Like Family

More than ten years of research went into this study of the domestic worker in South African writing, in Afrikaans and beyond. It starts from a claim the texts keep making, that the maid is practically family, and shows how that “practically” hides, behind a kindly paternalism, the deeply unequal place of a black woman treated quite unlike the white household. Ever since Eva Krotoa, such women have also been go-betweens, frequently the sole black working people their employers really speak to. After history chapters and one on white servants, the book reads the servants of fiction, memoirs by white and black writers, and texts in which domestic workers tell their own stories, with chapters on children, on sexuality and on novels after apartheid.

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About the book

Form

Nonfiction

Length

574 pages in the original

Set in

South Africa

First published

2015 by Protea Boekhuis

Author's age

64 when first published

ISBN

9781869199531 (original)

9781776143511 (Wits University Press, South Africa)