Domestic servants were a central feature of colonial society throughout Africa, especially in urban areas. They worked in almost every European, Asian,Footnote 1 and Arab home in Dar es Salaam, the capital of British colonial Tanganyika Territory,Footnote 2 and formed nearly half the working class in the city.Footnote 3 Ninety-seven percent of the servants in Tanganyika were African men.Footnote 4 In the 1920s and 1930s households typically employed numerous houseboys who each specialized in a specific task, such as cooking, laundry, cleaning, or childcare. During the early decades of colonial rule, domestic service was a skilled, dignified occupation many men sought because it earned them more money and respect than most other employment opportunities. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, the World War II economic crisis, the capital's soaring population, and the introduction of new labor regulations radically transformed the occupation.Footnote 5 New socioeconomic pressures caused employers to hire fewer, more generalized servants who would perform more work for less money. By the time Tanganyika achieved political independence in 1961, servants were among the lowest paid workers in Dar es Salaam.Footnote 6 As it became more exploitative and poorly paid, domestic service increasingly undermined masculinity. In response to the degradation of their occupation, in 1945 servants formed Tanganyika's first African labor union, The African Cooks, Washermen, and House Servants Association (ACWHSA).
This article analyzes the relationship between masculinity and domestic service by examining how servants resisted the changing culture and realities of their work in British colonial Dar es Salaam. The limited literature on male servants suggests they are humiliated and emasculated by their occupation because household work is traditionally considered “a woman's job.”Footnote 7 Yet, the relationship between domestic service and masculinity is much more complex, especially in the colonial context. During the early decades of the twentieth century, male servants along the East African coast “gained a reputation as excellent cooks and valets (houseboys)” and their occupation conveyed “a certain amount of prestige.”Footnote 8 The transformation of the social and material culture of domestic service during the 1940s and 1950s made it progressively more emasculating. Servants’ low wages undermined their financial ability to maintain their households, while long work hours left them little time to spend with their families or participate in community events. Gradually, servants became unskilled laborers rather than specialized workers. Moreover, the humiliations servants experienced at the hands of their European and Asian employers became increasingly resented and shameful as anticolonial sentiment grew in the 1950s. The primary threat to servants’ masculinity in Tanganyika during the latter half of the colonial era was not the seemingly female nature of domestic work, but the growing limitations the occupation placed on their ability to achieve the financial and social capital required to achieve senior status and respect within the African community. Whereas it had once been a highly sought-after and prestigious occupation, domestic servants like Saleh bin Fundi and Lorenzi Mikongoti now declared, “I find that my trade is a bad trade.”Footnote 9
Trying to preserve their eroding sense of honor and masculinity, throughout the 1940s and 1950s the servants’ union struggled to achieve livable wages and better working conditions that would enable men to provide for their families and restore the dignity of the occupation. Scholarship suggests that servants around the world “compose a category of labor historically viewed as unorganizable” because of their unique working conditions: they are physically divided since they work in the private residences of numerous different employers and their long work hours give them little time to meet to discuss labor matters.Footnote 10 Domestic servants are usually not perceived as “real” workers, and the often informal arrangements made between employers and employees are viewed as private affairs.Footnote 11 Servants in Tanganyika certainly experienced these challenges. The colonial context provided additional obstacles—primarily, a hostile colonial state that viewed labor organizers as political threats who were trying to undermine the imperial project (which they often were). In fact, in 1949 the Labour Department canceled ACWHSA's registration. Rather than quietly fading away, union leaders restrategized.
In the midst of a highly politicized labor movement, domestic servants allied themselves with Tanganyika's emerging anticolonial nationalist party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), and its new centralized labor organization, the Tanganyika Federation of Labor (TFL). With the support of TANU and TFL, the servants’ union reemerged in 1955 as the much larger, better organized Tanganyika Domestic and Hotel Workers Union (TDHWU). Soon after its inception, TDHWU initiated one of the largest labor strikes in Dar es Salaam's history, during which thousands of workers supported the servants’ strike for improved working conditions, job security, and respect. Analyzing the history and demands of ACWHSA and TDHWU provides new insight on the difficulties servants faced organizing in the colonial context and the strategies they devised to overcome these challenges as well as a new perspective on the relationship between masculinity and domestic service.
