“You don't need money to give alms”: The protective capacity of faith and spiritual kinship among domestic workers in Zanzibar

Abstract

Few domestic workers on the semiautonomous Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar are registered union members, and most domestic workers neither receive nor demand their legal right to a formal contract. Relying on my yearlong engagement between 2017 and 2018 with a women's Islamic studies group and a life history interview with a domestic worker, this essay explores domestic workers' reliance on alternative protective mechanisms from unionization and formalization. The domestic workers I engaged with cultivated relationships with God, negotiated dignity, received affirmation of their spiritual equality, and developed spiritual kinship connections in faith-based spaces. They also sought to ensure their physical and social well-being through kin-based connections and recruitment mechanisms. Kin-based connections that were spiritual or that connected domestic workers to employers were more protective than kinship relations cultivated in the context of work. Furthermore, domestic workers transformed routine work tasks into opportunities to practice devotion, which reflects Swahili/Islamic understandings of personhood as going beyond the category of worker. Religious spaces and spiritual kinship offer protection to domestic workers through the forms of reciprocity they enable and are thus often a more viable framework than unionization and formalization for overcoming the compounding effects of economic crisis and social inequality on domestic workers' lives.