An estimated 800,000 people work as domestic workers in South Africa. Most are black women from marginalised backgrounds. It’s therefore not surprising that the bulk of the literature about domestic work focuses on females performing cleaning, cooking and care work. What’s missing in debates about domestic workers’ job-related experiences and relationships with their employers is the experiences of men performing domestic work, a job traditionally linked to femininity.
However, paid domestic work in South Africa hasn’t always been dominated by women. In the 1880s when the mining industry was being established in Johannesburg, black men, rather than women, were the preferred servants in white households. Known as houseboys, they cooked, cleaned, nursed and cared for white colonial families.
But over the next decade the landscape of domestic work underwent significant changes. This was due to a few factors, among them:
