Pedagogies of Unlearning: Towards a feminist and decolonial prefigurative politics of life’s work

Abstract

This article is inspired by feminist decolonial ethnography in the analysis of the Rafiki group, an informal network of domestic workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It explores their collective efforts to challenge exploitation and promote change, providing insights into a decolonial and feminist approach to prefigurative politics. Using Pedagogies of Unlearning, the analysis focuses on the Rafiki group meetings’ content, form and particularities of locality. The findings highlight the importance of embracing the diversity and complexity of life’s work and prefigurative politics. The research findings support a pluralistic perspective, drawing on studies from diverse cultural and geographical contexts to deepen our understanding of collective unlearning and social transformation.

During one of my meetings with ‘the Rafiki group’, ¹ an informal group of women domestic and care workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that I had followed as part of my research on domestic work as a process of learning gender, race and class, I was told how these workers challenged employers’ attempts to exploit them. In this narrative, domestic workers had carefully learned to avoid the subject position of a malleable worker, which is easily manipulated. By applying the knowledge they had learned from their everyday lives, in other words, literacy from the everyday (Freire, 1998), they had learned about their rights as workers. For example, they had learned that they had the right to have a contract and to have their work hours and tasks regulated. When employers asked them to stay longer or take on additional work tasks, they had learned to negotiate and, when possible, resist their employers’ attempts to exploit them. Many of the women worked for affluent expatriate households, the majority under conditions of informality and precarity. During their meetings, domestic workers share work–life dilemmas, their working conditions and relations to their employers. They also discuss how their paid work impacts their family life, including the long commuting hours, not earning a salary that is substantial enough to support a family, and the additional expense of paying school fees for their children. These narratives point to how the messy, fleshy relations and components of life-making are connected. In other words, these narratives reveal how paid and unpaid social reproductive work is interlinked; the labour is not the same yet not completely separated (Mulinari, 2020). The social reproduction (SR) of life does not just happen: it is produced through labour, hierarchically, differentiated and context-bound, with different access to resources. In all contexts and countries, this labour is primarily conducted by women. But these women do not share the same class, race, age or ethnicity, and they experience this labour in unequal and hierarchical ways. In the remaining parts of the article, I will refer to social reproductive labour as ‘life’s work’ (Mitchell et al., 2004), which follows a feminist critical geography reading of SR. A life’s work perspective will be elaborated on later in this article. The focus of the article is a discussion of the content, form and particularities of locality displayed in two of the Rafiki group’s meetings. More specifically, I will discuss the critique of what is and the visions for the future that the Rafiki group meetings entail.

Prefigurative politics is a conceptual framework for analysing the work people do when they work for change, more specifically for imagining and working towards a future that transcends contemporary capitalisms (Monticelli, 2022: 17). Recognizing that the field of prefigurative politics is diverse, I will here focus on making a contribution to research that insists on emphasizing on the everyday as a radical point of departure for imagining change (Forno and Wahlen, 2022), as well as prefigurative politics displayed in social movements (De Vita and Vittori, 2022). At the centre of prefigurative politics in social movements is a view of the necessity of intersectional, embodied and pluralized discourses, as this allows for various realities to coexist. Hence, the quest is to develop pedagogies of affinity-for-affinity rather than producing a uni-dimensional understanding of the oppressed (De Vita and Vittori, 2022: 86). To do so I will draw from a decolonial reading of theorizations of SR and feminist critical pedagogy, that I, in a prior publication, have labelled Pedagogies of Unlearning (Mählck, 2024). Central in Pedagogies of Unlearning is seeing things in ways that are usually not done, and it differs from learning as it involves formulating a practical critique of what is. Pedagogies of Unlearning is connected to prefigurative politics through its emphasis on change and a forward-looking approach. Pedagogies of Unlearning involve recognizing the historical emergence of the contextual present as we imagine the future we do not know. It differs from more straightforward affirmative action and emphasizes subtle processes of seeing, doing and understanding things from the perspective from below and from within. What, then, is the conceptualization of decolonization in this article, and why does a prefigurative politics of life’s work need to be decolonized? Syliva Tamale (2020) defines decolonization as ‘a multi-pronged process of liberation from political, economic and cultural colonization. Removing the anchors of colonialism from the physical, ecological and mental processes of a nation and its people’ (2020: xiii). The quest for a decolonial perspective on the prefigurative politics of life’s work in this article emerges from the epistemological origins of scholarships of SR and prefigurative politics, which both mainly have been developed in the global north. While both fields in different ways are producing critical research on how life’s work is produced under capitalism, life’s work in practice, as it is lived, embodied and experienced, is far more diverse than these bodies of theories to a large extent have been able to capture (for an exception which emphasizes the pluralization of social reproduction, see for example Mezzadri et al., 2025). The contribution from the findings presented in this article to the research field of prefigurative politics and SR is that it extends the scope of research and the existing epistemologies through which life’s work is usually addressed.

