thiis

Every Tuesday afternoon I find myself sitting in a little yellow room. On its yellow walls are little drawings of mommy and daddy, and hand prints with craft paint, and leaves filled in with bits of torn coloured paper. The leaves are hung off pegs on a string that hangs from one yellow wall to another parallel to the ceiling. There are also words; days of the week, months of the year. A birthday chart. Names, with symbols. Nthabiseng and an Umbrella. Jacklynne and a ball. Bheki and a car. Katlego and a flower etc etc. Underneath each name with a symbol is a little hook for little people to hang little jackets and little bags.

Next to me sits a student. She reads slowly, placing her finger at each word. “The boy kicked a ball”. Sometimes she ignores the full stops like it is all one sentence “the ball is yellow and blue The dog likes the ball The dog likes the yellow and blue ball”. The student stops at words that are a little bit more difficult and sounds out the word slowly “the dog licks the ball with his tongue”. English is stupid like that though, you can’t really sound out tongue. None of the students in the little yellow classroom speak much English.

When the student writes, she places her finger between each word to create even spaces. She writes in pencil so she can erase any words she makes a mistake on. She writes, looks at it, screws up her face and erases it. She sweeps the eraser bits with her hand. Then blows on the page to get the last bits off. She writes on every second line so that the tail of the g or y or j or p or q doesn’t get in the way.

But today we don’t do these things. Because one of the students, Elizabeth, is distraught. She doesn’t know what to do. Her ‘madam’ has switched off her lights and water. Her ‘madam’ says the water and lights bill is too high. Her madam says she and the gardener are wasting electricity and water so they have been cut off. The big house, on Kloof Road Bedfordview, with its two stories and six bedrooms, underfloor heating, jacuzzi, three automated gates and electric fence topped walls the size of those that donned Jericho; still has its electricity and water.

We had this conversation sitting in a little yellow classroom around trestle tables, a group of students and their facilitator. These are students of an adult literacy programme. Mostly domestic workers, gardeners, that sort of thing. These workers, due to their specific vocation, are subject to an internal world that is really difficult to penetrate. As one of the others students Christana said, “for us dometics, apartheid is still here”.

This got me to thinking about the private realm, and the extents to which the domestic arena remains a space where prejudice runs free.  And makes me ask questions about privacy, about the rights to personal space, and individual decisions. Partly in the sense that many of South Africa’s racist remnants remain around the safe space of the dinner table, amongst  family and friends who ‘understand’ white frustrations.  But also as the new middle class produced through the spoils of BEE face the fact that they are the new haves, and there are people under their roofs that have not.

The domestic realm has been recognised as a space of violence among families, of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. However, the domestic realm as a space of a softer violence, of a place where the very complicity of sharing a space brings about a hostility and brutality that exists on a subliminal level. Not on the basis of overt aggression, but of the remnants and shards of the undercurrent of what was called ‘petty apartheid’ – disgrace, degradation, of believing the world will never be fair, and that you will never be on the right side of God.

It exists in the satin curtains and under the thick luxurious carpet. In the teak window frames and the walk-in closets. In the fact that an elderly single breadwinner mother of three in one generation and four in the next generation, who are at home in Qwaqwa because none of the adults can find work, cooks three course meals at night, and in the morning clears the table, washes the dishes and makes the breakfast. After which this woman cleans both floors of the house, and all twelve rooms that are each four times the size of her little back room. This woman who can’t read and write must dust the walls of bookshelves, and pack away the financial mails and business days that baas always leaves around. And should it happen that one Tuesday there just happens to be a dinner party, she must stay behind to help cook and to clean up – she can always go to class next week.

Domestic workers. Domestics.  Maids. Helpers. The lady who works for my mom. Symbols of the history that remains lodged to the underneaths of our shoes like gum. Them, and the miners too. But at least the miners get health cover that the unions hooked up for them. And if shit goes down, NUM (and if its really bad, COSATU) takes to the street in streams of blood red that flood through the inner city and cause the shops to spin their shutters to the floors like a Mexican wave running ahead of the conductor. Because these women, and sometimes men, are on their own. In private spaces. And private individuals are difficult to regulate. And their private spaces are just that, private. These workers remain behind huge walls trapped in a private apartheid; vacuuming the floor and washing madams silks by hand, alone. And sometimes their water is cut off at the whim of a bitter madam whose husband probably yelled at her the night before because she spends too much on the credit card. And she will remain breaking her back, scrubbing floors on her knees and lifting heavy baskets though her sight is failing and she is almost sixty. Because she has little other choice than to pray for time to lift her, and for retirement to come swiftly. She will remain, and cry to others that feel her pain, even though no one can do anything.

What you gonna do? Walk house to house ringing the bell? Try yell over the walls that domestic workers deserve freedom  too? Try yell over the sound of the revving Ferrari (yes many drive them in Bedfordview) that true freedom can only be achieved through equality?

Those high walls have been built to keep certain things out, and certain things in.