Domestic Trials: Power and Autonomy in Domestic Service in Zambia

Author(s): Karen Tranberg Hansen

Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May, 1990), pp. 360-375
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/645085
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domestic trials: power and autonomy in domestic
service in Zambia

KARENTRANBERGHANSEN-NorthwesternUniversity

Inthe cities and townsof Zambia,a formerBritishcolony in the southernpartof the African
continent,recentemployersof domesticservantsreadilyjoin the chorusof old hands in la-
mentingthatservantsare not what they used to be, and, to be sure,a good servantis hardto
get. "Ah,servants,they'retrouble,"mostemployers,both blackand white, told me. The ser-
vants,intheirturn,complainedvolublyof inconsideratetreatmentandof beingorderedaround
all the time. Bothpartiesspokeat lengthand in detailaboutthe everydaytrialsandtribulations
theyexperiencedin theirinteractionwith one another.
Thedifficultiesservantsand employersin Zambiaencounterin theirrelationshipare by no
meansunique.Recentstudiesshow that,regardlessof time and place, domesticservicetends
to involvea problematicrelationship(see, forexample, Dudden1983; Glenn 1986; Gordon
1985; Graham1988; Maza 1983; Rollins1985; van Raaphorst1988). Itsvexing naturehas
beenattributed of the laborprocessin the house-
to the personalisticrelationshipcharacteristic
holdas contrastedwith the morecontractual,organizationalrelationshipof factoryand office
workersto theiremployers.'The problemscontemporaryservantsand employersendure in
theirinteractionhavebeen viewedas an anachronisticsurvivalof preindustrial laborpractices.
Andthetroublesomerelationshipof inequalitybetweenservantsandemployershasbeen taken
to epitomizedominationand its unhappycompanion,subordination.
Inspiteof effortsto bringout the voices of servants,muchof whatwe learnin these studies
is a productof the discourseof employers,speakingof, and thusfor,theirservants.Thisarticle
triesto refocusthe questionof inequalityin domestic service by bringingthe class relation
betweenservantsand employersto the fore.Thiscalls for a view of powerrelationsthatgives
agencyandvoice to servants,showingthemto be centrallyinvolvedin the making,andchang-
ing,of the institutionof which both they and theiremployersare part.Itreplacesthe concept
of an asymmetricalrelationshipbetweendominationandsubordination withan interactiveno-
tionof powerin which autonomyis counterposedto dependence.2Thetermpower,following
AnthonyGiddens,is used hereto referto relationsof autonomyanddependencein interaction

Scholarship on paid domestic service has attributed the troublesome interaction

between servants and employers to the peculiar interpersonal relationship char-
acterized by domination and subservience that makes this labor process different
from others. Viewing the trials and tribulations servants and employers in postco-
lonial Zambia experience in their interaction as social practices with which they
contest a power relationship of autonomy and dependence, this article focuses on
the class conflict underlying their relationship. Giddens' notion of structurationis
used to explain how verbal and interactional contests help to reproduce relations
of inequality. Emphasizing the interactive nature of power relationships, this anal-
ysis gives agency to servants, who, although they are the subordinate actors, are
fully involved in maintaining and contesting the domestic service institution.
[southernAfrica,domesticservice,laborprocess,inequality,power,class,gender]

360 american ethnologist

as expressed in the ability of actors to get others to comply with their wants (1983:88-94). In
matter-of-factwords, power is a means of getting things done as well as of choosing not to do
them. Although both servants and employers may perceive their ongoing troubles as private,
such seemingly trivial experiences are emergent properties of action that presuppose and re-
produce the relationship between them in class terms. Accounting for the recursive character
of social life, Giddens' theory of structurationis an attempt to tease out the duality of structure
that is woven into apparently unproblematic interaction but "thereby also reconstituted
through such interaction" (1983:71). Bringing this perspective to bear on my examination of
the interpersonal relationship in domestic service, I suggest that a reckoning with the two-way
relationship of autonomy and dependence may expose the class-based nature of the daily fric-
tions so characteristic of this labor process.
According to my own estimate, based on research in Zambia between 1983 and 1985, do-
mestic servants form the single largest category of the urban Zambian wage labor force today,
outnumbering those employed in mining, which used to claim the largest proportion of the
wage labor force.3 Copper exports, which provide the country's main revenues, have declined
since the early 1970s, sending the economy on a downward slide. Since the mid-1970s, the
Zambian economy has increasingly been sustained by foreign aid and loans. Several currency
devaluations, the decontrolling of prices, the phasing out of food subsidies, wage freezes, and
runaway inflation have turned the making of a living into an uphill battle in both ruraland urban
areas. Rural livelihoods have declined, and the urbanization process has proceeded at rates
that are among the highest in Africa, if not in the entire Third World. Wage employment
stopped growing in the mid-1970s, forcing more and more people to make a living by other
means.
Against this backdrop of overall decline, paid domestic service continues to be an important
source of wage employment. Black Zambian servants, both women and men, do the daily toil
of household maintenance and child care in the homes of other black Zambians, who today
form the majority of the servant-employing class. They also work in the homes of expatriates
from Asia-persons from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka,colloquially called Indi-
ans in Zambia-and from a variety of other places, although there are fewer such expatriate
households now than there were some years ago (expatriates made up 12 percent of the work
force in 1964 but less than one percent in 1985 [Economist Intelligence Unit 1987:14]). Judging
from my own research, more than two-thirds of these servants are men; they are the general
servants who do the work inside the house and on the grounds while women servants in the
main care for children. In addition to paid servants, or instead of them, some Zambian house-
holders make use of the unpaid labor of young relatives in returnfor upkeep and/or education.4
Some Zambian householders preferservants from their own ethnic group, but just as many take
the opposite stance, arguing that such servants learn too much about the private affairs of the
household. Close to half of the adult paid servants with whom I am concerned here come from
ethnic groups in the EasternProvince; the rest represent a variety of Zambia's many different
ethnic groups.
The servants represent age categories from the teens through the sixties; proportionately
more middle-aged women (that is, those beyond the childbearing years) than middle-aged men
work as domestics. Their education is limited, and many dropped out before finishing grade
school. The majority of the men servants are married and have dependents, and their wives
rarely make any income in their own right. Most of the women servants are single heads of
households who maintain dependents without permanent support from a man. Almost all of
these servants have held several jobs, mostly of short duration, because today's expatriate em-
ployers work on short contracts and Zambians of the servant-employing class are frequently
transferredacross the country.
These observations derive from a sample survey of servants and their employers in 168 mid-
dle- to high-income households that I conducted in Lusakain 1983-84. In terms of broad eth-

