In September and October 2011, the Johannesburg city centre was adorned with huge photographs on canvas, draped over the sides of several buildings in Newtown. In these various photographs, a black woman posed in a regal Victorian blue dress, with an apron around her waist. In one of them, she held an umbrella as a sceptre; in another, she stood at a bus stop and in another, knitted a Superman jersey.1 Within a few weeks, these became an accepted feature of the city landscape, prompting a Mail & Guardian journalist to interview several Johannesburg residents to find out how they understood the artworks. One woman said that she did not understand the photographs, while another, presumably a domestic worker, said she could not recognise herself in the fantastical images. She said: ‘I can see it’s me. But with an umbrella? With this apron, like a person working the house? With an apron and umbrella, it’s not on, no.’2 This public art was part of an exhibition entitled ‘Long Live the Dead Queen’ by Mary Sibande, a young South African artist. The photographs of the domestic worker, dubbed ‘Sophie’ – a generic Anglicised name for a domestic worker – expresses pride and reimagines the figures of Sibande’s foremothers (who were domestic workers) by rooting the images in what art critic Mary Corrigal called the ‘realm of fantasy, thus obviating those predictable knee jerk emotional responses which ultimately have a didactic goal and underscore the domestic workers’ role as victim’ .3 The confusion expressed by the interviewees was reflective of the static image of the domestic worker in the minds of many South Africans, as a poor and victimised black woman, recognisable only by her working identity.
But in 2010, I met Sophie M, a woman in her late 50s who was far from the victimised generic cardboard cut-out ‘Sophie’. Born in 1952 on a farm east of Pretoria, she walked a well-travelled path in the South African imagination: forced to seek work in ‘white South Africa’, she set up an alternative semi-rural home in Hammanskraal, on the border of Bophuthatswana and Pretoria. She travelled between her rural ‘home’ and the live-in quarters of her various employers and eventually settled in Kanana, a township in Hammanskraal, although she still worked as a domestic worker once a week for a retired woman living in Pretoria. Sophie’s life, as she recounted it to me, sheds light on ‘a black woman’s experience’ of migrancy and apartheid. It offers up her agency in the face of debates about structuralism,4 and can also be employed to understand ‘forms of consciousness’, in the same way that Belinda Bozzoli uses Mmantho Nkotsoe’s interviews of 22 women of Phokeng.5 But in light of the – albeit uneven – work of the preceding decades on women and labour migrancy, perhaps Sophie’s testimony most powerfully shows the constant negotiation and constitution of the categories of ‘woman’, ‘migrant’ and ‘labour’, too often presumed to be natural or eternal. The story of Sophie that I tell here is a story that shows the complexity of the ties between these three categories and forces us to rethink some of the major tropes of South African experiences.
A ‘respectable’ womanhood
Sophie M was born into the new apartheid state on a white-owned farm in Bronkhorspruit in the Transvaal. Life on the farm was not easy for her family, who had to work three months a year to sustain their lodging rights, undertaking heavy and onerous tasks, with little obvious reward. Sophie recalled having to go early every morning to milk the cows on the farm, a young girl quickly initiated into the rhythms of farm life. But in an increasingly capitalist economy such an existence was too insecure for a large family and so, to supplement the family’s subsistence livelihood, her father cycled to Pretoria every week to look for a more regular income. Throughout the week, Sophie helped around the house, particularly looking after her younger brother, with whom she developed a strong relationship. ’I was like a little mother,’ she explained. ‘I loved to put him on my back.’ From 15 to 18, Sophie attended school on the farm, but she claims her father put an abrupt end to it because he believed that too much schooling was inappropriate for girls. At the age of 21, Sophie fell pregnant and was left without support from her son’s father. In the mid-1970s, in desperate need of sustenance to support her young son, she sought out work as a domestic worker in ‘white’ South Africa.
