Domestic Work in Postcolonial Tanzania

Domestic Workers in Postcolonial Tanzania focuses on a highly vulnerable group - Tanzanian women domestic workers in private households. The households are characterized by extreme economic wealth and sometimes diplomatic immunity. Through narratives from women employers, domestic workers and historical documents, the changes and continuities between contemporary employment conditions and conditions that were practiced during the system of Indenture in East Africa, from 1820s - 1940s, are investigated. While the relation between women employers and domestic workers is the obvious entrance to the investigation, it is the postcolonial relations of learning, and how this learning is interlinked with learning gender, race and class, that is at the center of the investigation.