Like Family

196 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 2h27min.
More than a million black South African women are domestic workers. These nannies, housekeepers and chars continue to occupy a central place in South African society. But it is an ambivalent position. Precariously situated between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, white and black, these women are at once intimately connected and at a distant remove from the families they serve. ‘Like family’ they may be, but they and their employers know they can never be real family. Ena Jansen offers a historical perspective that shows how domestic worker relations in South Africa were shaped by the institution of slavery at the Cape. To support her argument, Jansen examines the representation of domestic workers in a diverse range of texts in English and Afrikaans. Later texts by black authors offer wry and subversive insights into the madam/maid nexus, capturing paradoxes relating to shifting power relationships. Soos familie, the award-winning Afrikaans predecessor of the updated Like Family, was published in 2015 and the highly-acclaimed Dutch translation Bijna familie in 2016.List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note to Readers Introduction Searching the archive Chapter 1 Domestic workers in South Africa Chapter 2 Enslaved women at the Cape – Precursors to the culture of domestic work Chapter 3 Migrant women and domestic work in the city Chapter 4 Legislation governing the lives of urban women Chapter 5 Domestic workers in personal accounts Chapter 6 Testimonies of domestic workers – Interviews, stories and a novel Chapter 7 Domestic workers and children Chapter 8 Domestic workers and sexuality Chapter 9 Domestic workers in times of political unrest and protest Chapter 10 Domestic workers in post-apartheid novels by white authors Chapter 11 Domestic workers in post-apartheid novels by black authors Chapter 12 Domestic workers on the threshold Bibliography Index