Figure 14.1
Mary Sibande
Long live the dead queen: Sophie knitting a Superman jersey
2011
Collection of the artist
However, that Sophie became a domestic worker was not nearly as inevitable as contemporary South African realities may make it seem. In many ways, what Sophie was doing was new – her mother had not been a domestic worker and neither had her grandmother before her. Rather, her foremothers, unlike many black men of their generations, had resisted full capitalist integration, presumably at times of their own volition and at other times heavily influenced by conservative patriarchs of the countryside, resistant across much of rural South Africa to women leaving the homestead. Her grandmothers would only partially enter the informal economy by being washerwomen and farm labourers, but primarily contributed to the maintenance of a rural home. In fact, while young Xhosa women on the Cape’s eastern frontier had started entering domestic work in white houses from as early as the 1820s,6 in the nineteenth-century Transvaal it was initially young Zulu men who did domestic work in white homes. And, by the early decades of the twentieth century, a broader range of black men from across the country could be found washing clothes, drying dishes and serving up dinner for young white children.7 Despite the rigid specificity of Victorian gender roles in colonial society at the time, in practice many employers preferred hiring men because ‘they could work them harder (at a time when housework was physically quite demanding), house them more roughly and control them through passes. Women, exempt from passes until the late 1950s, could walk out of a job with greater impunity.’8
But, by the time that Sophie reached young adulthood in the second half of the twentieth century, the institutions of socialisation and the demographics of domestic work in the Transvaal had begun to change noticeably. Significantly, the role mission schools played in educating young black children was less powerful and the influence of Christianity, especially in Sophie’s young life, created primarily ideological goals to strive towards. As Helen Bradford has argued, by the early twentieth century, simply being Christian did not translate into being educated or middle class as previously had been the case.9 Rather, as children were brought up in increasingly Christian homes, theology advocated Victorian gender ideals as an aspiration,10 demanding that women maintain a ‘respectable femininity’ as nurturers in a nuclear domestic space. Sophie’s family had only recently come to Christianity; her one set of grandparents still practised traditional Ndebele customs. But when Sophie asked her Christian grandmother why they did not wear blankets to weddings and colourful clothes, she was told as a marker of difference and almost as a point of pride that ‘we are not acting like the other Ndebele’. Instead, Sophie and her siblings were immersed in the domestic space, a trend across many African households on farms in South Africa. Sophie’s older sister remembered spending most of her time ‘giving hands to our parents’,11 while Sophie has vivid memories of helping her mother to bring up the other children.12 She went on to explain that at home it was often said that ‘a women’s place [is] in the kitchen only. And the kitchen must cook. Women [did not] work at that time.’
The demand for domestic workers, the increasingly expansive networks facilitating entry into white homes, an ideology of feminine respectability and, ultimately, a gendered economic push provided the catalysts for Sophie to enter domestic work. With a young child, no male support and a strong desire to be as independent a mother as possible, Sophie sought out waged work. But there was a precedent set for a young black woman entering urban South Africa, which shaped the nature of this entry for Sophie quite significantly. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, multiple waves of ‘moral panic’ swept across both black and white South Africa. At the heart of it was the increasing presence of women in the cities. While the migration of young Afrikaans women into the city and their involvement in trade union politics raised many white patriarchal eyebrows, their presence in town did not cause nearly as much anxiety as black women’s.13 By the early twentieth century, black women, first from southern Mozambique, but increasingly from the Eastern Cape and Lesotho, migrated in greater numbers to towns in search of work, stray husbands or freedom from rural patriarchs. Their involvement in beer-brewing and prostitution, particularly in the Transvaal where domestic work had for decades been closed off to women, frustrated and incensed white police and municipalities, as well as many older African men and chiefs, who felt their patriarchal power slipping away. The mid-1930s marked the beginning of a continued flow of Basotho women into the urban centres of South Africa and, noticeably, increasing clashes with the police that on the surface were about illegal beer-brewing and prostitution, but ultimately concerned the role urban women were playing in undermining segregationist policies and ‘detribalising’ migrant labourers.14 These tensions were replicated across the country over the next few decades, accompanied by the state’s (and much of society’s) association of urban black women with crime, disease and illicit sex. In the 1940s and 1950s in the townships of East London, for example, unmarried mothers were deemed to be acting in an unholy alliance with the tsotsis of the townships, many of whom were their sons. Hand in hand, they were portrayed as the rot at the centre of ‘slum culture’.15
Figure 14.2
Mary Sibande
Long live the dead queen: Sophie with an umbrella sceptre
2011
Collection of the artist
The state had clearly categorised urban black women as a danger, prone to immorality. In response to this, a range of churches set up ‘Christian Compounds for Girls’,16 which effectively functioned as policed accommodation to channel urbanised women into domestic work. Acting in response to this perception of urbanised women, and in the framework set out by the churches, like many of her peers, Sophie prioritised domestic work over other forms of generating income in the city, as the ideal way of maintaining a respectable femininity in compromised circumstances.17
Labouring for motherhood
Arriving in Pretoria to work for an Afrikaans family, Sophie was suddenly a migrant labourer, an urbanised black woman and a domestic worker. But her tasks for Mr and Mrs VL, her first employers, were not very different from her daily activities on the farm: she was cleaning, cooking, ironing and looking after children. Her status, however, had dramatically changed, partially as a product of the state’s perception of working black women and partially as a result of the networks of women in which Sophie was embedded.
