Distant Companions

Front matter

Distant Companions

SERVANTS AND EMPLOYERS IN ZAMBIA, 1900-1985

Karen Tranberg Hansen

Part I A Fixture of Colonial Society

. The Creation of a Gender Role: The Male Domestic Servant . Women for Hire? Sex and Gender in Domestic Service . Troubled Lives: Servants and Their Employers in the

Preindependence Era

Part Il Encountering Domestic Service

Part III Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Changes Appendix 1 Servants’ Wages Appendix 2 Servants’ Budgets

[vii]

xi

Illustrations, Maps, and Tables

Plates

Edith Cecil-Porch, two men companions with trophies, and servants during caravan trek

The household staff of S. R. Denny, Kasempa, c. 1930. From left to right, probably: piccanin, washboy, cook, houseboy, and tableboy

African cook

Michek and Kosam at Kawamba, 1947

Amon Chapusha and his wife, Lusaka, 1950s

Amon Chapusha (extreme left) and co-workers at Express Dry Cleaners, Lusaka, 1950s

Theresa Thompson, her nanny, and a friend of the nanny, 1949

Carole Stokes and nanny, Kitwe 1955/56

The children of the Ronald Bush household and their nanny in the garden in Lusaka

Erlbert taking Geoffrey Bush, aged 3, to nursery school

Michek, his small daughter, and Ian Thompson, 1952

Patson Satepa, setting the table in Mazabuka, 1964

Edson Banda with Faides and Joe, Lusaka 1984

Gertrude Banda with Faides and Joe, Lusaka 1984

Euclid Nkumbula at work in the kitchen, Lusaka 1984

Euclid Nkumbula, daughter Nellie, and wife Betty, Lusaka 1984

Southern Africa, c. 1924

Northern Rhodesia, c. 1924

Zambia, main towns and cities, 1964

Lusaka, residential and commercial areas, 1983

[ix]

Illustrations

Tables

2. 3.

Number of African men employed in Northern Rhodesia, by occupation, 1927—1948

European population of Zambia, by year, 1904—1965

Age and sex structure of the European population of Zambia, 1911-1956

. Number of Africans employed in urban areas of Zambia, by area, 1931, and by sex, 1946

. Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex, 1951-1957

. Estimated number of Africans employed in industry and services in Zambia, by occupational field and by sex, 1961-1968

. Increases in annual average earnings in Zambia, by occupational sector, 1954—1965

78-79 89

130-131

132-133

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.”! 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 relationship. 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 contexts, I have used the contemporary place names and English orthography. My observations close toward the end of 1985, just before a major International 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 developments 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 circumstances 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 reenactment.

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 product of their joint interaction, and servants participated crucially in structuring 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. I identify their employers by name wherever possible as well. The exception to this occurs in my discussion of a large sample survey I conducted in Lusaka from 1983 to 1984, in which anonymous respondents were selected at random.

The Zambian case is but a variation on the story of domestic labor which has no final, or single, conclusion, for it is still unfolding. Domestic service is not an archaic remnant of feudal practices persisting only in remote corners of the late twentieth-century world. It represents a labor process that takes many different forms, and it employs growing, not decreasing,

[xii]

Preface numbers of workers in an advanced capitalist economy such as that of the United States today. The book’s relevance must be seen in this context. As a study with comparative implications, its findings pertain not only to southern Africa, Africa as such, or the Third World, but to our discussion in the West about ongoing changes in the gender division of labor in the wake of the transformation of the postwar world economy. To highlight my work’s pertinence in this wider context, I take the kinds of calculated leaps at which a trained historian might wince: from past documents to observations from the early 1980s, and from Zambia's capital to the metropolitan United States. I hope the challenge this offers to conventional thinking about domestic service will balance the possible loss of detail in the progression of the sequential narrative of the Zambian story.

This book is a product of my long-term research interest in Zambia, which took me to Lusaka, first between 1971 and 1972 and again in 1981. This particular study draws on two periods of fieldwork carried out in Zambia during 1983-1984 and 1985, made possible by a grant from the United States National Science Foundation, no. BNS.8303507, 1983-1985. During all my stays in Zambia I have been a Research Affiliate of the Institute for African Studies at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. Different stages of the research were supported by a grant-in-aid from the MacMillan Fund of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota for archival research in England during the summer of 1982, and by two faculty research grants from Northwestern University, facilitating my return to Zambia in 1985 and additional archival work and interviews in England during the summer of 1986.

