Fundamental difference between a German domestic worker and a Zimbabwean domestic worker

It is not so much the labour rights: it is the minimum wages and human rights that the German Domestic servants enjoy in this great country to unlimited proportions. When I was a student in 1985 at the Technical University of Berlin, the jobs I did were mostly domestic work: cleaning in homes, hotels and hospitals in Berlin. We were well paid by any measure of a student's standards. We lived quality lives, we had money all the time even though we worked as from Friday to Sunday, and on Monday to Friday we were at the university again, reading hard so that we finish the degree courses quicker and remove poverty in our lives.  

We got such jobs from TUSMA or by shear networking: someone will recommend you to her/his former employer. She/He is a good employer, they said: you will get tips_ in form of cash that supersede your weekend wages. You are treated like a human being: you get all respect accorded of a human being. These tips_, according to most Germans employers are just the respect they kindly give on the domestic work you will have offered them:  The domestic work may be one of the last jobs one can do especially if you are a student, but we took those jobs firstly because of the good payment and again because of the relationship you will have developed with the employer and the entire members of the family that will be long lasting. You will be invited for Christmas dinners, birthday parties or any family event that may occur. When you are at these social gatherings, they will speak highly of you; treatment is the same as all other guests who will be invited to the occasion.  

"If you need money, please don't hesitate to phone us and we shall assist I anyway we can. A German rich family is rich by any measure one can imagine wealth. When they see any domestic worker, it becomes the time to part with an overly full wardrobe. Some designer clothes would have been put on only once, and they will not wear it again, set aside to give away to any domestic worker who works at their home. You will be given suitcases and bags of full of clothing. They will even tell you, please take everything we have set aside here and send them to your relatives in Africa or East European countries; they will definitely need them. But they do not do that to African foreign students only but to any domestic workers even white Germans who work in those posh and very rich German family homes.  

If travelling alone is education, then indeed I have leant something from the German way of life and above all how German culture and its traditions: upholds the dignity of human kind through their constitution, a document that is indeed sacrosanct. I doubt very much whether I can ever abuse a domestic worker if I ever relocated to Zimbabwe by and chance. When it comes to upholding the dignity of humankind the Germans have come to realize a different outlook after the WW2 respect for humankind. Human rights, dignity of human race, respect for other people is their uttermost that you can enjoy in this country. To associate modern Germany and its Hitler past is wholly not only correct but absolute fake news. To talk about today's Germany in terms of current Neo-Nazis making news in German politics is also malicious and untrue. Yes the 3% of the population is racist, but it did not mean that the general population is so. Germans are sensitive to human rights abuses. Germans are the people who have picked themselves from the ashes of the race warsof the WWs to becoming one of the human rights defenders because of their past history. German constitution says: in the first and second article of the German constitutional law stipulates: Human dignity – human rights - legally binding force of basic rights

Article 1

(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority. (2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and justice in the world

Article 2

(1) Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality insofar as he does not violate the rights of others or offend against the constitutional order or the moral law (2) Every person shall have the right to life and physical integrity. Freedom of the person shall be inviolable.  

I am writing this article to make comparisons between a German employer of domestic service and a Zimbabwean one. I am not ashamed to make these factual comparisons at all: in retrospect what shames me most are the pure and raw facts about slavery in Zimbabwe. Slavery in Zimbabwe is not spoken but seriously hidden openly. It is hidden in the sense that it's not called slavery at all but a way of life. Zimbabweans are the ones who will be taken and shaken about the slavery taking place in North Africa today, but forget that there is actual slavery in Zimbabwe itself. Africans from all over west African countries are sold in the markets in Libya and Egypt just like it was during those west African slave trade  in the middle nineteenth and twenties century. We need to sit down and tell ourselves that we are not better than the slave traders of North Africa today in 2017/2018. I can bet you domestic services will be sold at Mbare and Makhokhoba markets for a meal a day to alleviate poverty.

To be a domestic worker in Zimbabwe is the worst thing that can happen to one. They do hard labour for very little or no pay at all. There are situations whereby a domestic worker will be told that she will not be paid but work and get food and shelter as remunerations.  She is told if reported she will be fired and the next day the employer will be having another domestic worker: next!!!! They are many of them in the streets of Zimbabwean towns looking for those jobs. The domestic work is the hardest: she wakes up at 5:00 o'clock in the morning to make breakfast of the entire family. After breakfast she starts to do the laundry washing of several members of the family; extended families who will have camped in the home for an unending time. The domestic worker will be looking at the time she must cook for the family so that when Daddy and Momma come from work, food should be ready and still hot.  