domestic trials 361

nic/racial categories, 42 percent of these households were black Zambian, followed by 33 per-
cent white and 25 percent Asian. The discussion also draws on my observations of and partic-
ipation in the daily household routine in four different servant-employing households of which
I was a paying guest between 1983 and 1984, and again in the summer of 1985. Three of these
households were North American and one was Asian. My own place in these households was
ambiguous, for I paid more attention to servants than guests normally did, yet I was a new
household member to contend with, one whose presence increased the servants' workload. I
doubt that my presence significantly changed the manner of interaction between servants and
employers, for they were reenacting practices that had already become routine. My under-
standing of the nuances in the relationship between servants and expatriate employers is influ-
enced significantly by these stays, while my characterization of the servant-employer relation
in Zambian households draws primarilyon interviews. The details of the overall historical study
of which these observations are part need not concern us here (Hansen 1989). Because most
servants are men, my discussion initially refers to practices that characterize the relationship
between men servants and their male and female employers. Much of this applies to the rela-
tionship between women servants and their female employers, but with an important differ-
ence, which I will examine toward the end of the article.
Beginning in the private household, I firstdescribe some of the difficulties servants and em-
ployers experience with one another. I deliberately evoke the language of their nagging dis-
course in the attempt to convey an impression of the charged atmosphere that marks servant-
employer interaction. To examine their troubles, I next situate servants and employers in the
broader class context and explain how structuresof inequality are reproduced in daily house-
hold interaction. This examination grounds Giddens' abstract formulations in the unfolding of
everyday experiences and sets the background for the subsequent section, in which I analyze
the actual processes involved. My discussion throughout the article centers on questions of
power and autonomy, the significance of which I bring to bear on my conclusions.

everyday trials

An army of menial laborers is at work every day in the houses and on the grounds of large
numbers of affluent and not-so-affluent households in Zambian cities and towns. Each of these
households has at least one general servant who works inside the house and on the grounds;
some have house servants, gardeners, and nannies, and some are fortunate enough to be able
to afford cooks. Postcolonial economic developments have not dented the might of the em-
ployers, but have instead widened the opportunity gap between them and their servants. Their
relationship is uneasy, especially in black Zambian households. Its antagonisms are fed by the
servants'failed expectations about a new and better life, and by the knowledge that their bosses
have not changed at all, they just look different.
Today's labor process in domestic service turns on the shared need (though for different rea-
sons) for security of employer and servant: the one for household comfort and protection of
material property, the other for economic survival. A new kind of personalized dependency
relationship has been forged. It is a dependency relationship in which neither party lives up to
the other's expectations: employers describe it as a "blessing in disguise," and servants say of
their employers, "you can never rely on them." In talking about one another, servants and
employers use a language of trouble and tribulation that reflects the notions they have fash-
ioned about each other. Following Giddens, I suggest that we must reckon with the concepts
these actors apply in the course of their conduct. For they each know, in a practical sense, a
great deal about the workings of domestic service by virtue of their participation in it. What
they say about each other does not constitute a description of their relationship; their statements
are part of that relationship and thus affect their ongoing interaction (1983:245-248).

362 american ethnologist

 Contemporaryemployers complain that servants are inefficient, are lazy, and lack any sense
of foresight. Servants, they say, are not to be relied upon: they never tell the truth, they are
irresponsible, they squander their money, and they disappear without notice. They just never
learn, and they persist in doing things their own happy way. "Their way" includes eating dif-
ferentfoods and having different mores. Forservants have strange cultural ideas. Their relations
to spouses, dependents, and in-laws, their work habits, and their notions of time and duty differ
from ours. It is almost as if we are dealing with a different species. Expatriateand Zambian
employers make these statements, describing the difference between them and the other in
terms of life style or even of culture. Employerspass these bits of knowledge on to one another,
recreating the notion that servants are different from themselves. When expatriate old hands
speak to newcomers about the precautions they need to take with their domestics, they ad-
monish them never to trust servants, to keep their distance, and to remain uninvolved in the
servants' personal lives. Many new madams, as female employers of servants invariably are
called in southern Africa, are initially appalled by such advice and insist on reforming these
unwritten rules in their own households. Yet their ongoing troubles with servants eventually
prompt many madams to adopt the very practices they once resisted. "They all learn," say the
old hands when other newcomers go through similar experiences. Many Zambian employers
preferto hire young men fresh from the countryside with little education and no previous work
experience. Such young men, they say, can be better trained to performthe work in and around
the house the way their employers want it done. Unlike young country relatives whom em-
ployers may feel reluctant to order around, these young men may be issued commands and
expected to obey them deferentially. But once they have become thoroughly familiar with the
running of the household, these young men, it is said, begin to take things for granted and to
grow lazy; they are then laid off and replaced with other newcomers, who are "broken in" in
a similar manner. Thus, for both expatriate and Zambian employers, the cycle repeats itself to
reproduce the structureof inequality in daily household interaction.
In the counterdiscourse of servants, most employers talk too much, are rude, and look over
one's shoulder as one works. Zambian employers are too proud; they do not respect servants.
Expatriateemployers are too odd; they make unreasonable demands; one day they love their
servants, the next they hate them. As their servant, you work hard all day, five or more days per
week, month aftermonth, for a slave wage, and still they complain. The employers' ideas about
work do not make sense: they want the beds turned down just so, for instance, or else .... Their
demands change: when they go on leave they pay the same wage, although you only have to
work in the garden, watch the house, and tidy up before they return.They have absurd pantry
and storage rules. As their servant, you know what they own and where it is, yet they try to hide
their things and tempt your honesty. "When you are on trial" (a probationary period that may
or may not lead to full-time employment), explained Edson, a servant in one of my host house-
holds, "the employers test you; they leave cash and jewelry around the house to see if you are
honest." His remarksconfirmed an impression I had got from talking to other servants as well
as from my sample survey. Edson went on to tell me that servants are aware of this practice and
do their level best to be good workers to impress their employers during the trial period. He,
like many other servants with whom I spoke, was reluctant to take a job as a servant in a Zam-
bian household. The "owners," as many servants refer to their Zambian employers, do not
share or help out. They are stingy. They have too many claims on their incomes from extended
family members who will get their handouts before servants do. With relatives coming and
going, the work is rough and unpredictable. And at times the Zambian employers are faced
with so many financial obligations that servants aren't even paid.
Most employers complain about their servants for many reasons and view them as a mixed
blessing. A quarter of the employers in my survey said they could do without servants and
would rathernot have them. "Servants,"they said, "are more trouble than they are worth." Yet
they kept hiring them, considering them "a necessary evil." Employershave a hard time defin-

