” or professional agencies. Such formal employment remained uncommon in the twenty-first century, however. Instead, the ongoing recruitment of poorer kin to provide domestic and childcare labor for urban working women shows how “the costs of urban social reproduction in Zambia continued to be borne by female rural residents, replicating and reworking patterns of urban-rural dependence established under colonial rule” (98).
The concept of “care chains” implies a hierarchy among members of the chain, and the people at the bottom of this hierarchy were girl domestic workers. Hepburn avoids simply describing the conditions of exploitation for girl workers, and instead focuses on how both employers and girl workers understood the kin-based domestic labor system. In interviews, employers represented themselves as caring and maternal toward youthful employees; they supervised girls’ sexuality, and provided them with clothing, school fees, or remittances to parents in lieu of cash wages. For their part, girls (or rather, adult interviewees recalling their childhood experiences of the 1970s through 1990s) emphasized the autonomy and opportunities they found through domestic service, despite the obstacles they faced. Girl workers understood themselves to be helping their parents and setting themselves up for a better future. While urban domestic service did offer a respite from dire poverty, and some girls managed to complete secondary school while working, Hepburn's interviewees clearly understood some of their experiences as exploitative. Girls’ gendered identities saddled them with automatic responsibility for household work, while their generational role as children meant that they had little recourse against overwork or sexual or physical abuse by their employers.
Although, as Hepburn shows, kin-based and child labor arrangements have long been essential to the urban Zambian economy, they have largely been ignored by policymakers and activists. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on international standards, Zambian government policy, and local union organizing around domestic work. The agendas of formalization and regulation espoused by legislators and unionists may not serve the actual interests of domestic workers, Hepburn argues. In 2011, the Zambian government, following other southern African nations and advocacy by the ILO, introduced minimum wages, paid leave, and a minimum age (15 years) for domestic workers. Between 2011 and 2018, successive Zambian governments further raised domestic workers’ minimum wage from approximately USD25 to USD85 per month. Statements by Lusakan workers and comparative evidence from other southern African nations show that these new policies did have a positive effect for some individuals. Yet, the same evidence shows, not all employers followed the law, and domestic workers were often unable to access the formal mechanisms for redress. Hepburn traces the complex histories of domestic worker unions in Zambia, which have often struggled to maintain organizational unity and attract membership; although since the 1990s some unions have secured resources through links with the ILO, and have pursued the ILO's broad agenda of organizing wage-earning adult workers. The organizing strategies of Zambian domestic worker unions have therefore largely neglected informal and child domestic workers.
However, Hepburn argues, many urban domestic workers have made tangible improvements to their working conditions through informal collective organizing. Zambian domestic workers participate in a long tradition of collective organizing by domestic workers in southern Africa, where workers have offered one another solidarity or negotiated with employers in the absence of union or legislative support. Workers in the same neighborhood have formed friendships, pooled resources, and shared valuable knowledge to allow their peers to negotiate more effectively with employers. These insights into the continuing strength of informal collective organizing in the 2010s allow Hepburn, in the Conclusion, to frame a number of recommendations to historians and policymakers, urging to both the necessity of further research into the work of women and girls in domestic settings, and the relation of this work to the urban economy.
Hepburn's focus on girl workers, and her evidence that kin-based and child labor practices have continued alongside attempts at formalizing the sector, is an encouragement to historians, social scientists, and policymakers to take a similarly broad view of domestic service. Hepburn shows that the availability and growing visibility of formalized domestic service since the 1990s—as represented by labor unions or professional recruitment agencies—has not necessarily replaced informal and kin-based labor arrangements. The history of domestic service is of a diversifying market, not of a simple evolution from informal to formal work. However, historians interested in the cultural history of the family and domesticity may find Hepburn's analysis unsatisfying, in that it does not provide a detailed explanation of how kin-based domestic service has persisted and changed over time. Several times, Hepburn hints that familial relationships between employers and employees may be fictive rather than real, and that definitions of kinship have changed over time in Zambia. This is a crucial insight for our historical understanding of family relationships and domestic labor in Africa: if domestic work has been assumed to be the natural, unpaid duty of women and girl children in their “own” homes, then what are the gradations by which people have been classified as belonging or not belonging to the family?
Home Economics’ lack of attention to how cultural understandings of kinship, or rhetorical uses of kinship claims, have changed over time in Zambia may perhaps be related to how Hepburn approaches the interpretation of her evidence. In Home Economics, oral historical evidence is mainly presented in summary or paraphrase; the book offers few substantial quotations from interviews and therefore not much close analysis of specific language used by interviewees. Possibly a closer analysis of the language used by workers and employers to describe their relationships may yield more insight into who counted as a family in postcolonial urban southern Africa, and how the rights and obligations of kinship may have changed over time. Certainly, Hepburn's original approach should be a spur to other historians to take up the challenge of researching the history of domestic service by workers who have not always been recognized as such.