For advice and help in the launching and completion of this study I am indebted to many individuals in Zambia, the United States, 4nd England. Among them are university colleagues at all points of this triangle, the professional staffs of several libraries and archival collections, former Northern Rhodesians now living in England, directors and support staffs of the Institute for African Studies at the University of Zambia, my host households in Lusaka, and my research assistants. Simon Ottenberg and Pierre L. van den Berghe whetted my interests in politics, ethnicity, and race relations in graduate school, and Sue Ellen Jacobs taught me the importance of considering gender as an analytical category. Susan Geiger, Allen Isaacman, and Charles Pike encouraged the first conception of the research. Special acknowledgments are due to Dick Hobson for mediating many contacts with former Northern Rhodesians in England and for cheerfully responding to my many questions; to Arnold Epstein and J. Clyde Mitchell for scrutinizing their memory and research notes for information about domestic servants during the 1950s; to Deborah Gaitskell and Andrew Roberts for historical advice; and to Ilse Mwanza for facilitating my

[xiii]

Preface activities as a research affiliate in Lusaka. But the servants and their employers in Lusaka who tolerated my curiosity deserve more than my gratitude, for without their participation this study would not have been undertaken. Among the many special persons to whom I owe so much I do wish to recognize one by name: Norah Rice of Mtendere township in Lusaka, my assistant, confidante, and chaperone in a variety of activities between 1971 and 1985, who during all these years has played the singlemost important role in making me understand what autonomy means from a low-income woman’s perspective in urban Zambia.

Because this project has spanned some years, some of my observations have found their way into print. My article “Domestic Service in Zambia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 13 (1986), summarizes some findings from Part I and Chapters 6 and 7 in Part III. “Household Work as a Man’s Job: Sex and Gender in Domestic Service in Zambia,” Anthropology Today 2 (1986), draws in part from Chapters 3 and 7. The song on pages 163—164 appeared in Peter Fraenkel, Wayaleshi (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1959), pp. 51-52, and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission. Plate no. 2 is reproduced from a photograph in the Rhodes House Library at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, and reproduced here with the permission of S. R. Denny, who owns the copyright. The remaining plates are reproductions of photographs from private collections and appear with the permission of the individuals who own them.

Several persons influenced the shaping of this book at various stages. Judith Butterman, Kusum Datta, Susan Geiger, Maria Grosz-Ngate, Dorothy Helly, Hugh McMillan, Jonathan Ngate, Ibrahim Sundiata, Robert Welsch, and Judith Wittner read individual chapters, and Susan and Henry Antkiewicz, John Comaroff, Carol Stack, Margaret Strobel, and Pierre L. van den Berghe read the entire draft. I wish to thank them all for the interest they took in reading, commenting, criticizing, and advising me in their concern to keep my tendency to ramble within manageable bounds. If I have not listened well enough, they know whom to blame. The book is dedicated to my mother, who gave me the kind of home and preparation for working life I would wish for all servants in Zambia: devoid of hierarchy and with freedom to choose.

K.T.H.

Evanston, Illinois

[xiv]

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used in the notes:

NAZ National Archives of Zambia NAZIM National Archives of Zimbabwe PRO Public Records Office, England

[xv]

Distant Companions

Introduction: The Problem and Its Context

Maids are the thing to have, according to a journalist commenting on the unexpected response to the “Win a Maid” contest launched in January 1986 by Family Circle, an American magazine with a huge readership among mainstream women. When the magazine editor in charge of the contest returned after a two-week vacation, her office was filled with boxes and bags of mail entries to the contest.1 At the end of March 1986, a weekend magazine accompanying one of Chicago’s Sunday papers featured a sweepstakes contest sponsored by a company specializing in household cleaning aids; it offered free maid service once a week for a year as the grand prize. Illustrating the contest rules was a photograph of the face of a woman in a maid’s uniform, with lace cap and collar and a willing smile, along with cleaning aids, mop, and broom.?