The Transformation of Domestic Service in Colonial Dar es Salaam
Although women performed the domestic labor in their own households in most African societies, domestic service was an overwhelmingly male occupation throughout the continent during the colonial era.Footnote 12 Some African women worked in European and Asian homes, mostly as ayahs (nannies or childcare providers), but until the late 1950s domestic service was considered men's work. Scholars have explained this apparent paradox by pointing to employers’ concerns about possible sexual temptations posed by female servants,Footnote 13 the unwillingness of African women to participate in the wage labor economy,Footnote 14 and changes in how masculinity became defined during colonialism. As historian Janet Bujra argues, during the colonial period masculine identity “became strongly bound up with earning a wage.” Male servants overcame “an aversion to performing what [was] normally seen as ‘women's work’” because they performed these tasks for money.Footnote 15 During the first two decades of British colonial rule, men in Tanganyika did not merely resort to domestic work. To the dismay of colonial officials grappling with agricultural labor shortages, many African men actively sought and preferred domestic service to other types of labor.Footnote 16 They viewed it to be a respectable and an unequivocally male occupation. “The place for women,” one male cook explained to his European employer who hired a young African girl to work in his upcountry home, “is not in the house.”Footnote 17
Domestic service offered numerous unique benefits that bolstered male status. It paid more than many other occupations, and, while most urban jobs offered daily contracts, it provided the stability of monthly contracts and regular pay.Footnote 18 Their livable, reliable wages gave servants economic security that made them attractive husbands capable of financially supporting a family and reputable members of the community who could participate in and/or sponsor social events. Establishing and maintaining an independent household and being an active member of the community were key components of male honor in colonial Africa; they entitled men to respect.Footnote 19 Domestic service also provided access to housing, food, and luxury items such as soaps, medicine, and European clothing that other Africans could not afford or obtain. Some servants learned to play tennis and cards with their employers; others listened to western music and radio programs. Since European goods were highly prized, houseboys’ access to and familiarity with western goods and ways of life enticed African women and earned houseboys a reputation as great womanizers in towns.Footnote 20 Affiliation with the households of the upper strata of colonial society also enabled servants to acquire respect within the African community.Footnote 21 Servants would sometimes brag to other Africans about the positions of their employers in the colonial administration, or even inflate their employers’ importance, because their social status was connected to that of their employers.Footnote 22 These jobs certainly came with downsides, particularly when these men had to take orders from their memsahibs (female employers), which challenged traditional African gender roles. Yet, servants reconciled these slights to their honor and masculinity through steady income and affiliation with a modern, respectable way of life. When recalling being hired as a houseboy in Tanganyika, a man named Suedi excitedly remembered that he was “able to boast” about his new job.Footnote 23 Domestic service was dignified work that brought pride to Suedi and many other men.
During the 1940s, the severe economic decline and rapid population boom in Dar es Salaam began transforming the social and material culture of domestic employment. The city's population more than doubled between 1937 and 1948, increasing from 33,320 to 69,227.Footnote 24 Dar es Salaam's resources and infrastructure could not keep up with its growth.Footnote 25 Between 1939 and 1943, the African population increased by about thirty percent, but the number of African houses available actually decreased, causing rent prices to soar. Periodic droughts, inflation, and overpopulation made food scarce and expensive.Footnote 26 In addition to shortages in food and housing, there was also a shortage of jobs. In 1939, an estimated one out of every three African men in Dar es Salaam was unemployed and unemployment continued to go up “to an alarming extent” during the 1940s.Footnote 27
Employers minimized their household budgets by decreasing the number, quality, and ages of servants. During the 1920s and 1930s, households usually employed numerous servants for specific tasks. The 1930 edition of The Handbook of Tanganyika informed newcomers that Europeans in the colonies mostly adhered to the “Indian system” of household service. “It is a custom for each servant to perform the duties of his office and none other,” it explained. “This system is now generally accepted throughout most of East Africa with the result that the domestic staff of a normal household consists of a cook, a kitchen-boy, headboy and assistant, and a ‘dhobi’ or washerman.”Footnote 28 Many Europeans also hired an askari (guard) to watch over their homes and those with children almost always hired at least one ayah. Wealthier Asians in Tanganyika also adhered to the “Indian system,” but most could not afford such a large expense. Multifamily Asian households typically employed a few, more generalized servants to run their homes. Servants usually apprenticed as totos (small boys) before they were qualified to find work because entry into domestic service required access to an exclusive, specialized form of knowledge that needed to be learned—domestic service was not work just anyone could do: it was skilled labor. It was also expensive labor. One British resident of Tanganyika explained that “the cost of house servants formed a heavy item in the domestic budget.”Footnote 29
To save money during the economic crisis, employers gradually turned from the “Indian system” to hiring fewer, cheaper, generalized servants. Notes on African Domestic Labour in Dar es Salaam informed newcomers arriving in 1948 that “it should be policy, whenever possible to try and reduce the number of servants by encouraging them to undertake more than one kind of work.”Footnote 30 Rather than paying premium wages for numerous, highly specialized and experienced workers, they hired inexperienced servants or youths who would perform more work for less money rather than join the ranks of the unemployed. Due to changes in employers’ practices, domestic service was becoming unskilled labor and servants were expected to do whatever their employers told them to do; they were no longer professional men.
