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The Ghost in the House: Women, Race, and Domesticity in South Africa1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2014

Gabeba Baderoon
Gabeba Baderoon*
Affiliation:
Penn State University
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Abstract

In South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological partitions into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles reveals that in South African English the word maid denotes both “black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary art about domestic labor by Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In their art, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction, including Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novel Playing in the Light (2006), in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.

Keywords

Domestic workersdomesticitymaidmadamSouth Africaapartheidslaveryintimacyperformancevisual artblack womenwhite womenraceautobiographyproductionZoë WicombPlaying in the LightHélène CixousReveries of the Wild WomanZanele MuholiMary Sibandephotographysculpturepost-apartheidghost-writinghousesubjectivity.
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , September 2014 , pp. 173 - 188
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

1

I thank the editors of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry for a brilliant new intellectual venue, the readers of the essay for their insightful comments, and my colleagues Rosemary Jolly and Charlotte Eubanks for inspiring and impeccable advice.

References

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5 Meid, the Afrikaans version of the word, intensifies its offensiveness when used in English, and the brutal term kaffermeid specifically licenses sexual violence. This can be seen in the testimony provided by a woman activist before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “When a woman refused to bow down,… then that unleashed the wrath of the torturers, because in their discourse, a woman, a black ‘meid,’ a ‘kaffirmeid’ (kaffer servant girl) had no right to have the strength to withstand their torture” (quoted in Rubio-Marín, Ruth, ed. “The Gender of Reparations: Setting the Agenda”, What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007), 48–91Google Scholar, 52). I am grateful to Rosemary Jolly for alerting me to this in her work in Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).

6 Girl and boy are terms of insult used for black women and men of any age. They both infantilize and make age uncertain, simultaneously removing authority and the protection of childhood. Krotoa/Eva is called “a girl” in Van Riebeeck’s diaries, and this seems to refer both to her young age and to her role as a domestic servant. In J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the subject of the Magistrate’s obsession is the “Barbarian girl”, whom he “relieve[s] of the shame of begging and install[s] her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid” (1990: 31). This, however, is such a familiar trope of sexual exploitation that the soldiers in the barracks quickly comment: “From the kitchen to the Magistrate’s bed in sixteen easy steps” (1990: 31).

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36 Like Agaat, Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney (1997) engages the troubled relation of land and household in the plaasroman (farm novel), explored, for instance, in J. M. Coetzee’s exemplary In the Heart of the Country (1977); the long-running Mail and Guardian comic strip “Madam and Eve” depicts the relationship between a white female employer and her black domestic worker, characterized by intimate enmity between the women and also brief moments of empathy and alliance; Zukiswa Wanner’s comic novel The Madams (Oshun, 2006) revisits the fraught meanings of domestic work from the perspective of black women who employ white maids. In the United States, popular books and films such as The Help and Lee Daniel’s The Butler have used the often-overlooked presence of domestic servants as a lens on the workings of power.

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