Dear Juju,
Like a true pioneer, albeit one who has been dipping into the emergency supply of moonflowers, you continue to burn your bridges as you forge blindly ahead. I’m not sure if hitching your wagon to a dead horse will get you very far, but perhaps Thabo Mbeki really can be resurrected. Death or Glory – who would have thought that you and the Queen’s Royal Lancers would one day share a motto?
Your dream of seeing white domestic workers slaving away in township homes within the next ten years is right up there with Martin Luther King’s dream of achieving freedom and equality in a non-racial America. In fact, your dream is better than his. King’s dream remains just that. You, on the other hand, will one day walk through the streets of Polokwane shouting, “White servants at last! White servants at last! Thank God almighty, white servants at last!”
However, old buddy, and I hate to be the one to tell you this, your dream has the potential to cripple this great country. As appealing as you find the image of white women scrubbing your floors, it will, in fact, be the menfolk down on their knees. They will be begging for a return to a time when domestic workers took nothing more than thirty minutes for lunch and asked for nothing but cleaning products.
White women would make appalling domestic workers. They will think nothing of pitching up late after their weekly pedicure. Many of them play tennis in the mornings and you’d be lucky to see them before midday. They are going to want to make themselves breakfast and watch television while they eat. Ensure you have DStv or they will make your life a misery. Leave a damp cloth in clear view. Once they are done with breakfast, they may choose to pick it up and start the day with a little light dusting. On the other hand, they may choose not to. Don’t, for god’s sake, tell them what to do.
On the positive side, white women rarely ask for time off to attend funerals in the Eastern Cape. However, they do suffer from an inordinate number of headaches and other ailments that are impossible to verify from a medical point of view. My advice is that if they are not feeling well, let them lie down. In your bed, preferably. They will need a small bell to ring whenever they require something from the kitchen, the chemist or the beautician.
Back in the old days, more than one domestic worker found herself in a compromising position with her male employer, some of whom were hot-blooded Afrikaners so thoroughly unable to resist the allure of a woman on her hands and knees that they would draw the curtains to spare God the unpleasant sight of the Dutch Reformed Church’s code being violated in the most unseemly of fashions.
You can forget this kind of malarky with white women for the simple reason that they enjoy sex in much the same way that they enjoy stabbing themselves in the eyeballs with a red-hot crochet hook. And don’t even try using coercion. Many of them can fell a grown man by raising nothing more than their eyebrows while delivering a single well-aimed sentence.
If you have a domestic worker who comes from a poor white background, she will steal stuff from you. And I don’t mean sugar and Disprin. Once she has rearranged the cushions on the sofa while watching Oprah, she will take a nap. Be sure to wake her at 5pm or she will charge you for overtime. After you have paid her 150 times the minimum wage, she will drive off in your car. Your wife’s shoes will be in the boot and most of your Johnny Walker Black will be in her stomach.
If you really have to put white women to work, I suggest you send them down the mines where nobody can hear their incessant complaining. Training won’t be necessary because so many are gold diggers these days.