Picture: Canva
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Now that loadshedding seems to be a thing of the past (fingers crossed), those heady days of candles and stubbed toes and sucking on frozen meals are fading into distant memory. As is that jolt of shock and despair when you realise you’ve run out of underwear or clean shirts, or, much worse, realise that you’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans every day for three months (yes, I actually know someone who did this – and it was not me, thank you very much).
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Now that loadshedding seems to be a thing of the past (fingers crossed), those heady days of candles and stubbed toes and sucking on frozen meals are fading into distant memory. As is that jolt of shock and despair when you realise you’ve run out of underwear or clean shirts, or, much worse, realise that you’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans every day for three months (yes, I actually know someone who did this – and it was not me, thank you very much). You absolutely have to do some washing right now, but there’s no electricity, which means no washing machine, which means no other option but to get out a bucket and a good old bar of green Sunlight soap and head to the bathroom – thank goodness there’s no water shortage on top of everything else – and get to work scrubbing your dirty clothes. Soon, you are out of breath, and you realise that the 20 minutes on the treadmill and quick dash through the circuit at the gym that you power through three days a week are nothing, useless, that you are a weakling, utterly pathetic. Washing by hand is hard work – there’s the pummelling, the pushing down, the swirling, scrubbing, ringing out and ringing out again, and then the hanging up. Maybe not such a strain if it’s a single panty, but a lot more work if it is a jersey, the foul three-month-soiled jeans, or an entire load of laundry.
Of course, I am speaking on behalf of the privileged here, because for a large percentage of South Africans, this method of washing clothes is the norm, just as it has been all over the world for millennia. In fact, washing by hand has been an important aspect of Cape Town life in its more recent history – by which I mean since the 17th century, when the Cape began being used as a resting spot for European trade ships sailing to the East. After months at sea, with no access to fresh water – and with that which had been loaded in barrels prior to departure having become slimy and foul – with clothes scratchy and hard with brine and no water to waste on rinsing out the salt, it was a relief for the sailors to land at False Bay, row ashore with their bundles and hike up to the stream near Platteklip. It was dubbed the Versse Rivier or Fresh River, a place where they could at last revel in an abundance of fresh water, drinking it, swimming in it and washing their clothes – sometimes also the clothes of others, either for payment or punishment.
As this stopping-off point became a refreshment station run by the Dutch East India Company and grew into a settlement with free burghers, the population necessarily increased. Soon, the Company began importing enslaved people, many of whom were women, who were put in charge of doing Company (or, if privately owned, their enslavers’) laundry. By the latter part of the 18th century, any fine day would see more than 100 women at a time gathered at the same spot as the sailors had previously used. This was the designated washing location, and though we may like to have an idyllic view of this scene – of the mountain slopes, the women paddling in cool water, chatting, laughing, lolling about while the clothes lay in the water and basically washed themselves – it was nothing of the kind. In those days, clothes would be worn for long periods of time – think three months easily, so maybe my jeans-wearing friend was onto something – and they were made of strong fabric, wool or linen, heavy with months of sweat and grease. Imagine having to climb halfway up a mountain with an enormous basket of stinking clothes on your head. That in itself was exceptionally taxing, so later on, when water pumps came to the town’s public squares, some slaves tried to avoid the hike by doing the washing there, but this was not permitted and was severely punished. Since there was no running water at home, there was no choice but to go up that nasty, steep incline.