The article is outlined in five steps: first, I present an overview of the research context and method; second, I offer an introduction to the theoretical framework of theorizations of SR and Pedagogies of Unlearning. Thirdly, a historicizing section contextualizes contemporary domestic workers’ informal organization. Fourthly, I give a detailed analysis of how the Rafiki group’s meetings contribute to moving towards a feminist and decolonial prefigurative politics of life’s work. This section is outlined in two steps: Unlearning collectively and Unlearning from the margin. The last section outlines the conclusions.

Context

It is estimated that there are currently 67 million domestic workers worldwide. Over the past 20 years, there has been a significant improvement in understanding their lives and labour conditions, and documented cases of abuse and exploitation within this sector. Mainland Tanzania (excluding Zanzibar) is no exception. Currently, it is estimated that there are approximately 1.8 million domestic workers nationwide. This figure includes workers that are working in various informal arrangements. A situational analysis conducted by ILO (2016) reveals that there are 883,779 domestic workers on mainland Tanzania and who self-identify as domestic workers. This number is likely to be an underestimate. The majority are females aged 14–19 years old, with 68% being internal migrants from impoverished rural areas relocating to the urban region of Dar es Salaam. Additionally, only 0.19% of the domestic workers are international migrants (ILO, 2016). In 2016, 55% of women reported not receiving any pay, while 70% worked more than 14 hours a day, and 70% were not provided with annual leave. Grassroots movements of domestic workers have successfully advocated for greater recognition of this often overlooked and isolated workforce, although the Tanzanian government has not yet ratified the convention C189 designed for the protection of domestic workers rights (ILO, 2016). Despite experiencing overall positive social and economic development since the 1990s, approximately 49% of the Tanzanian population is currently living below the income poverty line. This figure is higher compared to neighbouring Uganda, where the share of the population living below the poverty line is 41.7% (Human Development Report, 2019: 321).

My research focuses on domestic workers who are working in expatriate households in Dar es Salaam, particularly diplomats and international businessmen. It is challenging to find previous research on the contemporary expatriate group in Tanzania, as noted in Smiley’s (2010) research. My research, described in detail elsewhere (Mählck, 2024) specifically focuses on expatriate households located on the Msasani Peninsula in Dar es Salaam, where most embassies and expatriate households are situated. This area was historically chosen by the colonial administration to enhance practical domestic life and security, and this trend continues today. Despite Dar es Salaam having low crime risks, security remains a primary factor for the expatriate community to live in this area (Smiley, 2010).

It is important to note that domestic workers who find employment in expatriate households on the peninsula belong to the top tier in terms of salary and prestige among domestic workers. However, many of the domestic workers I interviewed described harsh working conditions and hierarchical work relations.

Method and data

This research could not have taken place without the involvement and assistance of the domestic workers themselves, in particular, Rusi Samweil Kabinga (the name is a pseudonym), who has been of tremendous importance. She has facilitated contact with the Rafiki group, and at times, she has also served as an interpreter. She has discussed various themes with me that could be elaborated on in interviews with domestic workers. In practice, my work with Rusi involved examining the themes I had identified in the previous research literature on domestic work and domestic workers and making adjustments to my interview guide according to her recommendations. These began with the view of what she thought would be the most important for researchers and other stakeholders to know about domestic workers’ lives and working conditions and which would have the potential to improve domestic workers’ working lives in the future.

The research presented in this article analyses two Rafiki group meetings from the perspective of moving towards a feminist prefigurative politics of life’s work. The number of domestic workers participating in the meetings was between 10 and 15. The domestic workers in question were a diverse group, ranging in age from 25 to 55. The majority of them were single mothers, having gone through divorce or widowhood. Their educational backgrounds varied from middle school to high school. Most of these domestic workers had migrated from surrounding areas like Iringa, Moshi, Arusha or Dodoma to seek work in Dar es Salaam. Many of them were assisted by relatives in making this move and for many, Dar es Salaam marked their first foray into domestic work. Their experience in the field ranged from three to 30 years. While most of them worked full-time, a significant portion were employed part-time, with one individual even being employed on an hourly basis. Their salaries fell within the range of 300,000 to 600,000 Tanzanian shillings for a full-time job, which is equivalent to US$109–219 as per 20 September 2024. Two workers were ‘live-in’ domestic workers, earning 400,000 shillings, including accommodation and food.

