Madam & Eve, the cartoon strip published since 1992 in South Africa, captures widespread sentiments of the relationship between servants and employers. A 1994 cartoon depicts Eve reminding Madam of the country's newly obtained freedom, only to be told not to forget to do the dishes. This famous ‘free at last’ cartoon (inspiring the title of the second Madam and Eve book) tells in unequivocal terms that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Variations of this observation abound throughout Allison Jill King's book that explores whether domestic service employment has improved in post-apartheid South Africa. Inspired by Jackie Cock's path-breaking study, Maids and Madams: a study in the politics of exploitation (1980), King, a British sociologist, conducted research in 1999 in and around Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, the site of Cock's work. King's research was limited to a three-month period during which she conducted forty-two interviews. The book draws on nine case studies, involving employers from different backgrounds (class, language, ethnicity, location) and by and large middle-aged female servants, most of them barely educated. The chief improvement of post-apartheid employment practices is the reduction of working hours. The relationship is defined not by racial, class and cultural factors alone, but by all of them together. The result in everyday interaction is a continuous mediation of divergent cultural, social and economic issues. King views the relationship as defined by deep, asymmetric interdependencies epitomised in the statement: ‘Madam is my friend.’

The modest scope of King's observations is out of tune with her theoretical ambitions. She complicates the straightforward ‘free at last’ depiction of Madam and Eve with an explanatory framework that combines fragments of class, gender and race analysis, with concerns about otherness, deference and power by developing a notion of ‘chains of otherness’ and ‘hidden meanings’. Her comparative and global chapter concentrates on scholarship in Tanzania and Zambia, as well as Britain and the United States. The political economy chapter is uneven and poorly put together, drawing on highly disparate sources. A regional focus on the Eastern Cape, one of South Africa's poorest regions, rather than on the whole country, might have worked to better effect. The three case study chapters use the same presentational template. Because they draw on a very limited number of case studies, their concluding sections tend to overreach.

Overall, this book is marred by poor organisation and presentation. The narrative is repetitious, and progresses without the use of subheadings to mark the development of arguments in most chapters. The discussion of research methodology is scattered across several chapters. No doubt a copy-editor's hand would have improved the readability. There are typos, and the bibliography not only contains references that are incorrectly cited but also misses references.

Contextualising her study, King makes no reference to the wave of publications from the last two decades that demonstrate how servant-employer relations play out in today's global economy. Whereas Asia has received considerable attention in this new body of scholarship, Africa leaves its imprint largely with reference to South Africa. While the book under review illuminates the social, economic and cultural practices that shape servant–employer relationships in a specific region of South Africa in the late 1990s, it does not substantially contribute any new insights into the relations between gender, generation, identity and local politics in a global world characterised by deepening economic and political inequality.