domestic trials 363

ing what it is they want in a servant beyond broad desirables such as "personality" or being
"good with children" or "good with dogs." Because servants are hired not so much for their
skills as for their personalities, employers have a hard time ensuring their full cooperation, for
the employers do not know what to expect. Some engage servants because both spouses work
and they have children. Others keep servants because of the weather that creates too much
housework: the tropical climate, the red dust that creeps in everywhere, the resulting need to
change clothes frequently, and the laundering and constant ironing to get rid of putsi flies.5 And
still others have been used to servants for so long that, although they do not really like them,
they still find them useful to have around. Many rationalize their need for creature comfort by
saying that at least they create jobs for persons who otherwise would not be employed. Most
of them agree that they never really trusttheir servants, yet they employ them because of their
need for security.
In their turn most servants complain about bullying and mistreatment, lack of consideration
for them as persons, and last yet certainly not least, low wages. But their prevailing complaint
is that their work never ends-their employers keep them busy all the time. The employers,
servants grumble, tell them they lack energy and initiative. Yet those same employers pay a
slave wage and keep servants busy and always on call. Most servants in my survey wished they
had differentjobs, and 75 percent of them were adamant that their children would never end
up as servants if they could prevent it. Yet they go on working in a job for which they are paid
substandardwages because of lack of choice in the employment market. They need their em-
ployers in order to tide themselves and their households over from one day to the next.
Postcolonial employers and servants in Zambia thus need one another in a very special way
that makes both groups vulnerable. The frictions that troubled this occupational domain during
the colonial period continue to characterize it, but the concerns of the two parties have been
accentuated by the declining economy. Security-conscious private householders living in a city
where petty theft, break-ins, and armed robberies serve as regular means of material redistri-
bution need servants on the grounds to watch their material possessions.6 Whatever desirables
they look for when hiringa servant, the hard-to-define characteristic of honesty rankshigh. This
creates a dilemma. Since they never really trust their servants, they need to watch them well.
One-fourthof the employers in my survey admitted to locking up food and personal possessions
to prevent servants from taking anything more than small amounts of day-to-day kitchen sup-
plies. Some servants asked their employers to lock up valuables in order not to be held respon-
sible if things disappeared. Still other servants complained about the practice of locking up,
arguing that they could not work in an atmosphere so openly characterized by distrust. More
than a third of the employers said they retained their servants' National Registration Cards,
which is illegal, in the belief that this might deter a servant from absconding without giving
notice or help in tracing one who had already done so. It is difficult to know, employers claim,
what kind of company the servant keeps; he or she may be in cahoots with thieves. There is no
end to stories, most of which are true, of long-trusted servants who have suddenly stolen from
theiremployers. One such story made newspaper headlines during my stay. Itfeatured a trusted
embassy-employed cook who had been long in his employers' service. After he had forged the
signatureon checks he found in their absence, he was discharged. Yet, to prevent their servants
from becoming antagonistic, most employers seek to maintain a modicum of good relations,
no matterhow many worries about honesty they may have.
Although most servants get substandard wages, they go on with the work in a manner that
does not upset the employer too much. They depend on intermittenthandouts to supplement
their meager wages. Those who work for expatriate employers cherish hopes of receiving a
gratuitywhen the employer leaves the country, such as help with the building of a house or a
deposit of money in a bank account. Such hopes are not very realistic for the majority of ser-
vants who today work in Zambian households; they seek to improve their conditions by looking
for better-payingjobs. But all servants hope their present employers may help them find better

364 american ethnologist

jobs, in food service or as janitors at the employer's place of work, for example. While perform-
ing their tasks, servants set their own limits in terms of workload and supervision. They see the
best jobs in expatriate households disappearing as more and more Zambians take over the ex-
patriates'jobs and residences. Unless the work is plainly intolerable, many servants get on with
it. Unsure of where to go-except to something worse-many stay put, and the conflict be-
tween them and their employers continues. In short, what servants and their employers say
about each other deserves more than stereotype. Their statements reflect practices that sustain
the uneasy status quo of their relationship.

