Out the back: Race and reinvention in Johannesburg’s garden cottages

Abstract

The domestic worker’s room, or ‘maid’s room’, was ubiquitous in apartheid-era white South African suburbia. In the post-apartheid era many of these outdoor rooms have been reinvented as so-called garden cottages. Their histories of racialised labour have ostensibly been erased by a middle-class discourse in which garden cottages are rented to people who are seen to legitimately ‘belong’ in the suburbs. This article uses a combination of historical material, contemporary advertising texts and interviews to discuss the transition from maid’s room to garden cottage, considering how these spaces have been (in some cases literally) whitewashed. It argues that this discursive shift masks a continuation of the exclusionary politics of identity that have long motivated white South African suburban dwellers’ collective attempts to police the boundaries of the suburbs.