Although the segregation of racial groups has historically been a central characteristic of social and spatial organisation in South African cities, domestic workers cross the divide between black and white spaces on a daily basis. They either commute from black townships to white suburbs or, if they are ‘sleep-ins’, their backyard rooms are cross-over spaces where the children in their care often spend time. This is the case, for example, in Eerste lewe van Colet (First life of Colet; 1955), the first novel of Etienne Leroux (1922–1989). Located partly in Tamboerskloof, in suburban Cape Town, it features young Colet, whose parents are hardly ever home. His young carer is ‘’n meidjie’ called Sara in whose room he often plays, and where he listens to conversations with her visitors: ‘He absorbs images and words which introduced him to a complex, wider world.’ (7) He is also fascinated by the sounds of the foghorn and seagulls as Sara takes him on excursions to ‘dangerous places’ like the harbour. His parents are shocked when they hear Colet swear, and put it down to Sara's influence on their son. They dismiss her and tell him that ‘all the lekker, beautiful things’ he has been experiencing with her are ‘wrong, sinful’. (9) This creates a taboo, explaining the boy's lifelong attraction to subservient women.

In his memoir, Lost and Found in Johannesburg (2014), Mark Gevisser mentions his childhood fascination with Holmden's Register of Johannesburg, a book of maps. He describes his dawning realisation that Alexandra township, where Bettinah, the family's domestic worker lives, is ‘just a page away’ from his own affluent suburb of Sandton. Sometimes Bettinah's fourteen-year-old daughter, Hope, visits her mother, and Gevisser, who was born in 1964, remarks, ‘Hopey and I were contemporaries.’