It is in such notices, as well as in the growing number of classified newspaper advertisements placed by women willing to hire out their labor for household work as housekeepers, cleaners, cooks, and childminders, or combinations of these, that the late-twentieth-century face of domestic

1. Bob Greene, “A Contest Tailor-Maid for Today's Woman,” Chicago Tribune, January 27, 1986, sec. 4, p. L.

2. Chicago Tribune, Weekend Magazine, March 21-23, 1986, end page. This was not a unique incident but part of a pattern that indicates how commercial interests are attuning themselves to their customers’ needs and desires. Among others of the same kind, Tanqueray, the English gin bottlers, launched a sweepstakes with the prize of an “English butler for a season or $25,000” in Gourmet, May 1986, p. 29, and Rubbermaid, a kitchen-gadget firm, featured a “win-a-maid-for-a-year sweepstakes,” worth $2,500 in cash in the New York Times Magazine, part 2, Good Health, March 29, 1987, p. 45.

service in America comes clearly into focus.3 These observations command us to question the long-held sociological assumption that paid household work has all but disappeared in contemporary Western society. And in several developing countries such as Zambia, the growth of domestic service as a segment of the wage labor force prompts additional questions concerning its predicted decline in the course of the industrialization process. Taken together, these two sets of observations invite us to reconsider the comparative dynamics of paid household work, its relation to wider economic processes and their shifts both at home and abroad; its changing faces, that is, different labor forms such as live-in and day work; the nature of the work done in private households; gender differences in the labor process; and of the consequences of all of these factors for the private lives of servants and their employers.

A good place to start exploring these questions is Zambia, a developing country in the southern part of the African continent, the geographical locus for this work. If the contests described above strike a nerve among American women, so they would in Zambia, which has only in recent years emerged from its former colonial status. The great majority of servants in the past were men as they are today, although women have entered this occupation, particularly as nannies, in growing numbers since independence. Domestic service is not “naturally” women’s work everywhere, and certainly not in Zambia. There, the question of servants is of crucial concern to madams (as female employers of servants invariably are called in southern Africa), for many of the same reasons—and for some different ones—as in the United states.

During the colonial period in what was then known as Northern Rhodesia and also since 1964 in independent Zambia, servants were and are a sine qua non of social and economic position, yet their white employers considered them problematic and their chiefly Zambian employers today still do so. The colonial period’s unequal master-servant relationship used race to distance domestics from employers. The lack of postcolonial economic development in Zambia has accentuated the opportunity gap between servants and employers. A changed relationship of distance has emerged in domestic service in which the colonial era’s racial distinctions have been replaced by class-based ones. In comparison, during the expansion of the United States’ economy in the early decades of this century, white female immigrant live-in domestics found better jobs and left the occupation to minority, especially black, women and, lately, to new female immigrants often of Third World origin who now largely do day work. More recent economic transitions and the growing need for families to have

3. This statement is based on my observation of the classified columns of “household help, wanted” and “situation wanted” in the Chicago Tribune from January 1986 through May 1987.

dual wage earners have increased the need for domestic help, which is proliferating in many forms—live-in, day work, and commercial contracting. These changed economic developments are creating a new class of domestic workers in the United States whose relationship to employers is characterized by inequality. While the evolving story of domestic service in Zambia provides an important study in its own right, it offers a comparative case that casts critical light on our own situation. Rapidly changing economies, the different, and changing, roles of men and women in paid and unpaid household work, and a growing class gap between poverty and wealth come into play in both Zambia and the United States in the mid-1980s. This situation was not anticipated by conventional sociological wisdom and it requires new thinking.

In this book I describe and analyze continuities and changes in domestic service in Zambia from 1900 to 1985 by a retrospective examination of how the world of domestic servitude was created, maintained, sometimes changed, and at times resisted as a result of the interaction between servants and their employers, both men and women. I also seek to capture how that changing world was experienced in the everyday lives of servants and employers; how their relationships with members of their own households and others in the wider society shaped this peculiar world of work; and how the world beyond the household as a work locus at times was affected by servants’ activities. Good household management revolved around strictly upheld distinctions between the servant and the employer, and it also turned on sexual criteria. Human-made distinctions, construed as essential difference in culture, race, class, and sex, turned the servant’s personhood in otherness, and the changing construction of difference is a central concern throughout this book.

Why write a book about an occupational domain that according to conventional sociological wisdom has been considered to be obsolete in contemporary society?4 That belief was based on a limited number of studies, conducted mainly in northwestern Europe and North America, which described changes in domestic service as involving a transition from male to female by the end of the 1700s, and its remaining women’s main source of urban wage income till the second or third decade of the present century, when wage-labor opportunities opened up in new fields. In the wake of

4. Lewis A. Coser, “Servants: The Obsolescence of an Occupational Role,” Social Forces 52 (1973): 31-40.

5. For standard description and analysis of this scenario, see, e.g., Vilhelm Aubert, “The Housemaid—An Occupational Role in Crisis,” Acta Sociologica 1 (1955-1956): 149-158; Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975); and Theresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernization of Household Service in England and France, 1820-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1976).

that process the time-honored species of the genus servant, the live-in domestic, supposedly disappeared. Extrapolations from this pattern of near certainty were extended to the developing world with the suggestion that a similar process would occur there.