How the state defined domestic work was significant in shaping the meaning of Sophie’s labour in the homes of her employers, both pre- and post-1994. Firstly, the apartheid state provided almost no protection for domestic work in the labour law. While the 1936 Industrial Conciliation Act claimed to regulate ‘negotiations, the prevention and settlement of disputes between employee and employer, strikes and lock outs’,18 it specifically excluded domestic workers, giving them no wage-bargaining power, minimum wage or employment benefits. In fact, the only employment ‘benefit’ they were legally entitled to was ‘one month’s notice, or pay in lieu of notice’. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Black Sash took on many cases of this nature, appealing to common law via the Department of Manpower, or attempting to shame employers into increasing wages, since there was no legal obligation for them to do so.19 At a Black Sash congress, Jacklyn Cock argued for the desperate need for such action: in the 1970s, domestic workers were earning on average R22 per month for full-time work.20 Without any laws stipulating minimum wages, hours of work or other conditions of service, domestic workers had to rely on the goodwill of individual employers to provide them with a living wage.21 Sophie’s fortunes were mixed, but there was very little she could do to realign her bad ‘madams’ and ‘masters’ to the standards of the kinder employers. The Wiehahn Commission of 1979, set up to co-opt the emerging black trade union movement, excluded domestic and farm workers from the extension of labour right of black Africans.22
Without legal protection, ‘hidden’ in the VL’s live-in quarters, atomised and isolated from other domestic workers in the city, domestic labour was a blurry category in Sophie’s life. This trend and these shared experiences among black women under apartheid has led Shireen Ally to depict the state’s positioning of the ‘maid’ as a servant, not a worker.23 In contrast, however, she has suggested that the labour laws protecting and regulating domestic work in post-apartheid South Africa have shifted this category to ‘worker’. The inclusion of domestic workers in the Labour Relations Act of 1996 and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (1997) extends formal rights and requires registration to ensure regulation of employment benefits, such as the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF). Furthermore, the 2002 Sectoral Determination is a significant step in enforcing a minimum wage (albeit incredibly meagre).24 The state has also sought to partner with business, labour groupings and non-governmental organisations to include issues of domestic work within the mandate of the ‘Presidential Working Group on Women’. In particular, this group was responsible for launching a retirement plan tailored for domestic workers in 2007.25 However much these initiatives may seem like progress, they are not without problems, especially since the lived reality for many domestic workers, including Sophie, has changed very little post-1994. Documenting the impact of these laws, Ally’s argument goes even further by outlining how these laws of ‘protection’ and ‘representation’ have made many contemporary domestic workers dependent on what have turned out to be quite impotent labour laws.26
The failure, both pre- and post-1994 to turn domestic labour into an easily understood category of work is reflected in the continued ineffectual attempts at organising domestic workers. In comparison to groups of workers who have found political homes and networks of support in trade unions, domestic workers have been peculiarly difficult to organise as workers. Mobilisation has ebbed and flowed, but has never been particularly powerful. The significant contemporary attempts of domestic worker organisation began in 1972, under the banner of the Domestic Workers and Employers Project (Dwep). Initiated by Suzanne Gordon and Leah Tutu, it sought to ‘bring about an improvement in the position of domestic workers by helping to create a better understanding between a worker and an employer by revising working and wage conditions of domestic workers and trying to improve their status and personal image’.27 Two organisations, the South African Domestic Workers’ Association (Sadwa) and the Domestic Workers’ Association (DWA), were created in response to what was seen as a liberal movement and then merged to form the South African Domestic Workers’ Union (Sadwu) in 1986.28 Ten years later, this dissolved and after a five-year hiatus was relaunched as the South African Domestic Workers’ and Allied Workers’ Union (Sadsawu), small and in 2014, still relatively inactive.
