There was a time when the most Doreen Morris could hope for was filling white people’s bellies and cleaning up their mess. To be black in apartheid South Africa was to be limited in opportunity, if not hope, especially when home was a tin shack in a township gangland.
Morris did have books — Noddy, the Secret Seven, the Famous Five — but they were borrowed from the white family that employed her mother as a maid. A day of scrubbing, cooking and child-minding earned R1. When she became a teenager, Morris rolled up her sleeves to follow her mother into domestic work. ”She told me to take pride in it, as if my life depended on it.”
One look at Morris’s fingernails today and you know the story did not end there. Long, gleaming, narrowing to deli-cate tips, they are flawless. Sunglasses rest on her head, a gold watch gleams on her wrist and her white and cream outfit could be from a fashion supplement.
There’s a coffee table with hardback books on Salvador Dali on one side, a piano on the other, and the 46-year-old is sunk into a sofa in the sun-dappled living room of her Johannesburg mansion. As she chats, her grammar as polished as the piano, there is an audible bustle from the kitchen where a pot is being filled with water followed by what sounds like vegetables being chopped. The domestic help at work. In South African parlance this makes Morris, the employer, a madam.
She is not alone. A decade after the collapse of apartheid, a new generation of black achievers has emerged to claim what used to be the preserve of the whites: good jobs, fancy cars, lawn sprinklers, foreign holidays. You see them clicking on their high heels through Sandton’s malls, shooting down the N3 in their BMWs to spend weekends in Durban, gabbing into Nokias at Cape Town’s restaurants.
For these children of the revolution, few things embody success more than having domestic help. Their parents, denied a decent education and discriminated against in the workplace, often had no alternative to a lifetime of gardening, child-minding, cooking and cleaning. In less than a generation, that legacy has been swept away and a new black elite is wearing the employer’s suit.
The adjustment can be awkward since more blacks are poorer and jobless now than ever before, and hiring someone to clean up after you has not been part of black culture. ”It was uncomfortable to have someone doing things for me — I’m not an invalid,” says Morris. ”I guess I’m a bit of a pleb in that way.”
She still makes her own bed, packs her own bag for trips and chips in when her domestic, Thulisile Ngwenya, is juggling chores. For cooking and cleaning five days a week, 8am to 5.30pm, the 30-year-old single mother is paid about R2 000 a month, well above average. Ngwenya says she is delighted. However, some domestics expect preferential treatment from black employers, says Morris. ”They think standards should not be as exacting.”
Morris’s path to the position of madam was unusual. Despite her mother’s pride in her work, Morris did not enjoy it and saved money for further education.
She landed a job as a receptionist and secretary before catching the eye of managers at the SABC, which made her the first black continuity announcer in the Afrikaans service. She moved to M-Net, travelled to Cannes and Hollywood buying programmes, and is now an entrepreneur with a freshly minted MBA from Australia and a husband who is CEO of a company.
More typical of the new breed of madam is Nomsa Philiso (35), who exploited the relaxation of apartheid towards the end of that era, to obtain a tertiary education. She is a financial manager — not rich but comfortably middle class with a BMW and townhouse not far from her Soweto origins. A single mother, Philiso pays a woman to clean her house twice a week.
Black madams have to tread carefully, she says. ”More often than not, we start the base wrong. We don’t get into a formal relationship that says: here are the boundaries, you are there, I am here. More often than not, we find ourselves with domestics who are slightly older than us, and they start assuming a motherly/sisterly role which immediately disempowers you to give instructions. In our culture, there is no upward delegation, and no matter what your standing, you show respect to the elders. Whites don’t have this cultural issue of trying to humanise the working relationship.”
Ever since European settlers landed in the Western Cape and corralled some natives to help around the stockade, treatment of domestic workers has been a South African touchstone. At first they were slaves, then servants, then maids and, when that sounded too old-fashioned, they became housekeepers. The advent of black employers is testament to the success of the new South Africa.
So it comes as a bit of a shock to find that they often have a terrible reputation. ”The blacks are worse than the whites,” says Eunice Dhladhla, a third-generation domestic and now assistant secretary general of the South Africa Domestic Service and Allied Workers’ Union. ”They’re mean and arrogant — even employers who are African National Congress MPs, our so-called comrades.”
Sit in at the union’s dingy office, a fourth-floor den without lifts or landlines in downtown Johannesburg, and it could be the 1970s, with tales of unpaid wages, 90-hour weeks and summary dismissals.
Union members paint a consistent picture of exploitation. Gladys Pokane (36) says that she has learned not to trust her ”sisters”. Muriel Gugu (33) has resolved to work only for whites. Monica Ntuli (45) complains about ”old, old women being made to work so hard, too hard”. Selina Vilakazi, a union case officer for Gauteng province, says blacks treat her members ”like slaves”. Many tales are hearsay, gossip gleaned on taxis and accepted as fact even by those who have never worked for blacks, but there is no doubt that they are believed.
In a rare academic study of the topic several years ago, based on questionnaires sent to 500 madams and interviews with 20 domestics, psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela found that domestics faced a lack of respect in black households and that some felt a loss of womanhood and dignity.
One of the country’s biggest placement agencies says 85% of the women on its books, virtually all black, refuse to work for people of the same colour. ”The moment you mention it’s a black family they say no thanks. They say black madams are unreliable — the pay drops and conditions change,” says the owner, who does not want the company to be identified. ”White employers can be appalling but rich black ones are notorious for a sense of impunity. They regard themselves as a law unto themselves and think they can sweep anything under the carpet.” He recalls a roomful of domestics exploding into laughter when one of them mimicked the airs and graces of a sister-turned madam.
A raft of progressive laws stipulating working conditions and a minimum wage is supposed to have ushered in a new era for South Africa’s 800 000 domestics. About a 10th of the country’s estimated million employers are black. Within a decade they are expected to be the majority.
Ann Boshoff, head of the South African Homemakers Organisation, says things are improving as more employers are educated about their responsibilities, but she concedes there is a problem. ”It’s not something we like to say out loud but it’s true, there is a lot of exploitation. It’s across all colours but we get most complaints about blacks and Indians.”
Relationships between black South Africans and Indians have been fraught since labourers and professionals from the subcontinent landed in Durban more than a century ago, with even the young Mahatma Gandhi expressing contempt for ”indolent” natives. In turn, Indians were branded stingy taskmasters and the stereotype endures.
With inequality rivalling Brazil’s, those blacks who have made it, from billionaire mining magnates to Soweto shopkeepers, find themselves crunching on the same eggshells of resentment. Writing in The Guardian earlier this year Justice Malala, editor of ThisDay, pondered his escape from poverty and move to a formerly white suburb where nannies and gardeners used to be the only blacks. ”New black arrivals like me now agonise about not treating our domestic workers the way our mothers were treated as workers in these suburbs.”
One explanation is that black employers often use extended families in rural areas to bring a cousin or niece to the city. Long hours and meagre pay may be viewed as quid pro quo for being saved from rotting in KwaZulu-Natal without prospects. The other explanation is newness to the game. According to the labour movement it took decades to drill into whites the notion of responsibilities — something many still resist — and the same process of education is only starting with blacks.
Back in her mansion, Morris says that she and her black friends go out of their way to treat their staff with dignity. Memories of her childhood in a township on the Cape Flats endure, so it hurt when the domestic of a white friend she was visiting refused to clean up after her, saying she had a policy against working for blacks. ”I was completely taken aback. She was very vociferous.”
However, while she says she is uncomfortable with her position as a madam, ”I don’t have a constant feeling of guilt about it. I think it’s good for the economy.” — Â