By the end of the 1940s almost anyone could work as a domestic servant if they were willing to do so for the right price. Taking advantage of the flooded labor market, most employers paid their servants wages well below the cost of living in the city. State officials certainly knew that most African workers in Dar es Salaam earned significantly less than the state-estimated cost of living throughout the 1940s. Being the largest single employer in the capital, the state set the minimum wage for government workers in Dar es Salaam at Shs.1/- per day in addition to a monthly supply of food rations.Footnote 31 Aside from a select few, domestic workers on average received half the monthly cash wages earned by government workers in Dar es Salaam in the early 1940s.Footnote 32 Those who worked for Europeans earned approximately Shs.35/- to 45/- per month. The overwhelming majority worked for Asian employers, earning about Shs.20/- per month.Footnote 33 The one out of eight domestic servants who were youths under the age of fourteen earned only Shs.2/- to Shs.7/- per month, but many only received food and board in exchange for their labor.Footnote 34
Despite inadequate wages, the state did nothing to ensure servants received meals or rations to make up for their meager earnings. Officials acknowledged that servants earned “sub-marginal” wages, but they argued the special circumstances of domestic work meant servants did not need to earn wages equal to other workers.Footnote 35 What employers skimped in wages they made up for in what the Labour Commissioner called “hidden emoluments,” such as food, clothes, housing, and other goods.Footnote 36 In reality, this was neither true nor legal. Some European employers provided uniforms, cast-off clothing, and meals on the job, but the vast majority did not. Moreover, calculating the compensation of workers in this way was a direct violation of the Master and Native Servants Ordinance, the Territory's main piece of labor legislation, which required employers to pay their employees in currency.Footnote 37
The African Cooks, Washermen, and House Servants Association
A trade union movement swept Africa's cities toward the end of the 1930s and the start of the 1940s. In Tanganyika, servants first began organizing in 1939 in Dodoma, a small town in the center of the Territory. They came together to form Chama cha Wapishi na Maboi (Cooks and Houseboys Union) “on account of the distress and difficulties which frequently fall on us who work as cooks and servants in our duty.”Footnote 38 Led by Saleh bin Fundi, an askari and the leader of a prominent beni ngoma (African dance) band in Dar es Salaam, the organization spread to the capital a few years later.Footnote 39 ACWHSA records suggest that the association formed in Dar es Salaam in 1943, but there are indications that domestic workers began organizing in the city as early as 1941.Footnote 40
Although it lacked official registration, during the early 1940s ACWHSA met periodically in Kariakoo, Dar es Salaam's African quarter. The state's concern with the ACWHSA grew as the association became more vocal toward the end of 1944. The Special Branches of the Intelligence and Security Bureau, which investigated matters that jeopardized public order and security in the colonies, began monitoring association meetings and members as early as January 1945. The state forced ACWHSA to register as a union after Seleme Pembe, the association's first secretary, submitted a petition to the Labour Department containing nineteen demands that would improve the lives of servants in Tanganyika.Footnote 41 While they had ignored ACWHSA for years, after receiving the “Supplication of the Servant to their Masters,” Labour Department officials determined that ACWHSA was indeed a trade union and was required to register according to the Trade Unions Ordinance of 1932. Registering ACWHSA, like other unions in the colonies, allowed administrators to monitor the labor movement. Registration also enabled the state to cancel, disband, and outlaw unions when they became disorderly and started to pose possible threats to state power.
ACWHSA officially registered on September 28, 1945.Footnote 42 Over the next three years fifty-one other branches of the union appeared throughout the Territory.Footnote 43 Despite successfully spreading all over Tanganyika, the central branch struggled to gain and keep members. Union officers claimed to have 272 members in 1943, and the Intelligence and Security Bureau reported 200–300 attendees at multiple meetings held at the beginning of 1945. Toward the end of the year, however, the Bureau reported meetings of only fifty to sixty members. In March 1946 the membership and dues list contained only fifty-one names.Footnote 44 It is likely that more servants were involved in the union than were registered, but official union membership remained extremely low, especially in comparison to the thousands of servants living and working in the city.
Servants in Dar es Salaam experienced similar challenges to organizing as other servants around the world—isolation from one another, lack of leisure time, and the personalized, often informal nature of their work arrangements and employment agreements. One of the major problems in Dar es Salaam was that servants had trouble affording the high cost of union membership, a problem commonly encountered by servants elsewhere.Footnote 45 ACWHSA decreased its fees to attract more members, but it continued to have difficulty getting members to pay dues.Footnote 46 Although its 1948 report listed 287 members, it indicated only 27 members had fully paid their subscription fees.Footnote 47 Unlike domestic workers’ unions elsewhere, ACWHSA faced the additional challenge of being Dar es Salaam's first African trade union. As a new type of organization, most Africans were unaware of the functions of a union, the consequences and benefits of joining one, or its relationship with the state. At a meeting in October 1945, Fundi announced “he expected difficulties owing to the lack of understanding amongst the Africans” and noted that “the present generation were sceptical and suspicious regarding the bona fides of the trade union.”Footnote 48 In addition to being unfamiliar with the fundamentals of trade unionism, workers worried the union was merely a moneymaking scam. An intelligence officer gathering information about the association overheard men leaving a meeting remarking, “I am not a fool,” and “I am not going to let myself be cheated.”Footnote 49
Worried they would lose control over servants in their own homes and that the union could stir up unrest in the capital, employers and administrators capitalized on servants’ confusion to discourage them from joining ACWHSA.Footnote 50 Fundi continually complained, “Government officials are not in favour of this Association in that they tell their house servants that the Association in not recognised by the Government.”Footnote 51 He pleaded with the state to “warn Government Officers to stop spreading bad propaganda to their servants. The Labour Commissioner, District Commissioner, the Bwanas [bosses] of the companies and all the memsahibs do not like this Association,” Fundi claimed:
… the majority of these Bwanas tell their servants that “you are foolish, you are losing your money for nothing; it is a useless Association, it is not recognized here; the better organization is that of the Labour Commissioner.” With these words from the Bwanas, the servants become embittered, and say that “it is true that the Association is not recognized and that it why the Bwanas say it is useless.”Footnote 52
Servants likely feared reprisal from their employers, especially employers who explicitly expressed disapproval of the union, and worried about the possibility of the union exposing them to state authorities. In addition to submitting their financial records, the Trade Union Ordinance required unions to submit membership lists to the state every year, and the state kept tabs on union members through its Intelligence and Security Bureau. Although Tanganyika did not have a history of victimizing union leaders or members outside of protests and strikes, the state had arrested numerous labor agitators in Dar es Salaam and Tanga in the early 1940s. The possibility of attracting the attention of the state by joining a union may have frightened potential members.
