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Abstract
This article explores the potent entanglements of race and servitude in the historical drama of dirt and domesticity. I focus on a recent advert in South Africa for the laundry detergent Omo, in which a black ‘fairy godmother’ maid magically materialises in an on-screen suburban domestic scene, whacking her white madam on the hand, while humorously admonishing her: ‘Ooh eh eh … just one small cap is enough!’ I argue that the iconographic assemblage of maid-madam-dirt-detergent-machine in the Omo advert dramatises the labouring hands of black servants that have historically kept their colonial masters (literally and figuratively) white. Tracing the histories of servants and detergents, laundry and labour, and tool and toil, I argue that the Omo ad resolved – through inversion, parody and humour – the colonial paradox of the dependency of white cleanliness on ‘unclean’ black labour, by figuring the servant as a prosthesis, and as a joke. The servant, however, is uncanny, the joke is unfunny, and the laughter attending the ad is nervous.
Acknowledgements
This article would not have been possible without the financial support of the University of the Witwatersrand Friedel Sellschop Award, the (impeccable, as always) research assistance of Sarah Godsell, and the intellectual guidance of Eric Worby. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their engaged, insightful readings, and constructive feedback. All shortcomings and limitations of the article's argument and analysis are nonetheless my responsibility. All images in this article are reproduced with kind permission of Unilever PLC and group companies.
Note on Contributor
Shireen Ally teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Notes
1. See <http://www.cptawesome.co.za/2011/10/28/omo-just-one-small-cap-is-enough/> (accessed 8 November 2012).
2. See <http://www.expressoshow.com/articles/The-Top-TV-Adverts-of-2011?articleID=2027> (accessed 8 November 2012).
3. See <http://www.faithwriters.com/article-details.php?id=152828> (accessed 17 November 2012).
4. See <http://soundcloud.com/omoliquid> (accessed 8 November 2012).
5. See <http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3r9ju6/> (accessed 17 November 2012).
6. See also <www.brandslut.co.za/axe-hot-girl-vs-zombie> (accessed 8 November 2012).
7. A certain Mike Vorster complained to the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa that the ad was racist <http://www.asasa.org.za/ResultDetail.aspx?Ruling=5878>.
8. Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Nixon and Khrushchev argue in public as US exhibit opens; accuse each other of threats’. New York Times 24 July 1959.
9. William Safire, ‘The cold war's hot kitchen’. New York Times 23 July 2009, see <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/opinion/24safire.html?pagewanted=all> (accessed 10 May 2013).
10. I. Hughes, ‘Missionary labours among the Batlapi’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle 1841 (19):523.
11. The Star 20 August 1902 and 9 April 1903.
12. ‘Abolish the houseboy?’ Rand Daily Mail 1 May 1912.
13. Die Huisgenoot 5 January 1940:26.
14. Die Huisgenoot 29 January 1960:46.
15. Die Huisgenoot 17 February 1960:66.
16. Die Huisgenoot 3 April 1970:3; Die Huisgenoot 24 April 1970:15; Die Huisgenoot 17 April 1970:13.
17. Eric Worby, personal communication, 5 May 2013. Note, however, against this reading that the Skip campaign masculinised the machine by making it the central object around which the dancing girls carnivalise their desire, as well as the use of ‘himself’ to refer to the machine, creating a division of labour between manual work and ‘intelligent’ thinking, with the former female, the latter (the machine) male, and the mediating agent between them the detergent.
18. Drum August 1989:34–5.
19. Die Huisgenoot 24 April 1970:15.
20. Drum, August 1989:34–5.
21. For example, Drum February 1960:53.
22. Drum, in particular, represented many differing relations between women, commodities, and consumption, see for example, Johnson (Citation2009).
23. Drum August 1963:14.
24. Drum 8 February 1972:40; Drum March 1960:38.
25. Lumka Oliphant, ‘Omo washes “too white” for sensitive black viewers’. City Press 15 November 2009.
26. For an important account of how black women constructed themselves in relation to commodities (especially cosmetics) during an earlier period, see Lynn M Thomas (Citation2006).
27. I am grateful to Danai Mupotsa for bringing this article to my attention.
28. For an important analysis of blacks as consumers under apartheid, see Deborah Posel (Citation2010).
29. For example, designer Yda has emblazoned an African woman carrying ‘Omo Power Foam’ on her head on mugs, aprons, and dinner plates.
30. I am grateful to Sonja Narunsky-Laden for reminding me of this inversion in the ad.
31. The genealogy of this proposition of the human capacity to labour is of course most developed by Marx (of labour as a species activity). Donna Haraway (in a critique) summarises that, for Marx: ‘Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man’ (Citation1991:158).
32. See also Mark Wigley's (Citation1991) pioneering essay on ‘prosthetic theory’ analysing architecture in the Le Corbusian sense, ie as ‘human-limb objects’ and Sarah Jain's (Citation1999) important critique of theoretical deployments of prosthesis that presume lack or loss.
33. Melissa Wright (Citation2001) also uses this metaphor in an analysis of contemporary labour in globalisation, arguing that a ‘prosthetics of supervision’ cast Mexican maquiladora workers as the prosthetic limbs that enacted their supervisor's skill, resolving the paradox of unskilled workers turning out skill-laden products.
34. See Shireen Ally (Citation2011) for a discussion of the simultaneity of cruelty and care, intimacy and estrangement, love and degradation, in domestic service, ie of the servant as both loved and loathed.
35. For another analysis of advertising as spectacle, see Thomas Richards (Citation1990).