servants and employers

As human social actors both servants and employers bring intentionality to the workplace
(Giddens 1983:53-59). They monitor their mutual interaction in an uneasy labor relationship
whose ambiguous, personalized nature is mediated by a process of cooperation and conflict.
The personalized nature of the work relationship in postcolonial domestic service is not the
product of a paternalisticethos based on a sense of reciprocity of obligation between employer
and servant. Rather, it is the result of the deteriorating economic situation and the insecurity of
living in society at large. These circumstances force persons with few means to make a living
by working for those better situated, who, in their turn, in addition to getting housework done
cheaply, also get someone to be around the house in a role almost akin to a watchdog. No
longer obscured by the issue of race, the class division in domestic service today cuts right
through the interdependent employment relationship between worker and boss.
The colonial period's hierarchical relationship between servant and master was expressed
mainly in racial terms, and the unequal relationship between the two parties accentuated,
marked, and recreated a discourse that made the two even more unlike one another. The ine-
qualities inherent in this relationship have remained much the same since independence in
1964. The distinction between servant and employer is today no longer necessarily rationalized
in racial, but rather in class terms. The antagonisms such terms hide still revolve around con-
ceptions of the servant as less capable or worthy than the employer. These conceptions turn on
the need to uphold hierarchical distinctions between the chief sets of actors in the private
household-servants and employers-so that work may go on. The conventions that help re-
create these distinctions have much in common with those of the colonial era. They are com-
posed of informal practices surrounded by tacit rules that, in Giddens' terms, institutionalize
this domain of activity (1983:65-69).
These conventions are expressed in terms of address, in the structuringof everyday interac-
tion at the locus of work, and in the ways in which the two parties construe each other and
their lives when away from work. In 68 percent of the households I studied, the servants were
addressed by their firstnames. Twelve percent of the employers addressed their servants by last
names only (for example, Tembo), and a small fraction of them, three percent, mainly white
expatriates, addressed their servants as Mr. or Mrs. Tembo. Six percent of the employers, all
Zambians, addressed their married servants in a Bantuized idiom-for instance, BaTembo for
a man and MaTembo for a woman, the use of the prefixes Ba and Ma indicating politeness.7
Yet I noted that when describing the daily household routine, 20 percent of the employers re-
ferredto their servants as houseboys or boys. While many employers addressed their servants,
regardless of age and marital status, merely by first name, servants were quite formal in ad-
dressing employers. Thirty-sixpercent of them addressed the heads of the employing household
as bwana and madam; 28 percent used titles such as Sir, Mr., or Mrs. Twenty-four percent of
the servants in Zambian households addressed their employers in the terms from their respec-
tive languages for father and mother, or combinations such as "father of" or "mother of" fol-
lowed by the name of a child, thus acknowledging the status of the employer as a parent.8When

domestic trials 365

talking of their experiences with different employers, many servants still referredto whites as
wazungu and Asians as mwenye.9 They typically referredto their Zambian employers as "the
owners."
These conventions flow from the top-heavy line of power and authority in domestic service,
that is, the resources that employers control differentially. Employersdo not consider servants
their equals, so they call them by first name or last name without a title; they do not encourage
their servants to address them in the same fashion. The line of authority flows from the em-
ployer, whose needs determine how the servant is treated. In the households where I observed
daily interaction between servants and employers, the servants were obsequious in their man-
ner and almost inconspicuous. Most of them went around the house barefoot when working,
knocked on the door when entering a room to clean it, and refrained from talking in the pres-
ence of their employers. Employersconsidered servants who took the initiative to engage them
in conversation to be intrusive. Some employers felt imposed upon when servants asked ques-
tions about the employers' work, their plans for vacation, and so forth. In most of these house-
holds, servants did not speak unless spoken to.
Employers'questions to servants were also perceived as intrusive. Because they know that
employers prefer not to become involved with their employees' personal problems, many ser-
vants say nothing. Their answer to an employer's question may take the form of downcast eyes.
Assuming that their position of authorityallows them to pass judgment on their servants' affairs,
some employers admonish servants to limit their families and to save money for a rainy day.
Most servants dislike such patronizing advice. They have their own designs on life, and they
usually do not comment at all when employers tell them how to run their lives. When they do
speak to an employer-if, for example, they wish to ask leave to attend a funeral, take a child
to the clinic, receive an advance on their wages or borrow outright-they rarely address the
employer directly. They may make their intention to speak known by a slight cough, or they
may go through the madam, asking her to tell the bwana about the matter at hand. Since most
of these matters inconvenience the employers and upset the household routine, the employers
are likely to nag before they, grudgingly, permit the servants to attend to them. In expatriate
households where some servants are not very conversant in colloquial English, these encoun-
ters may be additionally strained because of language problems. Such employers assume that
their servants are less capable of understanding English than in fact they are. To make their
opinions clear, they speak slowly and in simplified English,conveying an attitude that infantil-
izes the servant.
The social practices that structure conduct in these households help to ensure that servants
never become members of them. Such practices are part of the ongoing interaction and help
to reproduce the structureof inequality that defines the relation between servant and employer.
In Zambian households, where employers are sometimes addressed in kinship idiom, inequal-
ity is recreated in daily interaction along the lines just described. Even if they treat you nicely,
servants say, you are still a servant. If you are out of place, they quickly put you back in your
place. Inability or unwillingness to become involved with another black person's economic
and social needs makes Zambian employers resortto hierarchical practices of interaction with
servants. In their view, servants are different from themselves: they are members of poor fam-
ilies; they have been unfortunate in life, not getting much education; their needs and desires
are different; they require less to make a living. In short, their world is inferior. Zambian em-
ployers make few efforts to improve that world, for they pay servants less than most other em-
ployers and so help to maintain the class gap between their servants and themselves.
Seeing one another as different, servants and employers rationalize their unequal relation-
ship in terms of such perceived differences. The unwritten rules employers use in interaction
with servants serve as distancing devices to distinguish the employers from persons with whom
they share time and space (Fabian 1983:30-32). By denying coevalness to the other, or, in the
servants' straightforwardlanguage, by not treating them as human beings, employers buttress