Sophie, however, was the exception that proved the rule. She was briefly involved in the unions, but the very reason she was able to participate was because of her networks outside of employment. Unpaid by a later employer, Catherine, she mentioned her concern to a white woman from church who also knew Catherine. She remembered her decisively saying, ‘Let’s go, let me take you to the union because we all friends. And we go to one church and she doesn’t want to pay you.’ Emboldened, Sophie went to the union who helped her to draft a letter demanding payment. Catherine still did not respond and so again, supported by her church networks to continue the struggle through the union, she approached them for support and was told, ‘Don’t worry, go and stay home, we will go to her house. We will take something to sell, then give you the money.’29
Figure 14.3
Mary Sibande
Long live the dead queen: Sophie on the wall of a Johannesburg building, waiting at a bus stop
2011
Giant building wrap installation
Image from the Public City Art Project
Sophie’s labour did not make her a worker in a ‘conventional’ sense, like the workers in Noor Nieftagodien’s chapter in this volume, for example. What she was doing often meant something a lot more subtle and more deeply embedded in particularly networks of women. For Sophie and many of her contemporaries, ‘working’ as a domestic worker was primarily an act of mothering and a way to perform a respectable womanhood. With continued networks of women, support spread from Pretoria to Hammanskraal, where her sister lived and looked after her son while she worked. Sophie conceived of her work as a means to care for her son and prove an important form of womanhood. While Sophie was working as a live-in in Pretoria, and her son was seven months old, her employer insisted that she send her son away. ‘He began to be naughty,’ she said. ‘He dragged the people’s things [and so they said] “No, take him home”’. From then onwards and quite consciously, Sophie saw cleaning, cooking and looking after the children of her employers as a means of, as she said, ‘working for your [my] child to grow him up’.30 This was a shared feeling among many domestic workers. Suzanne Gordon’s preface to Talent for Tomorrow, for example, summarises that a common thread throughout the narratives of domestic workers is the goal of ‘building for tomorrow’, often expressed in terms of providing for their children’s future.31
In addition, the very act of domestic labour often mimicked acts of mothering. Sophie developed a deep attachment, for example, to the W’s two autistic sons. ‘They were very difficult for me,’ she explained, ‘but I loved them.’ Taking special care to help them dress, make sure they took their medication and were kept busy with stimulating games and activities, Sophie was – in many ways – a substitute mother to them.
She prided herself on her skill with children, pointing out that her reference letters note her skills in child-minding and bringing children up. Even when deeply unhappy in her job, her unhappiness was rooted in the affront it posed to her dignity as a woman. Her explanation of her treatment at the hands of a later employer, a divorcee and his two teenage sons, speaks to exactly these gendered sets of issues: ‘It was only the men and two boys, so they left their mother there [behind]. I think he divorced her when he came there. So he wasn’t good when I try to tell him, because I was the only lady.’32
She elaborated on this story in a later interview:
That boy was very dirty. He slept with the girls in the house. When I went to his room, I found a condom on the floor. So when I tell his father, his father said: ‘This is my house. In my house he can do what he wants to do …’ He said to me: ‘That’s why I left my wife, she was just like you!’33
Her identity as mother and as a woman and its connection to the work she did was further emphasised by her involvement in the church and in a Manyano group. In their original form, Manyanos were defined as a ‘mother’s prayer union’ and functioned as a place for black domestic workers to come together as Christian mothers.34 Originally created early in the twenteith century as a space to police and affirm Christian Victorian notions of womanhood and nurturing motherhood, these Manyano groups developed into grass-roots organisations of relatively poor women. The South African literature emphasises a deep-rooted connection between domestic workers and Manyano groups, often initiated by highlighting ‘the correspondence of the structure of the working week for domestic workers during apartheid and the schedule of Manyano activities’.35 In Sophie’s Manyano group, which met regularly on a Saturday, she and her fellow Manyano members gathered money to support one another and to help to save for the heavy financial burden of supporting a family as a migrant mother.
