UNAVOTAKA / TUNATAKA. "What you want, we want." Graffiti spotted in Stone Town, Zanzibar, mid 2000s.
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING eludes me. When I sit down one day to write about my feelings about cleaning, I will have to include some details that make me squirm with shame.
My mother made us clean the bathrooms when we were kids. I would thank her for this difficult parenting lesson—everyone should learn to keep a bathroom clean, especially one’s own—but wow, the terror that ensued when we got it wrong or missed a spot.
The lesson backfired—I have hated cleaning bathrooms ever since, and wince when the time comes, every time, to scrub, wipe, plunge and dust.
When I moved to Zanzibar in my early thirties, the dean of the university where I’d gotten a job as a resident director sat me down one day in his airy office with the windows open, leaned back in his chair, and admonished me for not hiring a dada.
That’s the word for domestic workers in Zanzibar--dada—meaning, “sister.” A woman who comes to your home and cleans your clothes, does your dishes, sweeps the floors, takes out the garbage, and yes, cleans your toilets.
I stammered my reply. I know how to clean my own house, I said. In America, I didn’t grow up with a dada, I explained, we had to do it ourselves.
Well, you’re here, now, and it’s customary for anyone with means to hire help—it’d be rude not to, actually, culturally speaking.
Those were not his exact words but that’s what he meant. I was making more money in a year at this job as a foreigner than some people might see in a lifetime, is how he explained it.
So I hired a woman named Asha, a distant relative of the man I was dating at the time, and she came to the house three times a week, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t scrubbing my own toilets, but I never quite got used to this arrangement.
If I was home, I’d help her with all the chores and in that way, we really did operate like sisters for a while, however much we each had to forge a new myth to make this possible.
We’d stop for a coffee and biscuits midway through the day. I told her secrets like I’d tell a sister, and she would tell me some of hers, too. Like how the guy she was dating had gotten involved in some sort of crime ring in the main city, making a lot of good money as a getaway driver.
Anyway, this relationship became central to my life in Zanzibar. I grew to depend on Asha and she also relied on me, not just for her salary, but also for leads on other gigs with other foreigners. She knew one day I’d leave.
And then one day she helped me pack up the house and ship all my belongings back to Chicago. She even came with me to the airport, lugging boxes and suitcases covered in burlap, tied with coarse rope.
We both cried when we said goodbye.
Oh shit, I’m writing more than I thought I might when this essay began to take shape this morning.
I could go on but not yet—there are other strands in the good housekeeping braid.
Like the stories of young women in Zanzibar who were shipped overseas to Oman as domestic workers, and disappeared. Or came back with horror stories about the way they were treated and abused.
The ones who came back had a whisper network. Asha caught wind of some of these stories and told me about them. I held onto these tales even as I considered myself a reporter. What good would it do to expose these stories? No one seemed prepared to change anything about these arrangements.
Part of my job at the university included securing housing for American students who wanted a placement in a local home for full language immersion.
I’d visited hundreds of homes on the islands in this role, motorcycling to the outskirts to inspect empty rooms as potential homestays.
During these visits, a dada inevitably brought out a tray with glasses of fresh mango juice—some even had ice chips—and these young women always stayed silent unless I greeted them first, and then maybe I’d get a whisper of a hello.
In the essay I may write about good housekeeping one day, I will include the story about the time I discovered that a host family had been harboring two indentured servants from the mainland—had paid the poor parents for the girls’ labor—promising to pay for their schooling in exchange—and then made them sleep in a dark closet together—stripped of all identification—no days off.
The only way I even learned about this was through the student who’d been placed there. She came to me one day in my office and told me she was uncomfortable with this dynamic at the house with the girls—she’d been told she wasn’t allowed to even speak with them—and wanted to move.
I spent the rest of that week investigating, both the situation as she described it and finding her a new host family.
So yes, much to say about good housekeeping and bad housekeeping and the power lines between them. What can I say in a note that will actually be read and considered? I must take the time to sit down and structure this in a way that will get you to care about housekeeping that matters to you.
Maybe you were never pressured to hire a house cleaner in another country and maybe you’re completely comfortable with the cleaning services you’ve arranged in your own home and maybe you’re not sure you believe me when I tell you there was an active economy akin to slave labor on the islands where I lived, and that’s fine.
What’s still true is that each of us probably prefers a clean toilet and could probably learn a thing or two about performing that task well for ourselves without ever having to rely on the willingness and circumstances of another human to do this for us.
And if there is such an arrangement, it’s still helpful to have first-hand experience of what’s at stake in this task, a heightened awareness of good housekeeping and the price we all pay for it, one way or the other.
Unavotaka, tunataka. “What you want, we want.”
