Domestic Workers in Postcolonial Tanzania: Gender, Learning and Unlearning

Domestic Work in Postcolonial Tanzania examines the dynamics of learning domestic and care work within affluent expatriate households, characterized by significant economic privilege and, at times, diplomatic immunity.Paula Mählck employs contemporary narratives from privileged female expatriate employers and Tanzanian domestic workers, colonial documents, analysis of the built space of expatriate households, as well as literary works and analytic autoethnography to investigate the continuities and changes in contemporary employment relations as compared to those during the British colonial era from the 1920s to the 1960s. While the relationship between women employers and domestic workers serves as the entrance of the investigation, the study delves deeper into postcolonial dynamics of learning and their interconnections with gender, race, and class. It emphasizes learning to cope as a dynamic process involving negotiation and movement, offering a nuanced perspective that transcends the victim/survivor dichotomy.

Moreover, the book highlights the subtlety of unlearning oppressive practices and relations, distinguishing them from formal affirmative actions. It underscores unlearning as a means for individuals and collectives to challenge established knowledge, perceptions, and practices, aiming to demonstrate the possibility of change. Through its multifaceted approach, which includes the historicization of alternative narratives, sociological analysis, theoretical discussions on social reproduction, and critical examinations of research methods for Western scholars researching non-Western contexts, this book provides valuable insights into the complexities of domestic work taking place in expatriate households in postcolonial Tanzania. It offers a thought-provoking examination of learning, learning to cope, and unlearning within the context of privilege and power.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Stockholm University.

Paula Mählck is currently working as a researcher at Linköping University, the Department of Culture and Society, Division for Research into Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Sweden. She is also a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education, Stockholm University in Sweden.