Abstract:
The institution of domestic work and the figures of the domestic worker (the ‘maid’) and
the employer (the ‘madam’) – both of which are always raced and gendered – seem to carry a
powerful and affective metaphoric and symbolic load in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper
explores this phenomenon as linked to the dual nature of domestic work – as both a lawful and
regulated contemporary social practice and 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 in the terms of Charles Taylor. Domestic work is suitable for this kind of transposition
because of its association with intimacy and family – both markers of nation – as well as its
location in the social order of apartheid – the domestic domain. In order to trace some of the
sources and meanings attached to contested understandings of domestic work, the paper
examines the representation of white Afrikaans-speaking women’s subjectivity and agency in
historical accounts – one of the particularistic strands through which the symbolic relationship
between white female employer and black female domestic worker may be accessed. This is based
on a symptomatic reading of Hermann Giliomee’s account – in his book The Afrikaners: Biography
of a people –of white Afrikaans-speaking women’s subjectivity and the way in which this is
constructed in relation to white men and black