Despite these difficulties, by September 1948 ACWHSA boasted fifty-two branches in Tanganyika with over one thousand total members.Footnote 53 The union's main objective, according to the original charter, was
… to provide a cord for binding all workers of this group together, and enable them to regulate their affairs and help each other in word and deed, and in consultation with Government fix a special status of pay for its members who are employed, and make rules affecting employer and employee to enable them [to] live in harmony.Footnote 54
Over the years, the unity of workers remained central to the union's objectives.Footnote 55 It wanted servants to work together to achieve better labor conditions, but also to create a supportive community of workers who helped one another, rather than competed with one another, to find employment. While ACWHSA sought to facilitate unity, its demands largely consisted of stipulations that would maximize the financial rewards of domestic service and restore the occupation's prestige. As an analysis of the union's demands shows, servants’ efforts to achieve better pay and improved working conditions were also struggles to preserve their honor and manhood.
The union primarily urged the state to establish minimum wages that would allow servants to keep up with the rapidly rising cost of living. Better wages were not only a financial need—they were a social necessity. Masculinity became increasingly entangled with wage labor during the 1940s as African men became defined as households’ sole breadwinners throughout most of the continent.Footnote 56 As in other parts of Africa, the successful creation and maintenance of an independent household was the foundation of adult, male identity in Tanganyika and central to attaining senior status within the African community.Footnote 57 During the colonial period, cash became critical to a man's ability to establish his own household, especially in urban areas: men needed cash to pay the bridewealth that enabled them to obtain a wife and start a family and to provide food, clothes, and housing for their wife (and in many cases, wives) and children. When domestic service became less profitable in the 1940s, it threatened men's ability to maintain their households.
As their pleas for higher wages illustrate, servants appealed not just to their rights as workers but also to their roles as struggling heads of household. “We fathers of our children we have no means at all to feed our fathers and our children and our wives,” they cried.
… we can not afford to send our children to high educations, as our [illegible] is like a daily wage, so our sons and daughters are working to support themselves working for Europeans and Indians, and the reason is because we elders do not have enough money to do so, and you people there wonder why T.T. [Tanganyika Territory] is not progressing, the reason is money, education comes after money.Footnote 58
Servants demanded wages that would allow them to cover the minimum costs of rent and food, thus enabling them to maintain their household, but they also wanted wages that would allow their families to progress. Education was becoming increasingly important in post-World War II Africa; it facilitated financial security and, associated with social prestige, was a major route to respectability.Footnote 59 However, most servants could not afford their children's school fees. “We are poor Africans, we cannot educate our children,” Fundi pled.Footnote 60 Union members appealed to the state not only as workers who wanted better compensation for their time and labor, but as fathers, sons, and husbands who required more money to fulfill their familial obligations and provide promising futures for their children. Appropriating colonial discourses on progress, development, and education, the union argued that higher wages would not just improve their lives, but would help to improve Tanganyika as a whole.Footnote 61
The union's demands were not limited to wages. Most servants worked on oral monthly contracts, and domestic employers required and relied on their servants, whom they knew and trusted to show up for work everyday to take care of their homes and families. Being full-time workers, the union believed servants should receive the same benefits that were becoming standard for other full-time laborers in Dar es Salaam, including leave time and extra pay for working on Sundays and holidays. They also questioned “why are we not provided with places to sleep or posho [food rations] or clothes when we are working for Europeans”?Footnote 62 Servants wanted employers to provide such items on top of decent salaries as done in other occupations, not in lieu of livable wages as proposed by government officials.
