Distant Companions by Karen Tranberg Hansen

Author:Karen Tranberg Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Servants and Other Workers

Under the law, most urban African wage earners shared inequality: they were all servants in generic, legal terms. Personal or domestic servants differed from the rest mainly in regard to their intimate contact with those in power. Some of them lived on the premises, at a distance to be sure. Contemporary descriptions indicate that many lived in the African parts of town in Broken Hill, Livingstone, and Lusaka, and in some of the copperbelt towns employers insisted on them not living on the premises. According to Clyde Mitchell’s 10-percent-sample survey conducted between 1950 and 1955 of all dwellings in which Africans lived in the line-of-rail towns and the copperbelt, approximately 66 percent of the servants lived on the premises, 20 percent were housed in mining and industrial compounds, 12 percent lived in local authority townships and the rest in squatter compounds.7 In the postdepression years, servants’ wages were much the same as those of other workers. Until the mid-1940s, wages were pegged at the level of farmhands’ and remained at this level for unskilled workers on the mines as late as 1953.8 Yet servants are likely to have been better fed and clothed because of castoffs from the employers’ households.

If day-to-day living experiences when off work in private households and mines were shared to some extent by servants, miners, and the self-employed, so were the impacts of economic booms and busts during the 1930s. Servants were second to miners in the number of people employed in the rapidly growing mining towns. In towns away from the mining areas such as Lusaka and Livingstone, they comprised the single largest category of wage workers. The territorywide figures of domestic service employment almost doubled between 1929 and 1930, from 8,832 to 12,470. Over the same period employment in mining grew from 17,608 to 28,004, an increase of the same magnitude. As the two occupations gained momentum from the same process of overall economic growth, so they declined when the depression hit Northern Rhodesia, and both servants and miners were laid off. In 1933 employment in mines stood at 9,920 and in domestic service at 9,335. When the mines resumed their operation in the mid-1930s, both occupational sectors grew rapidly. From 1938 to 1943 employment in mines increased from 23,754 to 41,987 and in domestic service from 11,511 to 18,000. At the end of the war 20,000 Africans were employed as domestic servants in Northern Rhodesia.9

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