In Kenya, Domestic Workers Resist Exploitation

For many years in Nairobi, domestic work has been synonymous with exploitation. What does the future hold for Kenya’s domestic workers and their allies, who are actively organizing to transform domestic work into dignified work?

Written by Mumbi Kanyogo

Nov 7, 2022

Photography by Jeremy Onyango / THE REPUBLIC.

In the 2019 documentary, The Hidden Lives of ‘Housegirls’ in Kenya, BBC reporter, Nancy Kacungira, traces the migratory narratives of young women who leave their hometowns on the Uganda-Kenya border and travel to Nairobi in search of work as domestic laborers. In the documentary’s trailer, the audience is introduced to Esther, a 21-year-old Ugandan woman, who leaves her village in search of better work and wages in Kenya’s capital. For a moment, Nairobi’s imaginary is as hopeful as ever. The film’s focus shifts between western Kenya and Nairobi, predictably juxtaposing images of the capital city’s high-rises and highways with those of an unnamed western Kenyan town’s murram roads and small kiosks. The city morphs into a metropolitan embodiment of opportunity and survival—imagined and reimagined as an urban oasis and positioned in stark contrast to the systemic neglect that lines Kenya’s peripheries.

Yet as the clip unfolds, Nairobi’s existence as a place partly forged together through the extraction of labour, time, and life from its poorest, most vulnerable residents, is laid bare. Slowly, the city’s imaginary becomes undone and the distance between the country’s capital and its borderlands shrinks.

We learn that upon moving to the city, Esther has been forced to live in a small room, furnished with one mattress and no electricity, shared with three other people who also work as domestic workers. In lieu of the regular, permanent work she migrated in search of—the work that was meant to support her and provide security for her family—she is now a casual labourer working in the private homes of employers, who are hesitant to offer her even a cup of tea as she works under difficult conditions for extremely low pay.

Esther, like thousands of other domestic workers in the city, does the cleaning, babysitting, cooking, and washing—the labour that reproduces the everyday lives of the city’s upper and middle classes; that make their lives possible. Even so, many domestic workers leave work to go home to rest, raise their children, experience love and community—to make their own lives in simply impossible conditions, where they are unable to pay for their children’s school fees, make rent in homes that are often themselves dilapidated or to even afford two meals a day, let alone three. This is the contradiction that undergirds the transaction of reproductive labour.

Throughout the 28-minute short film, Esther’s words, which are featured at the beginning of the clip, hover over each scene and haunt the audience: ‘Huku mtu anaweza ku[ku]tumia kama punda. Nataka pia hawa wajue eti sisi pia ni watu, lakini [tuna]kosa tu pesa.’ (‘Here employers can treat you like a donkey. I want them to know that we are also people, it’s just that we don’t have money’).

In figuratively comparing the employer/domestic worker relationship to that between a person and a donkey, Esther theorizes the reality of domestic workers as one in which they are rendered unhuman. Esther’s theorization of her own conditions and those experienced by domestic workers, the ‘we’ she is referring to, makes clear what the harm that domestic workers suffer entails: it is the everyday exploitation that yields material benefits for employers and the economy in the form of clean homes, fed children, healthy workers, washed dishes etc. Her cutting metaphorical intervention makes clear that the exploitation that domestic workers experience is reproduced by those with more capital—it is not a faceless violation.

Ultimately, Esther pushes us to contend with the fact that within a political economy in which capital and its ownership (or proximity to it) determine who is treated as human, to be a domestic worker in Nairobi is typically to be overworked, to be extracted from, to be underpaid and abused; it is to be rendered unhuman or close enough to it, whilst reproducing the everyday realities that inscribe their employers’ own humanness. And this is nothing new. Instead, it is part of an ongoing colonial, capitalist logic that renders domestic workers exploited and surveilled...

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