The volksmoeder (lit. ‘mother of the nation’) is an Afrikaner archetype of women’s servitude, sacrifice, and submissiveness. Since the early 1900s, this archetype served as behavioral model for white, Afrikaans women. However, the same role was performed by black and coloured women who worked as nannies for white employers during South Africa’s colonisation and later during apartheid, a practice that continues today. The volksmoeder ideal is largely performative; though black/coloured women have extensively performed the role, they have long been racially excluded from embodying it. These domestic worker-nannies have become a phenotype in their own right. Much scholarship focuses on explorations of black/coloured South African domestic worker-nannies and their representation in the country’s literature.
Similarly, I investigate framings of the same in the South African novel As If Born to You (Newham-Blake, 2019). This novel speaks to the racialisation, classing, and gendering of childcare while commenting on the socio-historic contexts that often forced black/coloured women to assume these childcare roles. It importantly raises debates around concepts of mothering and responsibility in terms of childcare. However, South African representations of domestic worker-nannies tend towards the sentimental, ascribing to these women a collective identity dependent on selective remembrance leading to the erasure of their sacrifices and suffering. Such representations give rise to what I term the Amakeia stereotype. In this paper, I explore how Newham-Blake’s novel either supports or subverts this stereotype and how stereotyping a phenotype leads to the continued erasure of black/coloured South African women’s lived experience.

Authors:
Hanta Henning, University of the Free State, South Africa

About the Presenter(s)
Hanta Henning is a lecturer and PhD student at the University of the Free State. Her research interests include critical adoption studies, interracial adoption, representation of the adoption triad, and South African adoption narratives.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanta-henning-179090222/

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hanta-Henning

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