They used to say that when the Portuguese flee Africa in distress, it’s already too late to leave. In this light, what of recent reports that “even domestic workers are leaving South Africa for better prospects abroad’’? A low blow to national morale indeed.
There’s a certain shame when even the most menial workers give up on their country — and decide to skip the rest of the national dialogue while they’re about it. God forbid that whites and a good many blacks (not to mention coloureds and Indians in full compliance with employment equity quotas) would have to clean up after themselves if this domexit gets out of hand. The horror!
Relax; it seems the report may be more media content than reality. Somewhat hyperbolic. We’re probably OK in the short term. But clearly the idea that domestics would quit the country is being taken seriously by online news sites, which is good enough for me on the nonpaying side of the paywall. For free: a headline and what appears to be a paraphrase of an expert’s assertion that the hired help are upskilling and relocating operations abroad. Hardly surprising, the cynics among us might say.
And yet, despite the recent loss of tens of thousands of domestic worker jobs, I’m happy to break the news that there will always be a place in our social order for poor and desperate people to pander to the many and varied whims of the rich. This is for better or worse: Marx would call it exploitation, most just know it as life.
Not that domestic work in South Africa hasn’t always needed a revolution or two. The tragedy and injustice of domestic work is that it falls almost exclusively on women, and in South Africa that would mostly be black women, who effectively run two households. Too often there’s no choice but to accept the most menial labour in degrading conditions, to support children who are usually solely their burden.
For many in the domestic sector, life has recently been thrown upside down by the paradoxically impoverishing logic of the gig economy. The paternalistic madam-and-Eve arrangement is being replaced by an anonymous labour transaction with a service provider on an app. Hardly the improvement one might have hoped for, in what we take for granted is a bright new tech-driven utopia.
Not surprisingly, many liberal white South Africans are still coy and even embarrassed about the glaring apartheid-tinged exploitation of being cleaned up after. What used to be “maids”, and “servants” before that, have become the more neutral-sounding “domestic worker”. Or a progressive friend might say, “Gladys comes on Tuesday”, which is a particular white code, or “You’ll meet Josephina, she’s part of the family”. I had a colleague who insisted on giving her old helper Evelina an antique Merc to run errands in.
Other children looked forward to their next birthdays; we’d dread being old enough to start cleaning windows
I never grew up with domestics. With two criminally energetic Irish parents, and cleanliness being next to godliness, we pursued the Almighty with a broom or a dishcloth from the earliest age. My first memory is of lying in a pram drying cutlery, so in that sense I must concede to being born with a silver spoon in my hand. Other children looked forward to their next birthdays; we’d dread being old enough to start cleaning windows or mowing the lawn.
Almost all the other families, regardless of wealth or lack thereof, had domestics, and it was a messy business too when the pass police came through in their green vans, carrying out a raid for so-called illegals. Most ominous, and you’d be happy not to be part of it. The richest family in the neighbourhood had a Malawian “houseboy”, a compact, greying man who doubled as a waiter in a white coat on special occasions.
Nowadays, with time on my hands and the quest for flexibility a priority, I do my own cleaning and can attest to it being a back-breaking chore, approached with the utmost reluctance and resistance. It gives me plenty of time to think, though, and pay a silent tribute to the redoubtable ladies who once cleaned my various houses, helping to bring order to chaos, serenity to confusion.
Take a bow, Maria, loud and tiny, who lived with her one-eyed Mozambican husband Joseph in my back room in Kensington for many years. Now retired to Taung, early humanity’s HQ. And Regina, a Zimbabwean woman who helped her husband cut down an excess blue gum tree in the garden. She effortlessly used an axe to reduce it all to shisanyama fire-sized logs, so I immediately employed her to clean the house, and once a week she’d move through the rooms with a mop, singing hymns.
Well, parting being such sweet sorrow, it’s bon voyage, venerable ladies of the mop, as you seek your fortunes abroad. It’s your time to shine. Again.
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