THE WORKING WALKING
Sunday Times photographer Simphiwe Nkwali took these portraits of domestic workers and their canine charges in Parkhurst, Johannesburg
IT’S a peculiar spectacle. Every morning and afternoon in the depths of Johannesburg’s wealthy old “Parks”, hundreds of black domestic workers and gardeners — some clad in the livery of colonial servitude — emerge from mansions and villas.
Their task is to walk their white employers’ pedigree pooches through the manicured avenues. Forming spontaneous parades, they converge in the parks of the Parks.
While Great Danes and Jack Russells gambol and crap on the lawns, their chaperones look on from the shade of the planes and jacarandas.
Sunday Times photographer Simphiwe Nkwali recently became fascinated by this daily ritual, and took these portraits of stalwart dog walkers in Verity Park, Parkhurst.
Some white residents do join the twice-daily canine conferences — taking the trouble to exercise their own beasts. But even so, the stark racial casting of the scene may strike a Martian or Swedish visitor as surreal. Almost every black person you see in these parks is being paid to entertain and clean up after a white person’s animal.
Dog-walkers abound in New York and many other cities — many harnessing a herd of beasts each — but the act is a professional service, not a public display of servitude.
And if you happen to share President Jacob Zuma’s opinion that there is a morally dubious impulse in white South African culture to care more deeply about dogs than about other people — betraying a “lack of humanity”, as he claimed in a speech in December 2012 — then the march of the dog-walkers is a demeaning procession.
Zuma has since ventured the risible view that stress is for white people, and umpteen black canophiles laugh off his theories about dog welfare. But still. The white urban gentry appear to be offloading the chores of dog ownership on their employees. Meanwhile, many South African kids don’t receive the standard of diet or medical care lavished on the hounds of the burbs.
During apartheid, dogs became unwitting tools of suburban racism and police violence: the snarl behind the gate of power. Nowadays, some argue, white South Africans’ dogs have become the panting props of privilege — innocent accessories to a subtler assault, one of economic exploitation legitimated by the mask of democracy.
Parkhurst housekeeper Nombulelo Solani doesn’t buy that. “For me, it was never strange that my employers care so much about dogs,” she says. She considers her charges, Blue and Honey, to be as much her own as her employers’.
“I enjoy them. They’re like my children. I had four dogs, but one passed away — they had to put him down because he had cancer. So I have three now. The third is at home now because she’s very old — 73 in dog years.”
Solani, 49, hails from Colesberg. “Both of my children have grown up, so these are the only children I have left. And I take them to the vet myself. Blue has hip trouble but it will cost too much to operate on him, so now he has to be on tablets for life.”
She admits there are real cultural differences about a dog’s place in a household. “In the townships, our dogs sleep outside, but we do look after them. If I’m alone, I send them out onto the grass. And I tell my boss: ‘You spoil these dogs.’”
So does she. Point taken, though. — Carlos Amato