366 american ethnologist

their sense of privilege as well as their right to order servants around. By accounting for the
relationship in terms of difference, employers also free themselves from any responsibility for
creating that difference. The servant on his part says he belongs to the common man and so he
must work for those who are different and better stationed, the apamwamba or the wazungu.10
But he does so grudgingly. What servants and employers say about each other thus influences
their ongoing interaction and helps to sustain these differences. There have been few shifts in
the attitudes of the servant-keeping population toward human and social relationships. The
ongoing shift from white to black among the servant-employing population has not replaced
strangerswith brothers.Although some Zambian employers will tell you that, after all, servants
too are human beings, the social practices that characterize their daily interaction with servants
help to distance them from their less fortunate countrymen.

consent and struggle

Unlike during the colonial period, when coercive legal rules and regulations governed em-
ployment and structureda very hierarchical labor regime, consent to the labor process in do-
mestic service today is the product of the shared need for security of servant and employer. In
this relationship they are both vulnerable, although the servant is more so than the employer.
The employer controls more economic means and has more power than the servant. The gov-
ernment's inability to enforce its labor laws sends but one message to the employers: do as you
like. The interaction between servant and employer continues to be shaped by a mutually de-
pendent but unequal personal relationship which, as noted earlier, creates considerable am-
biguity. But an emphasis on the personal nature of the relationship masks its basic character-
istic: the class distinction between worker and boss. The social practices that are spoken of in
the language of trouble help to maintain and reproduce this class distinction. Some of the ex-
isting work on servants has analyzed these practices as examples of submission to a personal-
ized regime or as rituals of deference (for example, see Mannoni 1956; Rollins 1985:157-
173).11Although the domestic service relationship differs from many other work relationships
because of its personalized nature, servants are wage laborers and part of the working class, at
least in objective terms. I suggest that studies of the relationships between workers and em-
ployers in other occupational settings may throw light on domestic service.
To make the class aspect of the worker-employer relation central to a discussion of domestic
service requires a change of focus. Employersattributethe problems they experience with their
domestics to extraneous factors such as family ties and problems, lack of education, and cul-
tural conventions, factors which they assume servants bring with them into the workplace. But
ratherthan asking why servants are lazy, inefficient, and untrustworthyand why they defer to
the hierarchical interpersonal regime in domestic service, we might ask why they work as hard
as they do under a labor regime that is poorly compensated. Recent work not only on wage
laborers but also on peasants has identified several kinds of resistance, often in individual in-
stances of struggle in a general atmosphere of apparent acquiescence or overt compliance (see,
for instance, Gaventa 1980; Scott 1985). In his work on a Chicago machine shop, Michael
Burawoy demonstrated how the organization of work relations on the floor was dominated by
"making out"-a sort of game workers played with the rules that governed the tasks assigned
by the management (Burawoy 1980:66-93). Such games were not frivolous play, but practices
designed to do battle with the work conditions. Through them workers sought to manipulate
the tasks within the context of the established rules. Workers, in other words, do not passively
accept the conditions imposed on them; they actively seek to affect them, contesting the rules
of the game by manipulating those rules. But by manipulating the rules established at the locus
of work, they also lessen the potential for class conflicts between themselves and management
to arise openly, for the two groups must cooperate with one another to some extent so that they

domestic trials 367

can go on with their respective tasks. The games workers play generate consent to the rules and
allow the system to continue unchallenged.
Why do domestic servants in Zambia consent to work in a hierarchically structuredemploy-
ment situation in returnfor low wages? To answer this question I follow Burawoy, suggesting
an explanation that focuses on characteristics of this particularkind of workplace ratherthan
on characteristics of the servants' personal lives. Among these factors are at least three, which
I will examine briefly: low pay, poor work conditions, and short-termemployment prospects.
Servantsare worse off today than they were during the colonial era in terms of the purchasing
power of their wages. Runaway inflation has adversely affected other segments of the working
class as well, but the wage gap between the servants and these other groups has increasingly
widened. While servants during the colonial period received food rations as part of their em-
ployment package, few do today; in fact, the ration system was legally abolished at indepen-
dence. Although some employers occasionally hand out food and used clothing, such handouts
rarelyconstitute a regularcontribution that servants can count on in making their own budgets.
Domestic servants are not organized, and their conditions of work are not regulated by union
agreements. Employersdo not know, or ignore, the regulations of the 1965 Employment Act,
regulations governing sick leave, paid public holidays, dismissal, and length of annual leave.
Likewise, they do not widely comply with the servant registrationscheme established by the
Zambia National Provident Fund in 1973 to assure servants of pensions. These omissions fa-
cilitate a despotic organization of household work and take us to the next factor: poor work
conditions.
The majority of today's servants are general servants who work both inside and outside the
house. Such work never stops, servants say; there is always some unfinished business for to-
morrow. This has to do in part with the labor-intensive nature of their work. The polishing of
floors and windows, cleaning of carpets and furniture,laundering of clothes, washing of dishes,
and processing of foods are done almost entirely without the help of labor-saving devices. In
such a generalized work regime, a servant's previous skills (for example, in cooking) may be-
come redundant when the expatriate madam insists she likes to cook and asks her servant to
scrub the toilet bowl, wash her undies, and cut the lawn instead. Some servants openly regret-
ted not being allowed to apply their specialized skills, while others chose not to reveal such
skills. Keeping such knowledge to themselves, they resisted any additional claims employers
might place on their strained labor time. The working hours are generally long, but the em-
ployer says there is not much to do in and around the house, and the servant spends too much
time doing it anyway. But if he or she were not doing it, there would be something else, for
"work never stops." Although many servants live in quarters at the end of the garden, time off
work is rarely at their own disposal. They are simply considered to be available, or are made
to be so at the employer's discretion.
Servantsknow that their tenure is likely to be short, since as noted earlier, today's expatriate
employers come and go, and middle- and upper-income Zambians are transferredacross the
country frequently. In addition, if the servant does not work satisfactorily, the employer can
hire someone else from a marketglutted with potential replacements. Because they are so easily
replaced, some servants are reluctant to take an annual leave even if it is offered to them. They
fear that they will lose their jobs to the temporary workers the employers may hire during their
absence. To prevent this, some servants leave wives, young adult sons, or other relatives behind
to do the work in the house while they themselves go elsewhere for a break. In fact, some
employers insist on a servant's wife being left behind so they will not be inconvenienced when
the man servant takes his vacation time. "They never go anywhere together, anyway," some
employers say. Servantsaccommodate, within limits, to their employers' whims, tryingto make
the best of the situation while their employment lasts, in the hope that with proper consent
something may fall from the employer's table. This something is rarely increased wages or extra
pay for extra work. It is, rather, presents, occasional tips, help with school fees, a "bye-bye"