Feminist methodological research has pointed to the importance of building trust when researching marginalized communities (Mählck, 2013; Morrow, 2006) and being self-critical and reflexive on how power relations are produced and reproduced through research processes (Best, 2003; Thapar-Björkert and Farahani, 2019). This is particularly important when applying a decolonial lens to feminist ethnography (Jenkins et al., 2019; Mählck, 2024; Manning, 2021) and to fieldwork in Africa (Nhemachena et al., 2016). There is a significant power imbalance between me, a researcher from the global north, and the Tanzanian domestic workers. To illustrate, a typical trip to a shopping mall on the peninsula for an expatriate is equivalent to a month’s pay for a domestic worker. Aside from economic disparities, there are also racial and class-based hierarchies at play. As a scholar from the global north and of mixed-race origin, sometimes passing as white, I occupied a complex and ambivalent position as an insider-outsider in the expatriate community. At the time of this research, I lived on the peninsula part-time as a so-called ‘trailing spouse’ in a household funded by the international diplomatic community, and commuted to my part-time work as a university lecturer in the global north. Before, during and after the interviews, I tried to even out power imbalances and to create a safe environment for our discussions. This was done by meeting at a place of the domestic workers’ choice and sharing information about the project and about me. My perception is that the hierarchical relations that exist between me and the domestic workers on the grounds of race, postcolonial positionality, class and researcher and participant positionalities were never fully overcome. A better way of describing my presence in the group is that I felt welcome, and the domestic workers felt safe enough to share their experiences with me, despite our different positionalities. Data have been anonymized to protect the identity of individuals.

Variegated social reproduction

The concept of social reproduction (SR) in Marxist Feminist discussions revolves around the value of labour, production, and the interconnectedness of exploitation, oppression and accumulation (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Rai, 2024). Broadly speaking, SR involves the activities and relations related to producing and sustaining life (Gregoratti and Tornhill, 2025). This definition is closely linked to reflecting on how capitalism intertwines the division between work and non-work with racial and gendered hierarchies and modes of exploitation (Bhattacharya, 2017). Expanding on the concept, social reproductive labour includes not only the everyday domestic and care work like raising children, cooking and cleaning but also the wider work people do to sustain themselves and others. This includes working in societal institutions such as schools, prisons or hospitals (Ferguson, 2020). The recent intersectional conceptualization of social reproduction takes into account geographic, postcolonial and intersectional perspectives (Bakker and Gill, 2019; Bhattacharyya, 2018).

The analysis of variegated social reproduction (Bakker and Gill, 2019) emphasizes the importance of understanding how global capitalism operates within different geographical areas of social reproduction. This approach emphasizes that these geographical areas are systematically uneven and internally diverse, and they are more or less influenced by global and disciplinary structures. At this perspective’s core is an emphasis on how social reproductive labour is unevenly and hierarchically distributed, between geographic contexts, within the same location, and even within the same household. Feminist postcolonial perspectives contribute significantly to variegated social reproduction by emphasizing the interconnectedness of colonialism with both the pursuit of capital accumulation and the quest for modernity in the metropole (Katz, 2001). These perspectives highlight how social reproductive labour becomes a distinguishing factor based on racialized differences within these processes. Mitchell et al. (2004) describe this labour as life’s work, conceptualizing social reproductive work as central to individuals’ everyday lives. By conducting detailed investigations of everyday lives, it becomes possible to conceptualize broader societal relations, including individuals’ relations to the state, even when these relations may be absent or very weak. This perspective offers a spatial understanding where life’s work is produced through the practices of individuals at work, at home and in other everyday spaces (Mitchell et al., 2004: 18). This perspective contrasts with views that see individuals as passive bearers of structures predetermined by systemic logics.

Central to a variegated social reproduction approach is the importance of location. For this reason, the research presented here draws from African feminists who have theorized gender, labour and land in East Africa. Sylvia Tamale (2020) reminds us that African feminisms’ decolonial contributions are diverse. Here, I highlight the work from Lyn Ossome (2021a, 2021b), which points at the necessity to expand the understanding of labour (2021a: 558). She suggests that labour relations should be expanded from the traditional Marxist perspective (producing surplus value) to discussing the importance of land in social reproduction – and how relations to land are directly connected to livelihoods and labouring to survive. Taking into account agricultural labour, which in addition to being predominantly carried out by women, is crucial for food security on the continent, is an important step towards decentring and pluralizing social reproductive labour. In important aspects, Ossome’s analysis rests on the studies performed by Amadiume (1987) decades earlier. In this research, Amadiume demonstrated the inadequacy of Western conceptions of sex gender roles for understanding processes of land ownership, agrarian struggles and livelihoods in East Africa (1987: 34). Ossome’s work makes two important contributions: first, it brings the legacies of colonialism and slavery to the forefront of the analysis, and second, it decentres contemporary discussions on SR by situating the discussion in the context of agrarian struggles in East Africa. In so doing, she contributes to broadening the geographic and epistemological scope of theorizations of SR.

