Refugee, woman and domestic worker: Somali women dealing with dependencies in Yemen

Abstract

This paper examines changing gender relations among Somali couples in Yemen. Since the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia in 1991 hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees have come to Yemen. Most of them intend to move on to other countries on the Arabian Peninsula, or to Europe and North America. The possibilities to leave Yemen are, however, limited. Somali women often work as domestics; yet Somali men have difficulties finding paid labour. As a result Somali men have often become economically dependent on women, who have become the main breadwinners. Yet, Somali women remain socially dependent on men because they need male protection in Yemen. These mutual dependencies between men and women may lead to the arrangement of marriages but also to the break-up of couples. Somali women's work as domestics is an additional source of tension; while it is the reason for their economic independence, this particular type of work has made them dependent on other families.

Keywords:

• gender relations
• marriage
• domestic labour
• Somalis
• Yemen

Notes

1. This research was part of the research programme ‘Migrant Domestic Workers: Transnational Relations, Families and Identities’ at the International Institute of the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden and the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR) in Amsterdam. The main part of the research was funded by WOTRO Science for Global Development of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I would like to thank Shifra Kisch, Reinhilde König, Eva Evers Rosander, the members of the transnational lives and livelihoods study group at the University of Amsterdam, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

2. ‘Young and Invisible: African Domestic Workers in Yemen’. Arda Nederveen Visual Productions, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007.

3. In 2009 alone over 30,000 Somalis have crossed the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in search of a better life.

4. Yemen's unemployment rate is almost 30 percent, while there is also a lot of hidden unemployment (IRIN News, 1 September 2009).

5. Periods of fieldwork were July–September 2003, August 2004–March 2005, and November–December 2005. In February 2006 I carried out a mapping study on domestic workers for the International Labour Organization. In March 2007 I was in Yemen to make a short documentary on Somali and Ethiopian domestic workers in Yemen, and in February 2008 I was briefly in Yemen to screen the film.

6. ‘Yemen: Influx of Migrants Strains Resources’, IRIN News, 13 October 2008.

7. The Yemeni government was against a military attack on Iraq after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, with the result that approximately 800,000 Yemeni migrants were expelled from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

8. van Gemund (2007) mentions that in 2006 only 350 individuals were submitted for resettlement.

9. Each year the government of the United States of America makes 50,000 visas available to people who come from countries with low rates of immigration to the USA.

10. There is a large community of people of mixed Yemeni-Somali descent in Yemen, as a result of the long contacts between Yemen and Somalia (see Garcia Claessen 2005).

11. Qat is a flowering plant native to East Africa which has a mildly stimulant effect when chewed.

12. According to Islamic law a man can divorce his wife by saying ‘I divorce you’ three times. Only after the third time is the divorce definite.

13. Al-Sharmani (2004, p. 16) explicitly uses the term ‘diasporic’ to underline that it, first, refers to dispersed ethnic or national groups who share a particular history and heritage and most of all maintain regular and constant ties with each other, and second, to capture the ‘particular consciousness and practices that migrant families and communities espouse to resist marginalization and have more equitable membership in host societies’.

14. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out to me.

15. Interestingly, Al-Sharmani (2006, p. 107) notes that Somali women in Egypt prefer working for Egyptian families over working for Somali families in order to escape the stigma attached to paid domestic labour. In Yemen the number of Somali families that can afford to employ domestic labour is very small.

16. During my research I formed a support group of people concerned with the rights of domestic workers. One of the members of this group established a nongovernmental organization in order to improve the working conditions of domestic workers in Yemen. In addition, the Directorate General for Working Women of the Yemeni Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, which is supported by the International Labor Organization, now pays more attention to domestic workers.

17. Khadima literally means ‘female servant’ but it is also an explicit reference to the akhdaam, the lowest social status group in Yemen who are black and cannot trace their ancestry.