ACWHSA especially emphasized the need for defined work hours and overtime pay. During the 1940s and 1950s, historian Frederick Cooper has shown, colonial states sought to “induce African workers to adapt to the work rhythms of industrial capitalism” in the hopes of creating a more productive workforce.Footnote 63 Through a series of labor regulations, colonial powers shaped African work culture by requiring workers to sell their labor in units of time. Whereas most laborers worked fixed hours and were entitled to overtime pay if they worked over a set amount of time, servants’ time went almost entirely unregulated. Rather than having set start and end times, servants usually worked until their employers decided they no longer needed them. Many servants, especially those who lived-in, labored from the moment they woke up in the morning until they went to sleep at night, having relatively no leisure time. Some employers who had live-in servants would call on their workers even after they dismissed them for the evening. Sometimes employers would pay a small bonus for the additional work, but servants usually did not get paid for their extra hours of service.Footnote 64
Servants had always worked untraditional hours, but new regulations and conceptions of workers’ time in the 1940s and 1950s made their unregulated work hours exploitative and unacceptable. The union demanded the state regulate and enforce the number of hours employers could require their servants to work per day and require employers to pay their servants overtime for additional hours.Footnote 65 The exploitation of live-ins’ time was so prevalent in the late 1950s that ACWHSA's successor, TDHWU, tried to eliminate the custom of live-in servants altogether. It instructed all live-ins to leave the houses provided by their employers and find alternative housing in the city because “employers take advantage of those servants who sleep in their houses by increasing their hours of work,” forcing them to work late.Footnote 66
Like wages, fixed work hours and overtime pay were not merely financial issues. Being at an employer's beck and call and having no control over one's time was degrading and reminiscent of Tanganyika's former slave culture.Footnote 67 Moreover, having leisure time to spend socializing and participating in community events was central to maintaining social status in Tanganyika. The interactions and conversations men had at sporting events, religious ceremonies, and cultural clubs established them as members of the community and allowed them to create the social networks essential to attaining senior male status in urban society.Footnote 68 Servants wanted their employers to acknowledge that their personal time was indeed their own and for the state to protect it. If employers wanted some of their servants’ leisure time, they needed to pay for it. The union appealed to the state to enforce set work hours and require overtime pay not only to make more money, but also to uphold their position as free, respectable working men.
Lastly, the union tried to resist the deskilling of domestic service by pleading with the state to create definitions and standards for domestic labor. They wanted the state to legally enforce the “Indian system” by requiring an employer “to assign duties to his servants according to their degrees and not mix them up.”Footnote 69 The union explained, “Employers must employ specialized servants”:
[A] cook is a cook, an employer should not give him other work without agreement, he has no right. A boi [general houseboy] is a boi, an employer should not give him other work without agreement, he has no right. A dobi [washerman] is a dobi, an employer should not give him other work without agreement, he has no right … . An employer will distinguish between these servants if he wants the comfort of a European lifestyle. If he wants this he is required to have 8 or 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 or 3 servants.Footnote 70
Requiring employers to employ multiple, specialized servants rather than allowing them to hire one or two general servants would increase the number of jobs available and decrease the amount of work individuals performed. More importantly, establishing and limiting the tasks employers could assign per worker would help to preserve domestic service as skilled work, and skilled work was more respected in the urban labor hierarchy than unskilled labor.Footnote 71 Servants wanted to be seen as workers with a defined occupation rather than subject to the sudden whims of their employers. They wanted to be treated as professionals with specialized forms of knowledge and entitled to the respect and wages of skilled employees.
ACWHSA was quite outspoken about its demands. It sent numerous petitions to the government and made frequent appeals to meet with colonial officials to discuss their requests. Officials mostly ignored the union's correspondences because they viewed the leadership to be “inept” and their requests unreasonable.Footnote 72 In 1947, Fundi complained to the Registrar about the government's lack of support and informed him that he had lost patience with the state's continual snubs.Footnote 73 He accused administrators of bias against ACWHSA and refusing to help servants because worker demands conflicted with their personal interests:
… [I]f this Association would be for Ngoma or sale of rice or potatoes or vegetables or any other retail things unconnected with white employers, I feel it would be very strong. Otherwise if it belonged to Indians it would be strong. But because it is against your side, I am uncertain whether it can be strong … . Will my Association become successful if the Governor, the Chief Secretary, the Provincial Commissioner, the District Commissioner, Game Officer, Labour Officer or any other Indian or Goan employer wants to pay little?Footnote 74
Fundi highlighted the fundamental tension between the role of administrators as state officials who were supposed to protect African interests and their position as employers who did not want the price of domestic labor to increase. Due to their frustration with the union's incessant requests, in February 1949 the Labour Commissioner advised his Labour Officers to stop corresponding with ACWHSA.Footnote 75
Two months later the Labour Department informed ACWHSA that the Registrar of Trade Unions would be canceling its registration because its officers had not supplied the information about their members and accounts required by the Trade Union Ordinance. Furthermore, the “executive have consistently refused to listen” to the advice or requests of the Department, and only 27 of 287 listed members had fully paid their membership fees. “In view of this unsatisfactory state of affairs,” the Labour Commissioner explained, “I am of the opinion that the business of your association is not being conducted in accordance with the Trade Union Ordinance of 1932, and further that your association is not representative of the majority of house servants.”Footnote 76 The Registrar cancelled ACWHSA's registration effective June 12, 1949.
