Distant Companions
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Anthropology of Contemporary Issues A SERIES EDITED BY ROGER SANJEK Farm, Work and Fieldwork: American Agriculture in Anthropological Perspective Edited by M ichael Chibnik The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans by M icaela di Leonardo Lord I’m Coming Home: Everyday Aesthetics in Tidewater, North Carolina by John Forrest Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan by H ill Gates Accommodation without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School by M argaret A. Gibson Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town b y C a r o l J. G r e e n h o u s e Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 by Karen Tranberg Hansen Rx Spiritist as Needed: A Study of a Puerto Rican Community Mental Health Resource by Alan Harwood Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry Edited by Jack Kugelmass American Odyssey: Haitians in New York by M ichel S. Laguerre From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community by Louise Lamphere State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring an Industrial Society by Janet W. Salaff Uneasy Endings: Daily Life in an American Nursing Home by Renée Rose Shield Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York by Moshe Shokeid History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in the Anthropology o f Law by June Starr and Jane F. C ollier City of Green Benches: Growing Old in a New Downtown by Maria D. Vesperi Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect by H arriet W hitehead Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C. by Brett W illiams Womens Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley b y Pa t r i c i a Za v e l l a Distant Companions SERVANTS AND EMPLOYERS IN ZAMBIA, 1900-1985 Karen Tranberg Hansen Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1989 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hansen, Karen Tranberg. Distant companions. Includes index. 1. Domestics—Zambia—History—20th century. 2. Sexual division of labor—Zambia—History—20th century. 3. Master and servant—Zambia— History—20 century. 4. Zambia—Social conditions. 5. Zambia—Colonial influence. —I. Title. HD6072.2.Z33H36 1989 331.7′6164046′096894 88-47771 ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2217-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-9546-5 (pbk.) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For Olga Hansen-Hauge Contents Preface xi Abbreviations xv Introduction: The Problem and Its Context 1 Part I A Fixture of Colonial Society 1. The Creation of a Gender Role: The Male Domestic Servant 29 2. Women for Hire? Sex and Gender in Domestic Service 84 3. Troubled Lives: Servants and Their Employers in the Preindependence Era 154 Part II Encountering Domestic Service 4. Research on and Life with Servants 197 Part III Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Changes 5. Persistence and Change 217 6. A Transformed Occupation 244 7. Lives beyond the Workplace 267 8. Servants Everywhere: Conclusions 293 Appendix 1 Servants’ Wages 303 Appendix 2 Servants’ Budgets 305 Index 315 [vii] Illustrations, Maps, and Tables Plates Edith Cecil-Porch, two men companions with trophies, and servants during caravan trek 46 The household staff of S. R. Denny, Kasempa, c. 1930. From left to right, probably: piccanin, washboy, cook, houseboy, and tableboy 46 African cook 62 Michek and Kosam at Kawamba, 1947 62 Amon Chapusha and his wife, Lusaka, 1950s 81 Amon Chapusha (extreme left) and co-workers at Express Dry Cleaners, Lusaka, 1950s 82 Theresa Thompson, her nanny, and a friend of the nanny, 1949 150 Carole Stokes and nanny, Kitwe 1955/56 151 The children of the Ronald Bush household and their nanny in the garden in Lusaka 151 Erlbert taking Geoffrey Bush, aged 3, to nursery school 152 Michek, his small daughter, and Ian Thompson, 1952 152 Patson Satepa, setting the table in Mazabuka, 1964 235 Edson Banda with Faides and Joe, Lusaka 1984 270 Gertrude Banda with Faides and Joe, Lusaka 1984 270 Euclid Nkumbula at work in the kitchen, Lusaka 1984 271 Euclid Nkumbula, daughter Nellie, and wife Betty, Lusaka 1984 271 Maps 1. Southern Africa, c. 1924 32 2. Northern Rhodesia, c. 1924 35 3. Zambia, main towns and cities, 1964 218 4. Lusaka, residential and commercial areas, 1983 224 [ix] Illustrations Tables 1. Number of African men employed in Northern Rhodesia, by occupation, 1927-1948 78-79 2. European population of Zambia, by year, 1904-1965 89 3. Age and sex structure of the European population of Zambia, 1911-1956 90 4. Number of Africans employed in urban areas of Zambia, by area, 1931, and by sex, 1946 121 5. Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex, 1951-1957 130-131 6. Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex, 1961-1968 132-133 7. Increases in annual average earnings in Zambia, by occupational sector, 1954-1965 288 M Preface “When I was taught anthropology,” wrote James Murray, who from 1929 on spent over thirty years in the colonial service in Northern Rhodesia, “we learnt how to put bird seeds in skulls, about totemism and exogamy, and a Mr. Malinowski startled us all with a theory about ignorance of paternity. We also read little bits in a long book called ‘The Golden Bough/ I do not think anybody taught us about masters and servants. Certainly I cannot remember Dr. R. R. Marett doing so.”1 And Shirley E. Roberts added this perspective when responding to my request for information about her life and times with servants: “I would find it exceedingly difficult to explain to a modern American the kind of life led by a colonial child of 50 years ago without writing a treatise on the subject—and I haven’t the time.”2 Between these two statements lies the troublesome story I have been concerned in this book to retrieve and unravel from about 1900 in Northern Rhodesia through the mid-1980s in Zambia. Masters then assumed that they defined both the identity of servants and the nature of their relation- ship. The new anthropologists of the post-World War II era ask different questions about the structuring of social relationships from those asked by James Murray’s teachers. Relationships long taken for granted are today becoming problematized in research enterprises that are informed in fresh ways by history, the other social sciences, and literary criticism. The study of gender relations, in particular, has not developed from any one single theoretical tradition. This has offered me a challenging range of frameworks 1. James Murray, personal communication, October 19, 1986. 2. Shirley E. Roberts, personal communication, November 1, 1986. [xi] Preface from which to choose in constructing an explanation of questions of power, ideology, and economics. Masters and servants are both the products and the makers of this story, and their relationship persists, in a transformed shape, in postcolonial Zambia. While masters and servants were not studied in Murray’s days, the very fabrication of these terms and of men s and women’s place in the evolving social order and their contemporary changes is one of the central objects of this book. I use these—and many other words such as primitive, houseboy, and piccanin—without quotation marks or italics not because I accept their normative weight, but because I wish to acknowledge their role in structuring relationships of domination and subordination by race, gender, and class. The practices these terms helped to structure were anchored variously in time and space. To situate my study in those con- texts, I have used the contemporary place names and English orthography. My observations close toward the end of 1985, just before a major Interna- tional Monetary Fund-induced devaluation of the Zambian currency and the introduction of a foreign-currency auctioning system set a severely depressed economy on a further economic downslide. Later economic de- velopments in Zambia may have adversely affected the already strained relationship between servants and their employers which I describe in this book. A hard-earned way of making a living is likely under these circum- stances to become even more difficult, and the vexing relationship between this book s two main sets of actors who meet at a distance in the private household may become even more troublesome in its changed reenact- ment. The terms employed in the colonial discourse flattened servants out, rarely allowing any sense of servants as individuals, as persons with lives and desires of their own, to enter. Yet although the colonial employer had the upper hand, the relationship between servant and master was a prod- uct of their joint interaction, and servants participated crucially in structur- ing it. I am concerned to restore that sense of life and agency to servants and to depict them as individuals rather than invisible working hands, and so I seek where possible to identify them by their names and to anchor them beyond the locus of work in the context of their own social lives.