Between the Private and the Political: The Erasure of Black Domestic Workers in Apartheid South Africa

Sonal Sharma, Tufts University

In this paper, I analyze a specific phase in 1970s Apartheid South Africa when the state imposed a "domestic servants' visitor ban" in Johannesburg. This law restricted domestic workers from receiving late-night visitors or hosting overnight guests unless those visitors had official permission to be in the city. Using government and newspaper reports, the paper assesses the representation of domestic workers—or the lack thereof—in public discourse. I show that the reporting and heated opinion exchanges of (white) citizens in the newspapers foreground how the issue became a struggle between the apartheid government and white households, typically of middle- and upper-class status, while completely ignoring the interests of domestic workers. In other words, while the households opposed the ban, emphasizing the difficulties it posed for them in retaining their domestic workers and thereby losing access to cheap domestic labor, the state defended the ban using its racial logic to maintain ‘order’ in the city. In this tussle, the public exchange reduces the implications of this ban for domestic workers to a non-issue. The (white) households emerge as the only legitimate opponents to the ban, reflecting the disproportionate power they held in comparison to (Black) domestic workers, as the former could challenge the state without facing significant consequences. This moment marked one of several occasions when the humanity of the Black population was erased through racial domination. The paper argues that the household becomes a key site for understanding the reproduction of intersecting inequalities of race, class, and gender in apartheid South Africa.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 3. Visibility and Exclusion