368 american ethnologist

present in the form of money when an expatriate employer leaves the country or, still better, a
job in the household of an acquaintance of the present employer. There, the work routine-
with similar expectations on either part-will be reproduced.
Those servants who work in the very lowest paid jobs with the worst work regimes contest
their situations by looking around for better jobs. They are the ones who have come today and
are gone tomorrow, those who leave without giving notice. Given their low wages, they work
no more than they consider fits their remuneration, and some also help themselves to what they
view as their due from the employer's household.
The work conditions and the daily routine of domestic service have to be agreeable firstand
foremost to the employer, who sets the rules and dislikes being inconvenienced by a servant's
wish to change his weekly day off from Saturday to Sunday in order to attend church. The
servant is subject to arbitraryand personalized domination-despotic, benevolent, or other-
wise. If the servant's ways confront the employer's, the servant is said to be cheeky, insolent,
rude, or irresponsible: "They never learn." What servants do learn is to consent to this regime-
to carryout orders and do whatever meaningless work they are asked to do. They know that if
they cannot tolerate the regime, there are many others to replace them. Butthey do not consent
as passive automatons to orders handed down from above. They work at their ease, and one of
the games of "making out" in domestic service is to keep up the appearance of always working
so as not to be pressed with new demands. Saying that servants are slow and lazy, the employ-
ers themselves expect a low work output which, in turn, they use as a standard for evaluating
their servants'work and organizing the future allocation of tasks. While the servant fears to lose
his job if not consenting, the employer never really trusts the servant and to some extent ac-
commodates himself to the servant's slow routine in order not to upset and antagonize him. As
they work alongside each other in this process of mutual monitoring, the inequality inherent in
the situation is not confronted, and the existing relationship between the two parties, mediated
by a precarious and skewed interpersonal dependence, is continually reproduced.
What servants and their employers grapple with is fundamentally an economic issue: the
creation of conditions for survival and security in which they each have different stakes. Yet
some degree of cooperation is necessary for this to be achieved, and this requires a degree of
consent and accommodation on the part of each. To account for the role each of them plays
in this trouble-ridden process, employers look to rural-urban,cultural, and ethnic differences
for explanation. But what employers consider to be the very characteristics of servants them-
selves, characteristics they supposedly carry with them from the outside into the workplace
"because they are different," arise at the locus of work itself and independently of the particular
individuals who fill the positions as servants. What employers and servants say about each
other therefore reflects the practical experience they draw from their conduct at the workplace,
and it helps to reproduce that conduct. So servants work slowly because, as I have explained,
their work never stops. Knowing that his or her servant does not do more than asked and does
it slowly at that, the employer repeats orders and says servants are lazy and never take any
initiativeof their own. In the servant's language, the repetition of orders amounts to talking too
much or too loudly, and checking up on the work means walking behind him, supervising. The
servant does not take any new initiative, for if he did, he would not get any better pay, and if
he speeded up his work, he would be assigned another task. And if he argues about ways of
doing things, he is said to be rude and cheeky. So he says nothing and is called insolent.
Yet the employer tries not to go too far. For with servants, you just never know; you cannot
really trustthem. You should not upset them too much, for there could be repercussions, such
as a burglaryjob by a servant you have just fired. So you tolerate some degree of pilfering, for
afterall, you do not trustyour servant. And if, after you have asked him five times to deal with
certain plants in the garden in a certain way, he still does not do so, you stop; you do not want
to nag too much. After all, this servant has not to your knowledge been involved in anything
against you; he has been with you for some time, he knows your whims, and you dread the

domestic trials 369

thought of getting used to another new servant whom you may not like or whom you may trust
even less than this one. On and on they go, the servant intentionally being slow and-as ex-
pected by his employer-requiring constant supervision, and the employer, purposefully
checking up and-as expected by the servant-never really trusting.
In this way the participants in domestic service bring their understanding of their wider sur-
roundings and of the circumstances of their interaction to bear on their conduct in a process of
mutual monitoring that creates consent to, and reproduces, their unequal relationship. As ex-
pressed in their statements about each other, their day-to-day trials and tribulations are very
much partof the domestic service institution. Their efforts to anticipate each other's moods so
as not to upset the precarious balance required in their employment relationship mutes the
potential for conflict between them, and the work goes on. The tacit rules they set for them-
selves stem from their knowledge of how to go about doing things, given the circumstances of
domestic service and the nature of the broader economic surroundings. Intentionality, as
shown in these examples, is a routine feature of the conduct of servants and employers. Such
social practices organize their interaction recursively. As structuring properties, such social
practices are not barriersto action but are, rather,involved in its production. They are the media
of action as well as its outcome. This is Giddens' notion of the duality of structure, according
to which actors, in this case servants and their employers, draw on the knowledge they have
of one another's conduct (1983:81-84). In the process, their conduct reconstitutes the insti-
tution they interact in without changing the fundamental inequality that underpins it.