Now to the process of washing itself. It was seriously labour-intensive. This wasn’t sexy women having wet T-shirt competitions and brushing one another’s freshly washed hair. The first thing that had to be done was to place all the foul clothes in flowing water until they were thoroughly soaked. Then each garment would be taken individually and pounded against a rock to “knock the dirt out of it”, as OF Mentzel described after he visited the Cape in the 1730s.i Between poundings, the garment was immersed in the flowing water to wash away the released dirt. Only after this ordeal was the soap brought out, and this wasn’t lovely jasmine-scented, fabric-softening stuff. It was basically animal fat, maybe with some herbs thrown in for a nice touch. This kind of soap does not produce a lather; there is no foam, no fun bubbles. It was pretty much like smearing hard butter onto the clothes. Once fatted up, everything was laid out in the sun to bleach, but the clothes had to be kept moist, otherwise they might become discoloured – so, beware the washerwoman who fell asleep at her post! After a couple of hours of suntanning, the clothes were once again placed in the stream, once again beaten and, after being properly rinsed (try getting fat out with cold water), once more spread out on the grass, this time to dry.
The only part about doing laundry that might be considered in any way good was that, for enslaved women, it was the most freedom they would be allowed. While male slaves might wander for miles gathering firewood (increasingly far and wide as the population grew) or drive wagons, go fishing or be sent on errands, women tended to be kept at home to do domestic duties. At most, they might be allowed to go to one of the nearby public squares to buy or sell goods. However, there were cases of manumission, increasingly so towards the end of the 18th century, and more so as the 19th century advanced and began moving towards the abolition of slavery. But as Kate Ekama from Leap at Stellenbosch University has shown in a recent paper,ii manumission did not “necessarily sever relationships of obligation and dependency”, because there might be a requirement of labour as a condition of freedom, or as a way to pay off the price of an individual’s perceived value. In this way, “work was both a route to manumission and a consequence of it”. Once a slave was freed, labour was also necessary to survive and provide a roof over their head. In many cases, it was also important in raising funds for manumitting loved ones. In an unequal society, there were few options available to the formerly enslaved. A freedwoman might hire herself out as a laundress; this gave her independence, but still forced her to be dependent on a system of servitude with poor recompense.
By the late 1800s (slavery had ended officially at the end of 1838), the town’s streams were so polluted that the health and well-being of the population was being affected. The municipality was forced to put in certain controls, one of which was prohibiting the use of the traditional washing spot. This loss resulted in the opening of the first privately owned laundry in 1877, with more to follow soon after.
However, aware that there was a need for a public place in which to do laundry, the municipality very generously spent the huge sum of £2 000 in building a municipal laundry near the old washing site. It opened to great fanfare on 1 May 1888, except there was just one problem: no washerwomen used it. In fact, there seemed to be a boycott.
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The men of the municipality gathered together to discuss this behaviour and deduced that the laundry was too cold for the washerwomen. It was a shame, a pity, and the washerwomen were very ungrateful; one could never satisfy everyone, and there was always some ridiculous complaint. Had they bothered to ask the women themselves, they would have found out that the problem had nothing to do with the cold. It was that the great municipal minds had failed to provide the laundry with a drying ground. This was eventually corrected, and washing could commence once more.
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The men of the municipality gathered together to discuss this behaviour and deduced that the laundry was too cold for the washerwomen. It was a shame, a pity, and the washerwomen were very ungrateful; one could never satisfy everyone, and there was always some ridiculous complaint. Had they bothered to ask the women themselves, they would have found out that the problem had nothing to do with the cold. It was that the great municipal minds had failed to provide the laundry with a drying ground. This was eventually corrected, and washing could commence once more.
Reading about this aspect of Cape history formed part of the inspiration for a recent short story of mine, a work of flash fiction, which is about a young woman and her grandmother, and their different approaches to doing laundry, particularly their underwear. While ostensibly about panties (as the story is titled), it is also about our country’s long and difficult history, about ourselves and about memory.
“Panties” can be read in the new flash fiction anthology In other stories, edited by Kerry Hammerton and released by Karavan Press. The anthology includes 25 stories on several themes, from love and grief, to murder, politics, history, fantasy and much more.
Endnotes
i OF Mentzel (1921). A geographical and topographical description of the Cape of Good Hope, volumes 1-3, Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society.
ii Kate Ekama (14 August 2024). “Bound to be free? Manumission in Cape Town, 1825–34”, Slavery and Abolition, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2024.2389549.