This thinking has died hard for a number of reasons. One has to do with the lack of serious scholarly attention given to this occupation in the West and elsewhere. An occupational domain that for two centuries or more had been the single largest wage employment avenue for women remained largely forgotten. In the scholarship on the developing countries, the working lives of domestic servants were barely explored, in spite of the fact that paid domestic service often provided one of the earliest means to incorporate subject peoples into a newly created world of wage labor. Miners, railway workers, and traders in the markets were perhaps more conspicuous, and certainly more often targets for study.”

Another reason concerns the unilinear assumptions of modernization theory that have influenced our thinking about development. They center around ideas of convergence of the economic development path in the industrial world and newly industrializing countries. Modernization theory has not held up well in the face of the actual development experience in most parts of the Third World. And advanced capitalism at home has not been accompanied by the expected promethean industrial expansion. Rather, the old manufacturing structures are crumbling as the West is undergoing partial deindustrialization and transnational corporations locate manufacturing plants in Third World countries, in an overall process that is shaping a new international division of labor.® In the course of this transformation process, the composition of the Western wage labor force is changing, not only by sector, but also by sex. The manufacturing sector is shrinking while employment in service industries and service-oriented work is on the rise. The opportunity gap is widening. Today in the United States women of better and worse means are meeting in contractual employment relationships centered on household and child care which are recasting the live-in domestic service relationship of a previous era into new labor forms.

6. David Chaplin, “Domestic Service and Industrialization,” Comparative Studies in Sociology 1 (1978): 97—127.

7. For an overview of prominent topics and themes in the study of African labor history, see Bill Freund, “Labor and Labor History in Africa: A Review of the Literature,” African Studies Review 27 (1984): 1-58.

8. Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), provides a general statement on this emerging process. Special attention to gender in this process is offered in June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly, eds., Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983).

Far from having disappeared, one labor form of domestic service, namely day work, undertaken by workers who live out, appears to be growing.

The processes outlined above are not so far removed from Zambia as they might appear. Economic opportunities among all population segments in that country are linked subordinately to developments in the West. While Zambia is not hosting any global industry for assembly of Western manufactured parts for export to the West, it is intimately linked to world market ups and downs through exports of its chief source of revenue, copper. Aside from mining, there is little local industry or manufacture, and what little there is depends heavily on imported raw materials. When the downturn in the world economy of the early 1970s hit Zambia, the economy stagnated and overall employment shrank. Yet within this decline, the domestic service sector and the government sector have continued to grow. Rapid urbanization with one of the highest rates in Africa, if not the Third World, daily adds new potential workers to a labor force, of whom fewer and fewer find wage work. The opportunity structure has become markedly skewed and the gap between poor and rich is widening.’ With it, new distinctions are being forged between fellow citizens as more and more black Zambians go to work as servants for black Zambian employers. As a result of the postcolonial indigenization of the economy, more Zambians than ever before work in middle- and upper-level positions in government, parastatal companies, and in the few remaining private firms. Clerking, teaching, and nursing jobs are held increasingly by Zambian women. These households account for the growth since independence in 1964 of the servant-employing class. They, the new expatriates, and the remaining old-timers of white or Asian background all employ servants.

Women in Zambia want household help. Not maids, but male servants, for their preferred servant is a man. They have few positive remarks to make about women servants, who are relatively recent entrants to this particular segment of the labor force. Today, paid domestic service is not gender-typed as woman’s work everywhere, nor was it so historically. The Zambian case allows me to question the application of a biological metaphor in accounts of the social relations in domestic service which stress the occupation’s function as a “natural” extension of women’s reproductive role. Gender roles are not given; they are made. Their construction depends on a complex interweaving of cultural factors and social practices with economic forces and questions of power, and their unraveling is central to this book.