a gender difference that matters

Men general servants are today's typical domestic workers, and for this reason my discussion
up to this point has centered on men. Most of the issues and problems also arise in households
that employ women servants but with an added dimension of antagonism.
Because of differences between Zambian women today and white women of the colonial
era in childbearing and child-rearing patterns, a niche has opened for women to work as paid
nannies for countrywomen who are wealthier than themselves. This is not to say that African
women never worked as nannies during the colonial period. Some certainly did, and persons
who had employed them went to great lengths relating to me the troublesome nature of this
employment arrangement. The point is that the African nanny then was a "rare bird," as one
of the contemporary employers expressed it. She was the exception, not the rule.12Few colonial
white women worked away from home until after World War II, and many used creches for
daytime care of their children. Forchild care at home, for washing the nappies and pushing the
pram,they employed "nurse boys" more frequently than they did Africanwomen. These white
women had fewer children than today's Zambian householders do. Many white householders
sent their children to boarding schools in what was then Southern Rhodesia, or in South Africa
or Great Britain.Thus, white colonial mothers had fewer worries about children's day-to-day
supervision than have postcolonial Zambian women, who bear children much more fre-
quently.
Zambian women householders need nannies to attend to their children while they them-
selves go out to work. And Zambian women who do not work away from home want relief
from child care if they can afford it. Creches and nursery schools do not have facilities to ac-
commodate the growing number of preschool children. Even if places in such institutionswere
available, they would be too expensive for most. Zambian mothers hire nannies, for they are
cheaper than nurseryschools and creches. But once their children have all entered school, or
their older children are considered responsible enough to watch the younger siblings, Zambian
women employ men servants.
If men servants are spoken of in a language of difference, women servants are spoken of in
this way even more, especially in black Zambian households. Whatever personal satisfaction

370 american ethnologist

Zambian women householders may derive from bossing their "lazy" men servants turns into
utterdespair in relation to their "useless" female workers. Zambian women who employ their
countrywomen as nannies paint them in a sorry light and speak of them in distinctly invidious
terms. They recount their experiences of employing women servants in a troubled voice; they
say that women servants are insolent and cheeky, they do only the work they feel like doing,
they steal, and they rifle through your underwear and toiletries. But worst of all, before you
know it they have moved into the bedroom and taken over the house. The women servants in
their turn share much of the men servants' language when they speak about their madams,
complaining of the workload and the low pay. But they comment most vociferously on their
employers' pride. Being proud in this context means not helping, not sharing, and not being
concerned with the servant as a human social being. Last, but not least, the proud female
"owner" (that is, employer) behaves as if she is somebody who is better than you and who,
because of her position of status and authority as a properly married woman, has the right to
order her servant around.
In the view of female Zambian householders, the "woman problem" in domestic service is
due to the loose morals of their female domestics, who are always on the lookout for a man
either to marryor to "keep them nicely." Being kept nicely in Zambia means receiving shelter,
food, and occasional clothing. The gender role Zambian women householders attributeto their
female domestics is not a product of the tasks the women do in service or of their biology.
Rather, as Michelle Rosaldo has observed, a gender construction results from the meanings
women's activities acquire through actual social interaction (1980:400). Zambian women's
distrustof their female domestics expresses itself in an idiom of sexual antagonism that accen-
tuates and dramatizes their women servants' struggle for a livelihood. Low-income women's
attempts to secure their own and their dependents' livelihood through support from a spouse
or consort clash with middle- to upper-income Zambian women's child care needs. For the
woman who takes a job as a nanny will seek to quit as soon as she has some economic means
in her own household.
To account for this, we must grapple with the power dynamics of gender in the household,
their structuration, in Giddens' terms (1983:69-73), of relations between the sexes within it
and the way these dynamics enter into, and affect, women's and men's places in society at
large. Paid domestic work does not in the Zambian view properly constitute women's work,
for a woman with small children ought not to leave her own household to attend to someone
else's. Because of the deterioration in the economy, the ideology this view embodies prompts
women to pursue strategies both active and reactive. Their reactive strategy is to seek economic
supportfrom men. Their active strategy is to operate independently of men, who may be either
unable or unwilling to support them on a regularbasis. Only as a last resort, and in the absence
of economic support, do Zambian women enter the domestic service market.
The sexual antagonism that shapes the gender construction of women servants in Zambia
has found its way into stories about women servants who usurp the place of the wife, stories
that are featured on and off in popular newspaper columns and women's magazines.13 The
ideology buried in stories about the easy virtue of women domestics becomes socially relevant
when a Zambian woman hires a fellow countrywoman as her servant, and it has consequences
for women servants' wages and housing as well as for their treatment in domestic service. Since
employers assume that their women servants are members of households elsewhere, they are
less likely to provide them with housing, and they pay them less than men servants. If a female
domestic is unmarried, employers assume that she is looking for a male partner and will quit
once she finds him. And because they believe that the personal lives of their women servants
adversely affect their endurance as workers and cause their high turnover rates, they are un-
likely to increase their wages. While charged with sexual slurs, the verbal contest between
women servants and employers is a battle over the status quo. Forunderneath these expressions
lies a difference of life style that female employers make sure not to bridge. Yet women em-

domestic trials 371

ployers and female servants do have something important in common, although for different
reasons: their interest in men. The woman servant wants a person to support her and her chil-
dren so that she no longer needs to do someone else's domestic work, and her female employer
wants a husband to support her children and to legitimate her economic and social pursuits.
Their shared interest creates a sexual antagonism that furtherseparates these two categories of
women, servants and their employers, who have such different marketable skills and are in-
volved in such fundamentally different relationships to the economy. Neither in the Zambian
case nor in cases reported from elsewhere do women servants and their employers seem ever
to be sisters (Bossen 1980; Cock 1980; Rollins 1985).

