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necessitated by inadequate public transport options. Edwin’s job involved general cleaning duties and washing clothes. Over the next few years, he held a range of other jobs at the seminary, including as a gardener, a kitchen assistant, and a cook. He stopped working at the seminary in 2012 because his contract was not renewed. By the time he left, all of the indoor domestic service roles at the seminary were held
Masters and servants explores the politics of colonial mastery and domestic servitude in the neighbouring British tropical colonies of Singapore and Darwin. Like other port cities throughout Southeast Asia, Darwin and Singapore were crossroads where goods, ideas, cultures and people from the surrounding regions mixed and mingled via the steam ships lines. The focus of this book is on how these connections produced a common tropical colonial culture in these sites. A key element of this shared culture was the presence of a multiethnic entourage of domestic servants in colonial homes and a common preference for Chinese ‘houseboys’. Through an exploration of master-servant relationships within British, white Australian and Chinese homes, this book illustrates the centrality of the domestic realm to the colonial project. The colonial home was a contact zone which brought together European colonists, non-white migrants and Indigenous people, most often through the domestic service relationship. Rather than a case of unquestioned mastery and devoted servitude, relationships between masters and servants had the potential not only to affirm but also destabilise the colonial hierarchy. The intimacies, antagonisms and anxieties of the relationships between masters and servants provide critical insights into the dynamics of colonial power with the British empire.
for a job at the time they signed up for the project, while the others stated they were working as housewives, studying or working independently (e.g. domestic service workers, pastry chefs, manicurists). Among the women in the study, eight stated that their first paid work experience in Brazil was in the framework of the digital work pilot project. The majority of participants declared having access to a phone (their own or shared) while not having a computer or internet connection in
This book has explored the relationship between British colonialism and domestic service in Singapore and Darwin from the 1880s to the 1930s. Darwin was colonised in 1869 with the intention that it would become a bustling port city in the image of Singapore. The British and white Australian residents of the town mimicked the lifestyles of the British in Singapore, donning
through a hole in my sole. I’ll have to get a new second-hand pair after payday. 1 So narrates Cephas, the protagonist of Mbozi Haimbe’s prize-winning short story, ‘Madam’s Sister’. Published just a few years after I completed interviews for this book, the story puts domestic service in
Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), domestic worker trade unions, the Zambia Federation of Employers (ZFE), and maid centres from Lusaka and the Copperbelt. The aims of the meeting were to share knowledge and understanding about labour issues in the domestic service sector and the challenges of improving domestic workers’ conditions. 2 It took place three years after the ILO’s adoption of Convention
I met Mercy Banda in July 2013, soon after I arrived in Lusaka to conduct research on the history of domestic service in the city. Mercy was eighteen years old and lived with her grandparents next to Bauleni compound, an informal settlement to the southeast of the city. She had recently completed her secondary education at Kabulonga Girls’ High School, with high grades
and young Aboriginal women of mixed descent came to predominate in service. The arrival of white women and the coinciding decline of male servants was part of a pattern in many tropical colonies in this period. This has led historians to suggest that the arrival of increasing numbers of white women in the colonies resulted in the feminisation of domestic service in the tropics. In Malaya, Singapore
Esnart Lungu’s life story provides key insights into the history of girls’ employment in domestic service in southern Africa’s post-colonial cities. In March 1981, then-eleven-year-old Esnart left her parents’ rural home in Sinda, in Zambia’s Eastern Province, and set out for Lusaka. She travelled to the city to become a live-in maid for a family she had never met
immigration officials, along with representatives of the New Settlers’ League and the Country Women’s Association, she went to her first situation.1 After that, Nellie Dear disappears from the records. Between the wars, thousands of young British women trained for a life of domestic service, some staying in Britain and others emigrating overseas. Emigration, particularly for girls and younger single women, had become a focus of activity for a host of voluntary organisations and poor law agencies during the nineteenth century, actively supported by the Dominions governments