Domestic work in Zimbabwe means modern slavery of the 21st Century

Case study: Sibusisiwe Dlodlo

I was born in Bulilimangwe in 1955. I managed to pass standard six well with division two. I did not have the money to continue with my secondary education. I stayed at home doing nothing until I asked my parents if I could go to town to Bulawayo to look for a job to do. The only job that was appropriate for me was as a maid and work for the White families in Whites-only suburbs. It was the beginning of 1971, and I was sixteen years old. The reason was that if one got such a job, one got accommodation to stay at the place of work. You are then not a burden to anyone. Relatives were not kind back then to keep one for long period of time even if one was working. Space was scarce, African town homes had two to three bedrooms, keeping relatives was a challenge for them. As long as I was working for the White people, I was alright. I had my working hours, fixed hours. I was always free from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. I managed to maintain the culture of going to church as I was free on Sunday always anyway.

Come 1980, there was independence in Zimbabwe. My masters, the White people could not stand a Black government so they packed and left for Australia. I looked for another place of work, selectively avoiding Africans as employers. I had heard how mean they are and degrading it is to work for Africans in their homes. The middle-class African society was growing and they were relocating to once Whites-only locations and adopting the culture of domestic service in their way of life, imitating their former White masters. I managed always to get a White family to work for and I was happy and felt very lucky and safe. I was told by my friends about the disadvantages of working for a Black family, long hours of work, from 5 o'clock in the morning to 11 o'clock in the evening, too many people in the home, a long washing that has no end until the weekend. There is no Saturday break at 2 o'clock and if you are not lucky you would be told to work on Sunday too. It is 24/7 job and less pay than what a White master pays us. That was common practice and most servants who worked for the Africans complained the same thing all the time, slave/master relationship they all called it.  When the master I worked for decided to relocate for UK, because they did not want to stay in Zimbabwe anymore, I cried and I was aware that the next thing is to get a job from a Black family! I was already warned about how poor the conditions of work are in a black family. I tried to find out if I could get another job but not domestic service, it was not possible. I bit the bullet and got the inevitable, a Black employer in Khumalo area, Bulawayo.  We are the least in the society, the last people, the slaves of the twentieth century in Zimbabwe. There is slavery practiced in Zimbabwe to this date. It is practiced under the nose of the laws in the country. Think of any other trade: prostitutes, street cleaners, or garden boys, all these trades are better than us with no comparisons. We are just slaves in this country, we are treated as if we are the last pieces of dirt by the employers and their children too. This slavery is not perpetrated by the white population but by the same Africans, our brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. The White colonialists introduced the profession and the Blacks took over from them and becoming even worse employers than the colonialist. Situations we experience in these homes where we work are horrendous to say the least. There are worse than the time we worked for the colonialists.

When you hear them calling us, Sisi or Mainini you would think it is the respect they are offering us, no it is the demarcation they make between me and the rest of the family. It is the mock of the respect noun uSisi or Mainini that is reducing in its meaning and definition. It is synonymous to "slave" or less than human. In White homes where we worked, at least they called us by our first names. We had uniforms too, two or three pairs. The working times were defined: it means we had some break for lunch. Again White families are nucleated, it was the father, wife and two children to look after. They remunerated a pay that was livable. Coming to work for the Black family, my own people, it means the extended household would be about seven, ten to twelve residents, with small children and babies. So to cope with the work you need to start very early. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and go to bed at 11:00 in the evening. I sometimes eat the leftovers when I am actually clearing the dishes at the washing sink, I remember to throw some bread in my mouth and continue working.  It means cleaning the house at the same time looking after children and babies because the mother would have gone to work. It means washing for the whole family, washing that would be done manually as there is no washing machine like in white families. After washing, I get into the kitchen and start cooking as the employers would be coming for lunch. I give them the lunch and make sure the children have eaten too. When I start ironing in the afternoon a baby would be at my back as she or he could not sleep alone on its bed. I do not finish the ironing in the afternoon as I would break to start cooking for the evening meal. I would be asked how the baby is as I am responsible for its wellbeing, is he sick or not. When they arrive in the evening after work I would collect the grocery from the car, put everything in their correct places. I would then make tea for the mother and father, start the evening meal that would go on until 8:00 in the evening. When the small children have gone to sleep, I wash dishes and finish up the ironing left from the afternoon lot. There would be numerous other responsibilities I would be called to attend to in the evening. It is the smile on my face that would determine if I am a good servant or not. I eat last in this home and mostly leftovers from their tables. There is no defined plate of food for me. To do so would be to put me as an equal human being with them which they think I am not. It would be the food I would have cooked passionately with my hands and suddenly I do not have the equal right to eat it.

