At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg

by Rebecca Ginsburg

Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid’s most repressive years. In At Home with Apartheid, Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg’s middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960–1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family. More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power. Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers’ detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg’s suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas. The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book’s strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published August 23, 2011

Reviews

[Addison Schmidt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is without a doubt the most powerful, accessible, and informative book I have read for my history major. It’s very specific (as academic historical books tend to be), and if you aren’t familiar with much of the specifics surrounding apartheid (I was not), I’d recommend at least reading the Wikipedia page before diving into this, but otherwise I think it’s very accessible to the average reader. The author does take some creative liberties with her storytelling that seem to blur the line between specific factual happenings and her own portrayals based on conglomerated interviews, but this makes for a strong narrative from a reader’s perspective. The visualizations and stories told by former Black domestic workers about how they were treated by the white families they worked for and lived amongst are haunting and will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. This book is an examination of apartheid in its most intimate form— in the home—and demonstrates how complex and interpersonal dehumanization can become in a society which privileges above all the separation of one group in the name of another’s “superiority.”