Plates must be washed after lunch at the same time that washing laundry must be well ironed to dry-cleaning standards. She will be looking at the clock again because anytime either Momma or Daddy will drop in for tea or bringing groceries home. She will quickly rush to collect the shopping from the car, make tea, put the meat to cook and continues to do the iron that will be big to ever finish it in a day. She rushes to go to the kitchen to make supper for all. To think of it, this woman will not have rested for once. Because after supper she will do all the washing of plates but she rushes to go to the laundry room to continue with her unfinished washing, she fears that perhaps Momma will ask for a dress to wear the next morning and it will not be ironed!!  Oh God that is disaster in the making!! She will be scolded; she is not coping with the work load: she will be told. She will iron until 23:00 hours. When you collapse to sleep you don't sleep at one time but sometimes you will be bio-scoping in your mind, your life, your future in this unthankful family. How long she is going to cope with this?

There is no respect of a human being here as a domestic worker. It is complete exploitation of man by man: said Kenneth Kaunda. The Momma is rude to her, the father may not necessary be rude but very aloof. The children are overly rude to her too. It is those children who will be checking if the domestic worker took something from the fridge without permission and she ate it to remove hunger and thirst. When the parents come, the children will start reporting the rights and wrongs of the domestic worker because they do not see her as an equal human being. She does not get any respect whatsoever from the family. They do not even see her as an equal human being, in retrospect she a sub-human, they enjoy having someone in the home who poses a distinct difference between rich and poor. She has to be overly respectful of all of them including the children.

These domestic servants mostly come from the rural areas, Just by staying at these homes for about two to three months they change completely to be beautiful girls, the food changes them completely. This is when the Daddy in the home feels entitled to sexually abuse the domestic servant and have her as the small home in the main home. If she said it to Momma she fears she will lose the job. The conflicts between the Momma and the domestic begins when the domestic servants has shed her village outlook to town dwelling because of diet she will be responding to. This is the area of conflict with the Momma in the home.  

The Momma feels threatened by the beauty of this village girl doing domestic work at her home. Little does Momma realize that if this girl washes their bedroom linen, she will be privy of all the dirt in that bedroom? She also looses respect of the Daddy and Momma in the home, because she has been subjected to those intimate occurrences in the matrimonial bedroom. The domestic servant sees through them both. She has seen Incgekeza ka Baba (svina ya Daddy) in the sheets, she has washed incgekeza ka Baba lo Momma with her bare hands. Now what is there to respect them for? In Germany such privacy is not exposed to domestic workers at all!!! They will always make sure they do that work themselves and never for the servants (thanks to washing machines perhaps) it did not matter how rich they are. If anything the domestic worker will come to do the ironing and never washing the very private explicit laundry items in the home: those are done by the family members themselves and never by the servants.

The young children are to be looked after by the domestic servant in Zimbabwe.  Of the children, who is ill and who needs special-needs in the home care? There will be many of them: African homes have many children up to six children and also the extended ones, if one is unlucky. Then comes the grandparents and those unmarried sisters with countless fatherless children will be there too: a bloated family structure. You are supposed to do all the work, a work that should be done by three domestic workers will be done by one to save money. You must do the work with a smile on your face. To sulk and say the workload is too big can lead to losing the job altogether.

In African societies domestic work is slave work done to get slender minimum returns. In German we say: "zu viel zum sterben aber auch zu wenig to leben"  It simple means: "too much to die: but also too little to live on" All is calculated in the food and boarding the domestic worker will be getting as per contract, a contract that is not in written in document but by just words of mouth. A domestic servant is not even protected by the law. The abject poverty in Zimbabwe will always find girls going for domestic work unwillingly. For those with little education or none, its either you are in prostitution or you are a domestic worker and treated like a slave in your own country.  

Origins of modern slavery in Zimbabwe  

The domestic service came to Zimbabwe with Colonialization of this southern cone. However it did not mean that there were not slaves traders in this country before. Curiously the Kingdoms here in Zimbabwe had slaves. The King Mambo was well known for accepting slaves in his kingdom but was treated like all other subjects of the King. King Mambo's totems: "Bvuma va Randa" Dzimba ibge" was not called by those totems for nothing. Domestic service was the culture of colonial Rhodesia in those colonial times. They thought domestic servants were what the Africans were capable of doing: cleaning in white homes and wood carriers, farm workers, and miners but never beyond that. It becomes extremely surprising and devastating at the same time that a nation that went to war of liberation of oppression of their own country now becomes the very oppressors themselves. Slavery of domestic service in Zimbabwe has reached unenviable proportions.  