Again there would be something that would go missing at the home. The items range from money, clothes, body lotions, food items, jewelry, these are the things that would go missing in the home and the first suspect would be me. Where is it? To tell them that I do not know is not a satisfactory answer for them. Search would be done in my room first, even my mien would be searched! They would examine if my mien carried any guilt in it. If it did then it means I stole and sent the stolen item away from the home. It would be this accusation and the missing things in the home that would be spoken about to relatives and friends who come to visit the home. How do you work in a home where you could be accused of theft any time and you would be listening to the accusations? When the mother leaves the home for work she would have a close look at her fridge to mark the items inside it, the first thing she does when she comes back she would have a close look again to see if all items are still there. Otherwise bazazitika nje ngokudla kwakho. Eggs are counted all the time, how many did they use and how many are remaining. A domestic worker would eat bread without margarine and forget about eggs or bacon, you cannot have that and if you are lucky they you would to tell to take jam and also the cheapest in the home and not expensive marmalade. Ask most of these domestic servants, you will find that most of their stories vary slightly, they are more or less the same. You would be lucky to get a good Black employer who would empathize with you and appreciate the work you do in her house, a person who would give you enough to eat as the work is hard and needs a lot of energy to do all those chores in the home that are not clearly defined. You just work and work and give the best hoping it would be appreciated at least with a thank you. Most of the employers do not know the word thank you as they think it is in the payment package. There is no need to appreciate it upfront, a thank you goes a long way in building a good relationship with a domestic servant.  But most Black employers do not know that at all.

I sleep in a room meant for storage and it means anybody can get inside anytime of the day even at nigh looking for anything.  A mattress was put there for my use, a sign that I am temporal in this home and do not belong anyway. My clothes are always in the suitcase as if to mean "dzigare dzakasungwa". There is complete absence of privacy because they think a domestic servant does not need it. I am spoken differently from the rest of the family, the tone is different. There is very little chance to tell them that you are sick, then you are not a good servant, servants do not feel sick and stop working. Children are very rude to me sometimes and make faces to show absolute disrespect towards me. Children pick it up very early that this person is second class in this family and would treat you with the same contempt as their mother or father. What about sex advances from the father of the house? That too we have to endure it as well. I was told two options I had if I refused sex with him, lose the job. And I had to make that decision one time and lost the job. To my utter stupidity I never told the mother, the wife to this man that as a matter of fact your husband was making sex advances to me. I told the man of the house that I could not possibly have sex with him as I had a boyfriend who was a garden boy two houses away from where I worked. To say that much was even rude, I was never supposed to have a boyfriend and to say it openly that I had one again was insolent according to them. I did not see how I could continue to work for this family with sex advances from the man of the house. It was easy to connect one job from the other because I had a wide range of experience as a domestic worker, I had worked for various White people before. There are two employers who after dismissing me from my duties, came looking for me again and persuaded me to come back. If you are low as was the case with me there is no need to still go lower than the low, because physically there is nothing like lower than the bottom rock anywhere. I told them that I found another job and moved on.

It is the irony of it all that Zimbabwe has a history of a revolution. Our parents fought a bitter war for this country so that we are free from all forms of oppression. How does a country like my own, Zimbabwe, become comfortable with vestiges of colonial practices and adopt them without conscience, most abhorrent form of oppression; domestic service? Domestic service in Zimbabwe reduces one from a human to a subhuman. I wonder if they know how we feel about being subject to that kind of treatment and employment-terms that are fluid. Abuses relating to domestic services are not spoken, nobody has ever spoken about them, but how many times have we heard about members of parliament speaking on behalf of prostitutes, how the trade should be legalized? We are in the legal framework of employment definitions but we are surprised that we have never had any representative at parliament level who spoke about our plight passionately. If anything, payments of domestic servants have been revised. But there has never been a follow up as to whether it was put into practice whatever was decided as minimum payment. Domestic servants have been blackmailed still by their employers if they demanded that minimum payment. There is no work in Zimbabwe let alone people of my bracket who have no basic education. If we leave this very employment we are currently doing what would happen to our children who are dependent of this? It is a catch 22 situation to say the least.