conclusion: autonomy and dependence

Issues of class, race, and gender intersect powerfully in domestic service and have attracted
recent attention by scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives (see, for example, Chaney
and Castro 1989; Sanjek and Colen In press). Although domestic work is performed at a dis-
tinctive site, the relationship of servant to employer is, like other work relationships, based on
an exchange of labor power in returnfor wages. While recognizing the class dimension of this
unequal relationship, much existing scholarship has examined the peculiarity of the interper-
sonal relationship of subordination and domination in the labor process in domestic service
(for instance, Glenn 1986:156-164; Rollins 1985:178-179; Turrittin1986). Seeking to bring
the class relationship to the fore, this article has situated class practice in the everyday trials
and tribulationsservants and employers experience with each other, while paying attention to
an importantdifference in the gender construction behind the relationship of black Zambian
men and women servants to their black Zambian and expatriate male and female employers.
Seeing power as a two-way relationship of autonomy and dependence helps to place ser-
vants and employers as central actors in the making of and contest about the employment re-
lationship of which they are both part. Servants are never wholly dependent, as Mary Romero
(1988) has shown for the case of Chicana domestics who are strategizing on the job in order to
professionalize it. Zambian servants are also very adept at converting their limited resources
into some degree of control over the conditions of the domestic service institution. Their efforts
help to sustain a troublesome battle for survival and security in which servants and employers
have very different stakes.
This conceptualization throws fresh light on the everyday trials and tribulations that both
parties describe in a language of trouble, invoking notions of the other as different. The terms
today's employers and servants use to ascribe difference are rarely charged with the colonial
era's notion of race. Male and female employers describe their men servants as the have-nots,
those who have been unlucky in economic terms, and female employers mark their women
domestics as sexually venturesome, while the servants speak of their employers as those who
have, the owners. Yet these terms have the same effect on actual interaction in domestic service
as did the racial distinctions of the colonial discourse: they marka class divide. The verbal and
interactionalcontests between servants and employers are fundamentally a struggle for access
to economic resources and power. When the daily trials and tribulations that vex the domestic
service relationship are explained in this light, the exasperating troubles between servants and
employers become more than private squabbles. They receive their due attention, for they offer
crucial insights into the nature of a battle across the private household's class divide that is
fueled by and reflective of developments in the economic institutions of society at large.

notes

Acknowledgments. Thisis a revisedversionof an articlepresentedat the AnnualMeetingof the Amer-

Associationat Phoenix,Arizona,November16-20, 1988. The researchon which
ican Anthropological

372 american ethnologist

the article is based was supported by grant no. BNS-8303507 from the National Science Foundation, 1983-
85, and by funds from the University Research Grants Committee at Northwestern University during the
summers of 1985 and 1986. I am grateful to Helen Schwartzman and Judith Wittner for comments and
criticisms, and to the editor and anonymous readers of this journal for helpful suggestions.
1Inhis analysis of industrialwork, Edwardsdistinguishes three types of control over workers on the job:
simple, technical, and bureaucratic (1979). Simple control has two types: direct and hierarchical. Direct
control is face to face, as between boss and worker in small shops and offices where the boss sets the rules.
When firmsor shops grow too big for direct control to be effective, hierarchical control is introduced, with
levels of managers or supervisors reproducing the direct control over subordinates. The nature of control
in domestic employment relations is at the extreme end of Edwards'simple control.
2On this point, see also Epstein'squalification of Mannoni's dependence complex (1979:14).
3Paiddomestic service has not been enumerated separately in the Zambian employment statistics since
1968, when a total of 36,491 men and 1758 women were listed in the occupation (Government of the
Republic of Zambia 1968:34-35). For the past few years, the Monthly Digest of Statistics has included a
listing of servants, drawn from the registrationfiles of the Zambia National Provident Fund. According to
ZNPF figures, some 45,760 persons were employed in domestic service throughout Zambia's towns as of
June 1983 (Government of the Republic of Zambia 1985:8). This listing is not categorized by gender and,
judging from my survey, it severely undercounts the extent of service employment. Only one-third of the
employers I interviewed had registered their servants.
4Fora historical perspective on children's work, see Hansen (In press).
5Theputsi looks like a black housefly and lays its eggs on damp clothes. Many householders insist that
all articles of washed clothing be thoroughly ironed after they have dried in the open air. Ironing is sup-
posed to destroy the putsi so it cannot insert itself under the human skin, where it produces a boil-like
swelling.
6Crimestatistics are unreliable. To suggest the pervasive state of insecurity in urban Zambia I quote an
excerpt from the U.S. State Department Travel Advisory: "crime is high and travelers should take basic
precautions. Travel at night should be avoided even on major city streets and main highways. Except for
airlines public transportis unreliable and unsafe" (United States Department of State 1988).
7Because of the omission of ambiguous and missing answers, the percentages do not add up to 100.
8Because of the omission of ambiguous and missing answers, the percentages do not add up to 100.
9Wazungu(singularmusungu) is a Nyanja term. Itsbasic meaning is "Europeans"or "white people" in
general. Mwenye is a Nyanja term for Asians.
'1Apamwamba is a Nyanja term literally meaning "those on the top." They are the persons who live in
the high-income areas and have assimilated to the style of life of the colonial wazungu whom they are
replacing. In status terms, wazungu could just be another way of saying apamwamba. Professor Mubanga
Kashokihelped clarify these terms for me.
"Eugene Genovese's work on slave culture in North America helped qualify the psychology of domi-
nation. His emphasis on the material and social bases of the slave-master relationship prompted an explo-
ration of the way in which members of a subordinated culture both shape and resist their domination
(1976).
12Whilecolonial labor force statistics categorized by gender are available only for limited time periods
(1951-57 and 1961-64) and in all likelihood underestimate the magnitude of paid domestic service, they
do highlight spectacular gender differentials in this employment sector. Between 1951 and 1957, for ex-
ample, the recorded figures for men domestic servants grew from 30,000 to 33,000, while those for women
servants rose from 250 to 800 (Northern Rhodesia 1951:26, 1957:37).
'3Forexample, "Georgette, My Wife" (Anonymous 1983) and popular newspaper columnist Kapwelwa
Musonda's "House Servant Outwits Owner" (Musonda 1985).

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submitted 5 June 1989

accepted 3 September 1989

domestic trials 375