Domestic servants are humiliated every day, deprived of food sometimes, are looked down upon by all members of the family, can be suspects to missing items in the home: after which theft in the home is declared, the domestic servant is suspect, who else, have to cope with sexual demands of the Daddy in the home and the sexual acts are so wild and violent: annul and oral sexual intercourse; what he cannot do with his wedded wife,  are deprived of official holidays because they have to work. Are not supposed to get ill at all because of the work awaiting them, they should never complain that the wok is too much. They live in those pantry rooms because they are considered as items and objects and not humans but sub-humans. There is no privacy in their lives because their pantry rooms are there for anybody to get in even without knocking on the door.  

Domestic servants in some homes eat only left-over's, food left in the tables of Daddy and Momma. They are not supposed to eat the best of the food items in the home. When Momma leaves for work, she will check her fridge, count the eggs, and takes notes of all items, she will check again when she comes back home if all is okay, did she STEAL anything of mine, food items? I have never heard of a Rhodesian white people who did that to domestic servants. What the Black employers are practising cannot be normal life by any stretch of imagination; that is slavery at its best, at its worst a reduced human being.  

I remember when I was a student, and worked as a domestic servant, the first thing the German employer did was to show you the fridge, If you are hungry, there is the fridge and bread, but will again she/he will tell me: "what you would like to eat, I can get it before I leave for work" Such was the respect for humankind. According to the holy book: to love him/her as yourself, regardless of social status.     

Curiously the white colonisers treated domestic servants far better than the black Bwanas of today. A black employer is the worst thing you can have if you are in domestic work. I am really not very versed about the Zimbabwean laws. What I know for sure is that the ILO laws are not adhered to in Zimbabwe when it comes to domestic service. Curiously Zimbabweans really enjoy the domestic service as it demarcates between who is well-to-do and the slave: eking out a living by doing the heaviest job them masters cannot afford to do themselves: only a slave can do domestic service in a black home. This culture we automatically adopted from the white settlers is the worst form of neo-colonialism, must be abolished. We shall lobby for its abolition. We cannot go on like this as a nation: to abhor modern slavery in far away places, in Egypt and Libya, but in Zimbabwe slavery is tolerated, is rife, raw, practiced openly.  

Domestic work must be abolished in Zimbabwe

The domestic service in Zimbabwe infringes too much into the human dignity. We cannot keep such work description that interferes with human dignity. We should advocate the abolition of domestic service. The Zimbabwe government is a government that rejected the slave-master situation and as a result we fought the race war to set us free. However it is inconceivable that the very government that purports to uphold the human dignity does not recognize the slavery that is still perpetuated in domestic service to this day and at homes. We must work hard to remove slavery of all kinds in our societies. To still think that we maintain the ill culture of white colonialism: domestic service was the comfort of white rule in Rhodesia. We must therefore scrap this in our culture; slavery is to be abhorred by all those who know what we stood for in the fight for liberation of our country. Although the white colonizers brought this evil culture of domestic service in Rhodesia,  the whites remunerated domestic service better, they where fair in their salaries and conditions of work than the domestic services from the black masters: time wise and other wise. We must remember too that white families were nucleated: father , mother and either one child or two children.    

Alternative to domestic service

The alternative to domestic service is to get mobile companies ( e.g. bubble companies in South Africa)  that will provide domestic serve from 8:00 hours in the morning to 17:00 hours in the afternoon. The contract terms of services must be stipulated in the contract explicitely. If it's going to clean, then they must clean and after cleaning they must leave the home to clean elsewhere: rotational. If it's washing: their service will be coming to wash and iron the laundry and go after finishing the work description.  Inside the contract, it must be glass clear how much a domestic service costs per hour. In that way we can easily get rid of slavery, it is possible to remove evils in our society, the will must be there. We shall vote for those political parties that will quickly realize the evil of domestic service in our societies. There should never be live-ins in domestic service in Zimbabwe because it makes the domestic servants vulnerable to abuse of all kinds.

Contrast of domestic service in both countries: Germany and Zimbabwe

The difference between Germany and Zimbabwe is as different as day following the night. Much as the labour laws are strictly followed in Germany, nobody really controls the plight of domestic workers in Zimbabwe. Most employers of domestic workers in Zimbabwe exhibit the darkest recesses of human heart. No empathy, no Ubuntu whatsoever. German people know what is suffering because of the WWs on their soil. Their values about human race are taught in schools, colleges and at every level of their educational system. German people are sensitive to any kind of abuse in their system. They uphold the human rights abuses; they check and counter-check  any institutional racism in their public and private sectors. German laws and their way of life regarding human rights are a far cry for our still developing country Zimbabwe.