Inside her cottage behind her employers’ house in Observatory, Johannesburg, 47-year-old Flora Thembo, a domestic worker, sits next to what looks like at least several months’ supply of foodstuffs and other consumables.
Some of the goods sit in their original packaging, others have been pushed into disused barrels and empty paint containers. Every month she buys at least 50kg of mielie meal, 30kg of rice, about 40kg of sugar, 15 litres of cooking oil, 30kg of beans, 10kg of washing power, 10 bars of soap, some exercise books and pens.
”They plant the vegetables themselves,” she says of her family in Bulawayo. ”It would be expensive to transport them. The fields are not doing too well, but they will have to make do.”
Every three months she pays a courier to deliver the groceries to her children, at a cost of R1 500.
Thembo arrived in South Africa in 2000. In the first years of her stay she would send money whenever she could. But now priorities have changed.
”The money itself is not important to send,” she says. ”What is important are the supplies and maybe R500 or R600 for expenses to maintain the house. The thing is there is no food whatsoever, so even if I did send money it would be useless. Anyway, with the inflation, prices go up overnight.”
Thembo supports eight children, aged between 10 and 25, on her salary of R1 800 (about $Z24 000 000).
Her husband, who worked as a city council clerk, died of stomach cancer in 1998, making her the sole breadwinner for the family. Her eldest child is a truck driver and earns $Z200 000, the equivalent of R10 a month.
She spends her entire salary on the supplies for Bulawayo and her daily living. ”If my husband hadn’t died, I probably would have stayed [in Zimbabwe], because we would have helped each other,” she says. ”But then there were droughts in the Ninties. They made things even harder.”
Thembo, a former adult literacy educator, arrived in South Africa in 2000 and lived for a year without employment. Her first domestic job, which lasted a month, paid her R800, more than she was paid for conducting literacy classes in her home country. Her next job as a domestic paid her R500. She found her present employment in 2003. She started sending supplies back home in 2004 and visits once a year.
”I think if the old man [Robert Mugabe] could vacate the seat, things could turn for the better in Zimbabwe,” she says. ”He must allow younger people with sharper brains to run the country, as he is no longer willing to listen to what the people want.”