More than a million black South African women are domestic workers. These nannies, housekeepers and chars continue to occupy a central place in in postapartheid society. But it is an ambivalent position. Precariously situated between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, white and black, these women are at once intimately connected and at a distant remove from the families they serve. 'Like family' they may be, but they and their employers know they can never be real family.Ena Jansen shows that domestic worker relations in South Africa were shaped by the institution of slavery at the Cape. This established social hierarchies and patterns of behaviour and interaction that persist to the present day, and are still evident in the predicament of the black female domestic worker.To support her argument, Jansen examines the representation of domestic workers in a diverse range of texts in English and Afrikaans. Authors include Andre Brink, JM Coetzee, Imraan Coovadia, Nadine Gordimer, Elsa Joubert, Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Kopano Matlwa, Es'kia Mphahlele, Sisonke Msimang, Zukiswa Wanner and Zoe Wicomb.. Later texts by black authors offer wry and subversive insights into the madam/maid nexus, capturing paradoxes relating to shifting power relationships.Like Family is an updated version of the award-winning Soos familie published in 2015 and the highly-acclaimed 2016 Dutch translation, Bijna familie.

About the Author
Ena Jansen was professor of South African literature at the University of Amsterdam until 2016. She obtained her PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand where she lectured for 16 years.

Reviews
Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, Like Family provides rich insights into the `contact zone' of domestic service that paradoxically involves both intimacy and distance. In doing so, Jansen deepens our understanding of how the institution both reflects and reproduces the savage inequalities on which our society continues to be based. - Jacklyn Cock, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand and author of Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation



Book Information
ISBN 9781776143511
Author Ena Jansen
Format Paperback
Page Count 382
Imprint Wits University Press
Publisher Wits University Press