Shortly after their arrival at the Cape in 1652, Maria and Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch ‘founding father’ of South Africa, employed a Khoi girl to take care of their children. Krotoa, who was about ten years old at the time, would be ‘part of the family’ for the ten-year period before the Van Riebeecks moved on to Batavia in 1662. She learnt to speak Dutch fluently, and Van Riebeeck soon realised she could act as an interpreter during bartering expeditions and negotiations with the locals. A few men, such as her uncle Autshumao (Harry), were already active as interpreters between the Dutch and the Khoi, but Van Riebeeck apparently trusted Krotoa (Eva) more to further the interests of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company. Of course, he could never have been sure of her loyalty, and so researchers have, quite rightly, considered the likelihood that Krotoa used her postition and language proficiency to advance her own interests too. Not simply a pawn in Van Riebeeck's strategy to gain the upper hand at the Cape, Krotoa had agency.

The fact that Krotoa was both the first black nanny to work for a white family at the Cape and an important go-between figure, made me realise that the millions of black women who have worked in white households through the centuries since then are in their own ways also intermediaries, pivotal figures in the interracial South African contact zone. Like Krotoa, they are ‘outsiders within’; people with an exceptional knowledge of both black and white cultures. My premise is that present-day domestic workers are an important sociological and economic ‘institution’ that started at the time of Krotoa and slavery at the Cape, and continues to this day.

The lasting importance of domestic workers in post-apartheid South Africa is poignantly demonstrated by a character called Eve Sisulu who, more than three hundred years after Krotoa-Eva's death, was to become the main character in an often hilariously funny and politically relevant cartoon strip. The concept of Eve and her Madam was born when American Stephen Francis together with his South African-born wife visited his in-laws in Alberton in Gauteng.