Figure 14.4
Claudette Schreuders
Mother and child
1994
Cypress and American bass wood and paint
91 × 34 × 34 cm
gordonschachatcollection, South Africa
So powerful and ubiquitous was the significance of motherhood to domestic workers, that in 1986 Sadwu determinedly and consciously tried tapping into this at its launch, with the general secretary claiming: ‘The future of our children depends on constructive and active participation in our struggles towards liberation. Comrades, don’t waste time and energy, join SADWU now and fight along with all other progressive thinking people.’36
The emphasis Sophie gave to the connection between her work and wanting to support her son has been expressed by many women in the same position. Ally summarises a similar finding in her work: ‘Their [domestic workers’] relationship to waged work as a labouring class is connected to their understandings of mothering, and care, and their classed subjectivities are thus completely inflected by their commitments as mothers.’37
Some of the international literature on domestic work suggests that one of the significant reasons for the centrality of motherhood as an identity marker is its function as an alternate identity to that of a domestic worker, which few women are proud of and see as demeaning. Mary Romero suggests of Chicana domestic workers in America: ‘Since their status of motherhood is much higher than that of domestic worker, identifying the traditional family role served to minimize the stigma attached to the work role … In essence they maintained a social identity based on the family rather than on the work role.’38
For many domestic workers in South Africa, this surely is also the case, yet Sophie’s very conception of what domestic work is, is to mother. For her, labouring and mothering are one and the same.
A different migration
A few years ago, Sophie got very ill with tuberculosis and had to stop working. While recovering, she settled more permanently in Hammanskraal, where she had a shack – and later a government-built house – as well as strong family networks. From a farm in Bronkhorspruit to a temporary existence in Pretoria and finally to Hammanskraal, her movements have not been quite circular, but have certainly not followed a straightforward trajectory of urbanisation either. Sophie claims that she knew this, or some variation of it, would be the case quite early in her working life. She never planned to settle in Pretoria and set up a home in Hammanskraal while working, with the intention of returning to it eventually. While the apartheid state almost always insisted on a transitory black urban population with pass laws, influx control and the formation of the Bantustans, there is more fluidity in post-1994 South Africa. It is quite specific to domestic workers, however, especially those who spent the majority of their working lives under the apartheid regime, that they were unlikely to settle in their places of work. Working and living often in the same space, there was very little opportunity to invest in structures outside of the workplace. Sophie even remembers one of her employers trying to prevent her from going to church for fear that this would provoke political consciousness: ‘Sometimes when you are working they don’t want you to go to church. They don’t want you to meet the other people because you are going to speak about how you are working there … They don’t want because you are going to be clever.’39
But there were also positive reasons that Sophie wanted to settle in Hammanskraal. Temba and the surrounding townships of Kanana and Unity were formally set up by the apartheid government ‘to provide labour on the fringe of the Native Reserve [for Pretoria and industrial Babelegi]’ and thus was planned to be relatively well equipped with infrastructure and resources, such as a train station, a national road, a hotel, a garage, parks and a church.40 Since its formal inception, Temba has grown and is now filled with schools, a large shopping centre, a clinic and Jubilee hospital, as well as being situated on easily accessible taxi routes. Furthermore, because it was a labour reserve on the border of South Africa, the Tswana ethnic chauvinism that characterised much of Bophuthatswana was diluted to some degree here by the large number of Ndebele, Tsonga and Sotho speakers. As neither rural nor fully urban, the townships of Hammanskraal offer the amenities and conveniences of the city, but without its density and tight spaces, a feature of adult life Sophie came to associate with her living conditions as a live-in domestic.
Building a house and investing in it is part of the evidence of Sophie’s ties to Hammanskraal. Among many migrants from rural South Africa, the permanence and pride provided by a house ‘back home’ holds symbolic significance. In the face of constant movement and the need to provide for a family and to prove one’s success as an urban worker, a house offers a certain security. This was certainly true in Sophie’s case. But what is even more convincing evidence of her ties and their recurring pull is her continued involvement in social and religious communities in Hammanskraal. Now the biological mother of a son she feels has abandoned her, Sophie finds solace and meaning in a range of other relationships in the community. Her sister still lives close by, she is a regular member of the local Methodist church where she sings in the choir and she supports the efforts of a young woman called Alice, who has started a small-scale social entrepreneuring business. Alice, she says, is like her daughter and she treats Alice’s children as grandchildren. Sophie’s position in the community has taken on moral significance, as she regards her role as educating the younger generation and protecting her friends from vicious gossip and harm. She is squarely positioned as a key local figure. Hammanskraal is where Sophie plans to stay, especially now that she can receive pension money. Neither circular nor urban, Sophie’s migrancy asks for a new category or definition. Perhaps ‘networked’, ‘gendered’ or ‘domestic’ describe her movements best.
