Home Economics: Domestic Service and Gender in Urban Southern Africa

Domestic service has long been one of the largest forms of urban employment across southern Africa. Home economics provides the first comprehensive history of this essential sector in the decades following independence and the end of apartheid. Focusing on Lusaka and drawing wider comparisons, the book traces how Black workers and employers adapted existing models of domestic service as part of broader responses to changing gendered employment patterns, economic decline, and endemic poverty. It reveals how kin-based domestic service gradually displaced wage labour and how women and girl workers came to dominate kin-based and waged domestic service, with profound consequences for labour regulation and worker organising. Theoretically innovative and empirically rich, the book provides essential insights into debates about gender, work, and urban economies that are critical to understanding southern Africa’s post-colonial and post-apartheid history. – .