5 - Domestic Service in Magila and Zanzibar, 1864–c.1930

Summary

In the nineteenth century, schoolchildren provided all or most of the labour the UMCA mission household demanded. Missionaries, in keeping with the habits of other Europeans, referred to these students-cum-domestic servants as ‘boys’. These ‘boys’ divided their time between domestic service, study and play, as explained by this ex-slave student's letter from Zanzibar to his patrons in England: ‘My work it is to cook food for the children. […] I study in the evening and Acland Sahera is my teacher, we learn to read English. In the morning my work is to cook, and later my companions take turns with me that I may walk or go to football.’ The distinction between students and domestic servants was equally blurred in Magila on the north-eastern mainland of Tanzania. For example, at Umba, the missionary Herbert Geldart oversaw thirteen boarding school boys from neighbouring areas. He wrote that: ‘[they] do all my housework – sweep, cook, lay table, wash up, &c.; they receive no pice, and often work very hard indeed; yet they are pleased to do it, and a grumble is about the last thing you would hear.’

This close connection between children's education and domestic service declined in the twentieth century. From the early twentieth century, school boys’ and – to a lesser extent – school girls’ household labour was confined to their own familial homes. By this time, there was an emerging – albeit ambiguous – distinction between ‘boys’ who were schoolboys and ‘boys’ who were adult, professional wage-earners. In contrast, during my fieldwork it was made patently clear in the interviews that child labour was totally unacceptable, and the attitudes towards child labour are neatly illustrated by Figure 1.

The missionaries’ use of children as servants in the late nineteenth century correlated with the high numbers of children who were left kinless and unprotected due to war, slavery, or famine at this time. In other words, humanitarian crises made children widely available as workers. Missionaries, who were anyway in the business of finding children to proselytise, took advantage of this and merged domestic work and religious education. The increasing clarity of the distinction between work and education also owed something to the emergence of domestic service becoming a professional labour category in the early twentieth century.