Conclusion
It is significant that there is not more literature on domestic work. Despite being a fundamental factor shaping the South African landscape, the domestic space and black women’s reproduction of the home remains undervalued and hard to quantify. Processes of migrant labour in which women are central are often overlooked in the face of South Africa’s infamous mining industry. But placing Sophie the person, not the stereotype, as the lead actress in this chapter, shows just how contingent and constructed the very categories of ‘migrant’ and ‘labour’ are. Sophie’s story opens a space to reimagine the figure of the domestic worker. Perhaps it also provides a path to imagine a different set of circumstances that could allow for the possibility of the fantastical image of Sibande’s regally dressed ‘Sophie’, too.
Notes
1. http://www.jhblive.com/live/exhibition_view.jsp?exhibition_id=18142.
2. http://www.mg.co.za/multimedia/2010-10-14-sophie-inthe-joburg-skyline.
3. http://corrigall.blogspot.com/2009/08/mary-sibande-domestic-fantasy.html.
4. See, for example, CW Kihato, ‘Invisible Lines, Inaudible Voices? The Social Conditions of Migrant Women in Johannesburg’, in Women in Southern African History, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 397–420.
5. B Bozzoli and M Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1991).
6. J Cock, ‘Domestic Service and Education for Domesticity: The Incorporation of Xhosa Women into Colonial Society’, in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. C Walker (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 76.
7. C van Onselen, New Nineveh and New Babylon: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2001) 271.
8. D Gaitskell, J Kimble, M Maconachie and E Unterhalter, ‘Class, Race and Gender: Domestic Workers in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy 27/28 (1984), 16.
9. H Bradford, ‘Mass Movements and the Petty Bourgeoisie: The Social Origins of the ICU Leadership, 1924–1929’, Journal of African History 25.3 (1984), 295–310.
10. D Gaitskell, ‘Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa’, in Women and Gender, ed. Walker, 254.
11. Interview with Maria S, Temba, Hammanskraal, 2 May 2010.
12. Interview with Sophie M, Kanana Village, Hammanskraal, 8 July 2010 (1).
13. I Berger, Threads of Solidarity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
14. P Bonner, ‘Desirable or Undesirable Basotho Women? Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 1920–1945’, in Women and Gender, ed. Walker, 221–250.
15. A Mager, Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999).
16. D Gaitskell, ‘Christian Compounds for Girls: Church Hostels for African Women in Johannesburg 1907–1970’, Journal of Southern African Studies 6.1 (1979), 44–69.
17. D Gaitskell, ‘Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–39’, Journal of African History 24 (1983), 4.
18. S Gordon, Talent for Tomorrow: Life Stories of South African Servants (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1995), xiii.
19. The Black Sash at this time was a non-violent, white women’s resistance organisation founded in 1955 in South Africa by Jean Sinclair.
20. J Cock, ‘Plight of Domestic Servants’. Text of a talk given to the Black Sash Mini-Congress in Grahamstown on 24 February 1979, available at http://www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/webpages/DC/BSAug79.0036.4843.021.002.Aug1979.14/BSAug79.0036.4843.021.002.Aug1979.14.pdf.
21. Ibid., 18.
22. S Mosoetsa, ‘Urban Livelihoods and Intra-Household Dynamics: The Case of Mpumalanga and Enhlalakahle Townships, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’, PhD dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2005, 56.
23. S Ally, ‘Domestic Worker Unionisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Demobilisation and Depoliticisation by the Democratic State’ Politikon, 32.1 (April 2008), 1.
24. For example, from 2002–2003, if you lived in an urban area and employed a domestic worker for more than 27 hours a week, the minimum wage was R4.10 per hour.
25. See http://www.supersmart.co.za/news/insurance-news/new-retirement%11savings-vehicle-for-domestic-workers/ and http://www.skillsportal.co.za/features/584960.htm.
26. Ally, ‘Domestic Worker Unionisation’, 1.
27. S Ally, From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers and the Democratic State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 151.
28. Ibid.
29. Interview with Sophie M (1).
30. Ibid.
31. Gordon, Talent, xii.
32. Interview with Sophie M (1).
33. Interview with Sophie M, Kanana Village, Hammanskraal, 31 August 2010.
34. Ally, From Servants, 164.
35. Ibid., 165.
36. Ibid., 172; emphasis added.
37. Ibid., 181.
38. M Romero, ‘Day Work in the Suburbs: The Work Experience of Chicana Private Housekeepers’, in The Worth of Women’s Work: A Qualitative Synthesis, eds. A Stratham, EM Miller and HO Mauksch (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 88–89.
39. Interview with Sophie M (1).
40. National Archives, Pretoria, NTS, 6555, Descriptions of Townships in Pretoria and Hammanskraal, 1959.