Later that year, labor unrest surged in Tanganyika and throughout the continent. The state began unregistering all of Tanganyika's trade unions in an attempt to subdue the instability. The actions of Tanganyikan officials was part of a larger trend of deregistration throughout the British Empire.Footnote 77 The only African union registered in Tanganyika at the end of 1950 was a thirty-three-member tailor's union. The following year, no African unions remained registered. Rather than forming unions, administrators encouraged domestic and other workers to form labor organizations and associations. They discouraged the formation of trade unions that they believed would be prone to and legally permitted to strike.
ACWHSA refused to disband. It continued to function, illegally, under a number of guises for another six years. Saleh Fundi, Lorenzi Mikongoti (the union's new secretary), and a group of supporters adamantly fought the union's cancellation. They were steadfast that ACWHSA be recognized as a union—they did not want to be a club. “All our members have no interest to form such an association,” they proclaimed, “as it would not be helpful to us.”Footnote 78 Trade unions carried an air of officialdom and authority that clubs and associations lacked. They also had the authority to negotiate with the government and employers on workers’ behalf. The union gave servants a sense of legitimacy and power they lacked as individuals as well as a platform to win in the political arena what they could not in the work place. Moreover, unions were a specific privilege of workers. ACWHSA helped to identify servants as part of the African working class who were entitled to the same rights and benefits as other workers in the capital. They would not allow the state to simply take away their power and respect by revoking their Certificate of Registration.
Union officers channeled their frustration with Tanganyika's administration into a critique of the entire colonial system and attempted to use the hierarchical structure of the British Empire to their advantage. ACWHSA took its complaints to the Colonial Secretary James Griffiths in London. Union officials continued to challenge the revocation of their registration and asked Griffiths to force the Governor of Tanganyika to meet with representatives of ACWHSA. They also expressed larger concerns about the poverty and oppression Africans faced on a daily basis as a consequence of how British officials governed Tanganyika. They portrayed the local Labour Commissioner, Chief Secretary, and Provincial Commissioner as oppressive, out of touch, and uninterested in entertaining the views of ordinary Africans. “When you people come here,” they complained,
… you hold your meeting with Arabs who are working at the Bomas [government offices] who are not in need, and you also here [sic] the well to do Africans who do not care about the poor other Africans, those are the people who are fighting for there [sic] own interests not for the others. The common town people are those who know the needs of the people because they can starve for 2 or 3 days, but you people hold your meetings with the rich people, so you cannot find out the difficulties of T. T. [Tanganyika Territory].Footnote 79
Administrators’ lack of interest in the lives of their African subjects, the union pointed out, was impoverishing them.
As conditions deteriorated in the early 1950s, the union also reached out to the United Nations. Union representatives highlighted the poor labor and living conditions in Dar es Salaam and explained that they needed higher wages, fixed work hours, and overtime pay because “the salaries given to different categories of domestic servants are not enough to meet the requirements of life.”Footnote 80 Labor protections and improved compensation remained a priority, but much of their communication to the UN addressed the exploitation of Africans, the injustices of colonialism, and the incompetence of the local administration. They complained that Africans had no political authority and alleged that British officials lied, treated people unfairly, and wanted to keep Tanganyika from progressing. They insisted that Africans should govern Africans: “European, Indians, Arabs and their family [sic] in this country … should all return to their mother countries. We do not want to be governed by any white, red, coloured men for the work of Liwali [district governor] except an African.”Footnote 81 Unlike their earlier grievances, the union expressed desires for self-government, frustration with the racialized allocation of power, and anger with a colonial system that benefitted others at the expense of the African population. Labor matters were clearly becoming entangled with larger political concerns.
The politicization of ACWHSA stemmed from years of frustration created by belittling government officials who were unresponsive to the union's requests, the everyday embarrassments servants endured as a result of the mounting financial and social constraints of their work, as well as the daily inequality, poverty, and humiliation they experienced as colonized men. As anticolonial sentiment grew and the nationalist movement took hold in Tanganyika, domestic service came to represent the oppression of the colonial system. Domestic employment put the colonized in close, intimate contact with their colonizers; serving those who were subjugating the African population became increasingly resented by both servants and other workers.Footnote 82 Servants throughout Tanganyika felt the anger and frustration expressed by union officials, and employers took notice. “The present day attitude of the local domestic servants,” a Labour Officer observed, “has changed considerably in the post war years.”Footnote 83 Servants were no longer quiet and docile. Attempting to regain power and respect, they would soon strike.