9. For analysis of recent socioeconomic conditions in Zambia, see Cherry Gertzel, ed., The Dynamics of the One-Party State in Zambia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

I set about the task of describing the empirical processes that affect servants and their employers by approaching domestic service at several different, sometimes overlapping, levels of analysis, linking cultural, demographic, and labor market factors over time. I seek to incorporate a sense of history, and I aim throughout to capture how servants and their employers experienced their unequal companionship in a changing world in a way that brings life to their world. My concerns are with changes in the nature of the servant-employer relationship, with special attention to differences in the labor process depending on whether the servant is a woman or a man; with changes in the type of work that is carried out in private households; with the effects that the work of a domestic has on the servant’s own household and-off-the-job activities, and the ways in which such social practices in turn affect the job situation; with the structure of the labor force in domestic service, over time and in relation to overall employment patterns, and by sex. I am also concerned with the changing relationship among domestic servants, and between them and other workers—that is to say, with the questions of whether or not—and, if so, when—they constitute a class in terms of objective indicators as well as of felt identity of interests. The final issue I explore concerns the broader dynamics in paid household work between a developing country like Zambia and a Western country, such as the United States. In that effort, I seek to bring my findings from Zambia to bear on developments closer to home, and ultimately on the task of throwing light on the place of paid household work in the changing economic context of advanced capitalism.

The Problem of Domestic Service

But why domestic service? What’s the study for, anyway? as some of the people I interviewed asked when I approached them in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, between 1983 and 1985. There is more to this than culture, demography, and labor market factors in Zambia, although these factors all bear upon it in complex ways. I wish to stress that the at times fascinating, yet mostly depressing, story of domestic service in Zambia speaks to larger issues. As I hinted at before, some of these issues concern inequalities in opportunity and income—in short, class—which prompted the creation of and fuels today’s reproduction of a dependent, subordinate labor form— paid domestic service—in various disguises across time and space. Its continued existence is not to be understood as an archaic remnant of the early phases of capitalist development. Vast present-day income gaps coupled with distinctions in consumption styles are central to the production of domestic service, which in turn plays a focal role in reproducing these distinctions. Because of this double centrality, domestic service is a key occupational domain to study for purposes of clarifying the mediation of poverty and wealth which takes place in the encounter across the private household’s class chasm beyond the factory gates and the office, and is so intimately linked to developments in these institutions.

The comments just made may read as if the larger issues in this study are revealed merely by attributing an economic function to domestic service: it reproduces class privilege. Such an explanation might perhaps work, if made on the basis of aggregate statistical data and national input-output statistics. But it would tell us little about the making of this particular labor form. Nor would it tell us how the relation sometimes was resisted, at times changed if not transformed, yet reproduced over time into one or several simultaneously existing forms of paid domestic labor. And the explanation would leave out completely any understanding of this occupational domain as a created world of labor, a product of the lived and changing experiences of women and men, servants and employers, as well as other members of the society of which they are all part.

The larger issues of this book, then, revolve around inequality, and specifically what it has meant and how it has been experienced in the relationship between men and women servants and their employers from different generations and of various cultural, national, or ethnic backgrounds, from about the turn of the century through the mid-1980s in Zambia. Inequality is at the core of their relationship. It is the basis that structures the labor process and informs the asymmetrical encounters between the chief actors in domestic service—servants and employers— whose created places are construed as belonging to distinctly different worlds. Domestic service, I claim, at least in the live-in version I set out to trace retrospectively in Zambia, and perhaps as well under conditions of day work, can only operate smoothly in situations where servants and employers are considered different from each other. These differences are constructed and informed by essentialist notions of race, culture, sexuality and class. Highlighted differentially, but not incidentally, across time and space, these differences mask, at least temporarily, the co-presence and participation of servant and employer in a shared world.

This paradox of conspicuous presence and social invisibility first struck me when I stayed with Danish relatives in Nairobi before traveling up-country on my first stint of fieldwork as an undergraduate in 1969. I grew up in a society permeated by egalitarian values and in a home free of any gender- and aged-based hierarchy. My father died when I was five years old, and my mother, then forty-eight, went back to work to support her household of three girls and one boy aged between five and seventeen. There was never any question of women not doing things on their own, for we had to. Our participation and initiatives were counted on, and our presence acknowledged. And there were no authoritarian restrictions placed to limit our ambitions. My reaction in Nairobi was one of distinct dislike of what I experienced as the awkward presence of the paid hand who was regarded more as a thing than a person. This experience repeated itself in 1971 when I began my first of several research periods in Zambia, whenever I stayed in a servant-keeping household. Although my research over the years has taken me into Lusaka’s low-income areas, where I have tried to clarify the forces that influence women’s work in the home, yard, market, and city, I remain puzzled and troubled by the deeply sedimented weight of domestic service, which it seems to me most people in Zambia take for granted.