Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Fanon's Secret
- 1 Thinking About Race and Friendship in South Africa
- 2 With Friends Like These: The Politics of Friendship in Post-Apartheid South Africa
- 3 Bound to Violence: Scratching Beginnings and Endings with Lesego Rampolokeng
- 4 Afro-Pessimism and Friendship in South Africa: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson III
- 5 The Impossible Handshake: The Fault Lines of Friendship in Colonial Natal, 1850-1910
- 6 The Problem With ‘we’: Affiliation, political Economy, and the Counterhistory of Nonracialism
- 7 Affect and the state: Precarious Workers, The Law, and the Promise of Friendship
- 8 ‘A Song of Seeing’: Art and friendship Under Apartheid
- 9 ‘Friend of the Family’: Maids, Madams, and Domestic Cartographies of Power in South African Art
- 10 Corner Loving: Ways of Speaking about Love
- 11 Kutamba Naye: In Search of Anti-Racist and Queer Solidarities
- 12 The Native Informant Speaks Back to The Offer of Friendship in White Academia
- Acknowledgments
- Contributor Biographies
- Index
9 - ‘Friend of the Family’: Maids, Madams, and Domestic Cartographies of Power in South African Art
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Fanon's Secret
- 1 Thinking About Race and Friendship in South Africa
- 2 With Friends Like These: The Politics of Friendship in Post-Apartheid South Africa
- 3 Bound to Violence: Scratching Beginnings and Endings with Lesego Rampolokeng
- 4 Afro-Pessimism and Friendship in South Africa: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson III
- 5 The Impossible Handshake: The Fault Lines of Friendship in Colonial Natal, 1850-1910
- 6 The Problem With ‘we’: Affiliation, political Economy, and the Counterhistory of Nonracialism
- 7 Affect and the state: Precarious Workers, The Law, and the Promise of Friendship
- 8 ‘A Song of Seeing’: Art and friendship Under Apartheid
- 9 ‘Friend of the Family’: Maids, Madams, and Domestic Cartographies of Power in South African Art
- 10 Corner Loving: Ways of Speaking about Love
- 11 Kutamba Naye: In Search of Anti-Racist and Queer Solidarities
- 12 The Native Informant Speaks Back to The Offer of Friendship in White Academia
- Acknowledgments
- Contributor Biographies
- Index
Summary
In South Africa, it is not uncommon to hear families say that their domestic worker is a ‘friend of the family’ or even ‘like family’. While some employers strive to pay their ‘domestics’ a fairer wage, involve themselves in financing their laborers’ healthcare costs, and funding children's educations, most domestics are paid the minimal accepted daily rate of R100. Sometimes, the payment includes R10–R20, to buy a cheap lunch and transport money back to the township. The obvious socioeconomic power imbalances between the ‘madams’ and ‘maids’ of South Africa limit claims purporting to incorporate laborers into family structures. Yet, despite this, the language used to describe voluntary social contracts that determine the bonds of friendship, and the less voluntary — but obligatory — social contracts between family members is invoked in order to frame this unequal relationship.
Irma du Plessis (2011: 46) argues that domestic work, because of its ‘close affinity to the family’, operates as a ‘foundational unit in everyday and scholarly understandings of both “nation” and “society”’. Moreover, given the level of intimacy such laborers have in maintaining the architecture of white families, domestic work ‘may be understood not only as a contemporary social practice, that is, a lawful and regulated albeit imperfect and incomplete form of employment, but also as a central feature of what may be termed the apartheid social imaginary, an implicit social understanding of the way in which things stand between fellow citizens’. Taking into consideration the ‘extent to and the manner in which domestic work and the relationship between domestic workers, domestic employers and their respective families surface in the public domain in contemporary South Africa’, it is no wonder that this type of labor, and the laborers who carry it out, are ‘deeply inscribed with social meanings which are powerful in the present’.
The domestic spaces in which the boundaries of this unequal relationship are negotiated are also the location in which contemporary fears regarding the other — a ‘domesticated’ other who is invited into one's intimate spaces as a necessary component of maintaining one's exclusive domestic arena — are magnified.
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- Information
- Ties that BindRace and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa, pp. 216 - 242Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016