The Tanganyika Domestic and Hotel Workers Union and the 1956 Houseboys Strike
Saleh Fundi died in 1955. That same year the British Empire changed its policy toward trade unionism in Africa as nationalist, anticolonial movements ignited throughout the continent and threatened Britain's control of its colonies.Footnote 84 Properly trained and supervised unions had the potential to stabilize the empire. Hence, in 1955 Tanganyika's trade union movement revived with the state's support. Newly elected president Omari Hasani campaigned to have ACWHSA reregister as the Tanganyika Domestic and Hotel Worker's Union. TDHWU was one of sixteen unions to register that year, bringing the total number of unions in Tanganyika to twenty-three.Footnote 85
These unions were starkly different than those from the previous decade. They were larger, better organized, and heavily involved in nationalist politics. They banned together under the leadership of Tanganyika's anticolonial nationalist party, TANU, and its affiliated labor organization, TFL. TDHWU grappled with finding its place in the growing labor movement that was being taken over by an emerging, western-educated, nationalist African elite. Although TDHWU occasionally butted heads with TANU and TFL leadership, TDHWU's affiliation with TANU and TFL significantly strengthened the union.Footnote 86 The decade-long struggle between ACWHSA and the state alienated servants from the colonial administration, but the support of these new organizations gave TDHWU legitimacy that its predecessor lacked. When TDHWU was in its infancy the Labour Department refused to meet with its members, but it was willing to meet with a representative of TFL on the servants’ behalf.Footnote 87 Affiliation with TFL and TANU, which were popular among the masses, also legitimized the union in the eyes of the African population. TDHWU boasted more than four thousand members, three thousand of whom were servants and the others hotel workers.Footnote 88
On December 6, 1956, thousands of domestic servants went on strike in the capital. TDHWU announced the strike in October after the Kinondoni Hostel sacked nearly fifty African employees. The hostel fired its head waiter and three other waiters for allegedly being drunk at work along with forty-five other employees who struck to protest these dismissals.Footnote 89 Initially, the union called for all domestic and hotel workers in the capital to demonstrate their solidarity by refusing to work until the management gave the fired employees back their jobs. While both hotel and domestic workers participated in the strike, domestic servants dominated the union, and the strike quickly turned to the issue of servants’ wages, rights, and respect. The union demanded an increase in servants’ wages to keep up with the high cost of living as well as legal protections and working conditions on par with those of other workers in Dar es Salaam.Footnote 90
The weeks leading up to the strike were tense. Labour Department officials and private employers charged that union members intimidated many workers to support a strike they were actually against.Footnote 91 Workers undoubtedly made threats, but the coercion went both ways. With the help of the local press, employers and colonial officials threatened potential strikers with unemployment and destitution. In an editorial to the Sunday News, one employer cautioned servants that if they struck, their employers would not rehire them. “Within a day,” the author warned, servants who participated in the strike would “become homeless and without money with which to support themselves and their families.”Footnote 92 As the newspapers readily reminded, there were already over a thousand unemployed servants roaming around the capital.Footnote 93 Nothing was as dishonorable and emasculating to an African man as being unemployed and unable to provide for his wife (or wives) and children. These men had a lot to lose if they chose to strike—their salaries, their homes, and their honor.
In spite of the intimidation, union representatives implored servants to come together, stand strong, and demand better wages and treatment. TDHWU General Secretary N.T.C. Msumba urged, “Let us pull together. Do you wish to become weak? If you are dismissed without cause? If you are treated with scorn at your work? If you are called a dog? Come quickly and become a union member.”Footnote 94 TFL tried to negotiate with the state on behalf of the union to get servants higher wages and several labor protections that had become standard for other workers (such as leave and overtime pay). But administrators insisted that servants’ wages were adequate and “that the contract of employment was essentially a personal one between employers and employees.”Footnote 95 They effectively denied that servants were workers entitled to the same standards as other laborers and reinforced the notion that domestic service was not the state's concern. Furthermore, in anticipation of the December strike, at the end of November the Labor Department publically advised employers to ask their employees if they intended to participate in the strike. “The employer concerned should point out that it would not be possible for him to enter into an oral monthly contract to employ that servant during December,” they advised, “since the servant had clearly stated his intention to break the contract by going on strike.” The employer should then decide whether or not to continue to employ that employee at all on a daily basis, “and thus subject to termination on any day in that month.”Footnote 96 The Labour Department's recommendations turned the Houseboys Strike, as the newspapers called it, into a citywide general strike.
TDHWU viewed the Department's suggestion to be “an illegal way of threatening members.”Footnote 97 Not only did it intimidate individual workers, it threatened to erode one of the few benefits of the entire occupation: the security of monthly contracts. The workers perceived the proposal to be unmistakable evidence that the Labour Department was backing employers in the dispute.Footnote 98 The state's apparent support of employers provoked other labor organizations. On December 2, the Commercial and Industrial Workers’ Union announced their intention to strike for two days in support of TDHWU. They intended to strike not against the termination of the Kinondoni employees or in favor of higher wages, but against the government advising employers to retain workers only on a daily wage and suggesting they could sack workers who intended to strike.Footnote 99 TFL also helped to orchestrate sympathy strikes from the Eastern Province Building and Construction Workers’ Union and the Dar es Salaam Dockworkers’ and Stevedores’ Union.Footnote 100
To the frustration of officials and employers, it became unclear what the strike was about or how to prevent it. The union initially called the strike to demand that the Kinondoni Hostel reinstate fired workers, but a flyer published by TDHWU stated the reason for the strike was that employers refused to increase servants’ wages.Footnote 101 One employer berated union officials for stirring up trouble and insisted the strike was not the desire of the general houseboy population, but rather of a small group of individuals. He pointed out that the union made no specific wage demands and had not tried to negotiate with private employers. “By all means,” he wrote, “let the union help in establishing a really fair living wage for its members, but let this come about by friendly negotiation: not by threat of strike.”Footnote 102 Seeing neither the union's claim to support the Kinondoni workers nor their demand for higher wages as legitimate, the author declared, “This is a trial of strength.”Footnote 103
The strike was indeed a trial of strength. It was mostly about power and respect. Servants wanted to show their employers that they would not tolerate the abuses and humiliations all too often experienced at work—they refused to be “treated with scorn” or “called a dog.” By depriving employers of the domestic labor they all too often took for granted, servants hoped to remind employers that they and their services were important and valuable. They also wanted to prove that domestic servants could carry out a strike and show their employers as well as the state that they could not be ignored and exploited just because they worked in private homes. They wanted to make servants visible, to demonstrate that they were part of the working class, and to demand that they be seen and treated as real workers. This was also a strike against the entire colonial order. As one housewife observed, “[U]nion leaders themselves come out with statements such as ‘Share your wealth—or get out of our country.’ Such sentiments could hardly be described as normal labour dispute language.”Footnote 104 Servants were striking as workers and colonized African men who sought greater control over their work and their everyday lives.
