At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscape of Domestic Service in Johannesburg (review)

The unsettling qualities of Witwatersrand, its dismembered landscape and fragmented communities, have been etched in the physical and social fabric of Johannesburg since the nineteenth century. Marked by its subterranean river of precious metal, the Witwatersrand contains the footprints of a mining empire whose tentacles reached the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa and integrated even the smallest villages into the mining economy. Here, in the heart of the Witwatersrand, stands Johannesburg, the “city of gold”—a place where dreams and nightmares, fear and utopia were constructed by the mine owners and industrialists who controlled (and continue to control) both the precious metals and labor process with Orwellian precision.

The Witwatersrand became the epicenter of South Africa’s mining and industrial revolution in what Charles van Onselen has called a “cauldron of capitalist development [into which] poured men, women and children from all over the world, giving the Rand a cultural diversity and a social structure that bubbled with excitement . . . and vitality.”¹ From its early beginnings as a mining town, Johannesburg has experienced the boom and bust that characterized the evolving social geography of a city based on racial and class segregation of residential areas. The northern area of the city became the preferred location for whites, while the areas to the south of the city were designated for Africans. This highly racialized geography rested on a colonial planning principle in which the built environment was designed to lessen the threat posed to Europeans by plagues, overcrowding, and violence. To varying degrees, municipal officials in Johannesburg and indeed throughout South Africa forcibly relocated the African population to areas outside cities. The 1923 Native (Urban Areas) Act and the 1930 amendment to the 1923 Act, as well as the Slums Act of 1934, codified residential segregation along racial lines in South Africa.

The mining economy of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg relied heavily on migrant laborers drawn from South Africa and also from the subcontinent. Historically, labor migrants were concentrated in their largest numbers in the highly gendered mining industry. Much of the earlier scholarship focused on Johannesburg’s male migrant mineworkers, enriching our understanding of “the world the mine owners made” and the complex patterns of workers’ resistance.² Yet historians and sociologists have paid little attention to female migrants in the making of modern Johannesburg.

Rebecca Ginsburg’s book uncovers the world of African women domestic workers in Johannesburg’s affluent white suburbs during the 1960s and 1970s. These were women forced to live their working lives in one tiny room with a toilet at the back of an employer’s house, without the protection of law and for a meager salary. Hidden from public view in the homes and kitchens of suburbs like Park-town, Northcliff, and Kensington, these domestic workers endured long hours, a heavy workload, high levels of social control, naked racism and sexism, a regimented way of life, a lack of privacy, and persistent housing insecurity. The author draws upon interviews of both domestic workers and their white employers to examine the hidden lives and subjectivities of African domestic workers.

At Home with Apartheid is divided into six chapters, each providing a detailed analysis of the interiority of domestic work. The first chapter describes the migration of women from rural areas to find job opportunities in cities like Johannesburg; it is followed by a chapter that examines the mobility and daily routines of African women in and around their employers’ properties. Chapter 3 discusses the dual world that African domestic workers occupied as they navigated the draconian laws of apartheid, and chapter 4 considers how African domestic workers navigated their separation from friends, male partners, and children. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which African domestic workers challenged the limits of both visible and invisible mechanisms of power imposed by their employers. The concluding section synthesizes the various issues discussed throughout...