Home Economics: Domestic Service and Gender in Urban Southern Africa by Sacha Hepburn (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Home Economics: Domestic Service and Gender in Urban Southern Africa by Sacha Hepburn SE Duff Home Economics: Domestic Service and Gender in Urban Southern Africa. By Sacha Hepburn. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. xiv + 233 pp. Cloth £80.00. Children and young people were not only at the frontier of the colonial encounter in Africa—in schools, churches, and workplaces—but they were frequently at the forefront of anticolonial movements, as nationalist organizations relied on their young supporters to turn out, often in protest, against colonial states. How, then, did youth understand life in postcolonial Africa? This is one of the questions animating Sacha Hepburn's new study of domestic work in independent Zambia. Indeed, perhaps the best-known study of ordinary people's experiences of the boom and bust of postcolonial economies is also on [End Page 517] Zambia, a small, resource-rich state in southern Africa. In Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (1999), anthropologist James Ferguson recounts how miners, and especially retired miners, understood the promise of modernity made possible by copper mining after independence from British rule in 1964, and the disappointments that followed. Hepburn, though, is interested in women and children and, in particular, those who worked (and still work) in middle-class households in urban areas. How did—and do—these frequently exploited, harassed, and underpaid workers make sense of postcolonial political freedom? The book comprises seven chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. It is divided, roughly, in three parts. The first is on the feminization of domestic labor in the mid-1960s. As in much of southern Africa, the domestic workforce in what was Northern Rhodesia consisted overwhelmingly of African men. This was due partly to racist anxieties about the sexual danger posed by African women to white men (and, indeed, many African parents worried about the threat posed to their daughters by white men, discouraging these young women from seeking employment as domestic servants) but was also the result of the division of labor within African households. While African women and children worked to maintain rural households, men left to seek waged labor, often as cooks, cleaners, and gardeners. As more lucrative positions in industry and commercial agriculture opened up for men after independence, and as employers—who were increasingly African and middle-class—sought out women and children for domestic work, men were gradually supplanted as domestic workers. Hepburn explores the nature of increasingly feminized domestic work in the postcolonial era in the second section, and, indeed, scholars of childhood and youth will find Chapters 2 and 3 especially interesting. Drawing on a number of oral interviews with current and former domestic workers and employers, Hepburn produces a nuanced, sympathetic portrait of why middle-class women would seek out rural women and girls to clean their households and raise their children, and why rural women and girls would enter into this work. For middle-class African women, rural African girls allowed them to navigate between the opportunities opened up by greater access to education and employment and social expectations that they remain responsible for the maintenance of the household. A "girl from the village"—who may be (distant) kin—could be absorbed into the family, treated liked a junior relative, while also caring for middle-class children as she might her own younger siblings. For girls from impoverished rural areas, domestic work might offer a means to support their families, or the chance to attend high school and, eventually, [End Page 518] seek better-paid work. These girls occupied multiple worlds: as social adults in some contexts, as "child mothers" with their employers; as working women migrating from the countryside to the city, but also as girls and dependents as they worked as maids and nannies. As Hepburn makes the point, the language of kinship hides the degree to which girls were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in middle-class households—as well as the complexity of the relationships between employers and employees within them. The final section—the remaining two chapters—brings the study up to the present, paying attention to often-desultory state efforts to regulate domestic work and child...