On December 6, 1956, approximately 2,400 domestic servants—along with 450 hotel workers—failed to report to work, representing about thirty percent of those in the capital.Footnote 105 The Commercial and Industrial Workers Union and the Eastern Province Building and Construction Workers Union carried out a two-day sympathy strike in Dar es Salaam starting the following day. For those two days, “building work in the town was virtually brought to a standstill.” At its peak, an estimated ten thousand out of thirty-seven thousand workers in Dar es Salaam walked out. Within three days of the initial TDHWU strike, however, employees started to return to work.Footnote 106 Resuming work was troublesome for many strikers—some employers did not welcome them back.Footnote 107 Most European employers tolerated not having their servants for a few days, but many Asian employers permanently replaced strikers with nonunionized workers.Footnote 108
Servants’ show of strength was fleeting; the strike was a material failure. The servants never achieved their desired citywide wage increase. Nor is it clear what became of the workers who were originally fired. With the state's support, employers stuck together to demonstrate who held the upper hand in the employment relationship. Yet, the strike created significant unease in Dar es Salaam. Unlike other labor disputes, the Houseboys Strike entered the homes of the colonial administration and upper class. Many servants worked in the same households for years and bonds of trust and affection developed between employers and employees.Footnote 109 The strike shattered these bonds, and employers felt deeply betrayed. When sentencing strikers for unlawful picketing, the Resident Magistrate scolded two servants, not for threatening violence, but for attempting to drive a wedge between masters and servants. “It is quite outrageous,” he said,
that you, Kassim, should intimidate one and you, Ferdinand, two domestic servants, the first of whom, Rajabu, has been a cook for the same employer, an Arab shopkeeper, for no less than 13 years and the second, Mzee, as a houseboy to Dr. Joseph for ten years, and thus try to rupture such a commendable relationship between employer and employee to your own selfish ends.Footnote 110
Employers could no longer pretend their servants were friends or “part of the family.” Servants demanded to be recognized, treated, and respected as workers.
Conclusion
TDHWU suffered a severe crisis of leadership in the years following the strike when several union officers were imprisoned for stealing union funds.Footnote 111 Despite difficulties with the leadership, membership remained quite strong through the end of the colonial era; TDHWU boasted nearly five thousand members in 1958.Footnote 112 After political independence in 1961, servants encountered new challenges to unionization. Shortly after taking control of the postcolonial government, TANU outlawed unions.Footnote 113 It created a centralized organization to represent all workers in the country, but this organization was an official arm of the state led by government employees, not workers. Servants, like all other workers in Tanzania, went without an independent union until the Trade Union Act finally legalized independent unions in 1998. Then they helped form Tanzania's Conservation, Hotel, Domestic and Consultancy Workers Union (CHODAWU).Footnote 114 Although there are millions of domestic workers in Tanzania, in 2012 they comprised only about fifteen percent of CHODAWU's 36,000 members.Footnote 115
The institution of domestic service has dramatically changed and servants continue to struggle in the postcolonial era. With an increasing number of African women entering the urban work force, Africans have become the largest employer of paid domestic workers.Footnote 116 Moreover, whereas only three percent of domestic servants were women in 1949, fourteen percent were female in 1971, and more than eighty percent were women in 2006. Domestic service currently has a higher concentration of women than any other occupation in Tanzania.Footnote 117
There are numerous reasons African employers prefer to hire female domestics and African women choose to enter domestic employment in the postcolonial period,Footnote 118 but the rise in the percentage of women working in domestic service is also a consequence of African men increasingly opting out of domestic work. African men still work as servants in Dar es Salaam and elsewhere, but mostly in wealthier European and Asian homes. They have maintained their foothold in the houses of the upper classes, leaving the lesser-paid work in the homes of Africans and lower class Asians to African women. While most jobs in upper class homes pay fairly well, domestic service has become increasingly identified as women's work throughout postcolonial Africa, and it no longer carries the same meaning it once did, regardless of the wages it brings. Domestic service in Tanzania has become, as one male servant described, “a job without honour.”Footnote 119