Pedagogies of Unlearning

Elsewhere (Mählck, 2024) I have developed Pedagogies of Unlearning as a conceptual framework for investigating the labour involved when individuals, individually and collectively, negotiate and sometimes challenge the contemporary costs involved in social reproductive labour under capitalism. Pedagogies of Unlearning stand with one foot in African feminisms’ elaborations of theorizations of SR and one foot in critical education, in particular feminist pedagogies. Theorizing life’s work on the African continent, by necessity, involves reflecting on relations to land and women’s roles in subsistence farming. For this reason, Pedagogies of Unlearning also comprise the transgressions involved in unlearning the cheapening of land and labour (Mählck, 2024; see also Patel and Moore, 2020, for an elaboration of cheapening). Central to critical education, which in many ways lays the foundations for feminist pedagogies, are processes of emancipation and change of oppressive structures. This comprises the view that pedagogical relations do not necessarily take place in classrooms only; instead, what is at the core is theorizing relations of oppression and emancipation taking place in society at large as pedagogical relations (Freire, 1998; Mama, 2017; Periera, 2002; Tamale, 2020). Few scholars have been as important for developing the field of critical pedagogy as Paulo Freire (1998). While his thinking spans various fields, I here centre on his ideas around literacy and conscientization as these have inspired Black and African feminisms’ pedagogies. Literacy in the Freirean meaning moves beyond being able to read and write and implies learning from one’s positionality and from this moving towards change and subverting oppression in society. Conscientization points at the unity between thinking and practice. Conscientization is crucial for reversing structures of oppression as it departs from experiencing the practicalities of one’s everyday life and the interlinked cognitive processes of thinking and reflecting. This line of thought is developed in the various and different Black and African feminisms’ critique of how societies are organized and understood, and the interlinked conditions and processes for emancipation. For example, bell hooks’ (2003) pedagogy on transgression and learning hope is directly linked to Freire’s ideas of education as the practice of freedom, and she further expands Freire’s ideas on literacy and conscientization to encompass intersectional relations of gender, race and sexuality. In an African context, Sylvia Tamale (2020) develops Freire’s concept of conscientization to encompass the shared history of African women’s experiences of the slave trade and colonialism on the continent. Central in pedagogical relations, such as learning, are processes of transformation and change. In this respect, Pedagogies of Unlearning differs from learning as it involves a practical critique of what is and, by necessity, entails an element of working towards a future we do not know but which we can imagine. This is simultaneously a cognitive, practical and emotional process; and it requires thinking and hope. It is in this aspect that the pedagogical processes of how domestic workers unlearn collectively from within and from below involve moving towards a decolonial, feminist and prefigurative politics of life’s work. The following will dig deeper into this argument through a detailed analysis of the content, form and particularities of locality in one of the Rafiki group’s meetings. But first there is a necessity to historicize domestic workers’ organization in Tanzania.

Historicizing domestic workers’ organization

The sun stands high, even the wind feels warm against my face as I stand in the corner of the parking lot, squinting to see if I can recognize someone's face. Another meeting is going on next to me; a group of men has gathered. Later, Maria will tell me that the men are security guards who have gathered for a meeting. Along with domestic workers, there are cooks, gardeners and guards employed in expatriate households. A closer look at previous research into domestic workers’ organizations (see Bujra, 2000) points out that the location that the Rafiki group has chosen for their meeting is perhaps not arbitrary; the development of domestic workers’ formal organizations in the early phases was closely linked to the role of a particular night watchman, Saleh Bin Fundi. Fundi played a crucial role in mobilizing workers outside the household. His job allowed him to avoid surveillance and form alliances, which proved instrumental in organizing the African cooks’, washermen’s and houseboys’ association during the 1920s and 1930s. Fundi’s leadership and strategic alliances became a significant factor in the growth and development of the domestic workers’ organization. During the period 1940–1945 the workers conducted a series of strikes, demanding better work conditions and better pay (Bujra, 2000). Research from the archives (Mählck, 2024) shows several letters of complaint that workers had sent in, their main concern being wages. These workers’ protests were taking place at the same time as general anticolonial struggles swept across the continent, indicating how workers’ rights movements and anticolonial struggles have been intertwined. The early organization of the domestic workers’ movement displayed the gender distribution in the sector, which during the colonial era was male-dominated; it has now transformed, and today, the sector follows international gender patterns, being female-dominated.

Global research has highlighted historical and contemporary challenges faced in organizing group protests, mainly due to domestic workers being dispersed in private households (ILO, 2016). In this context, it is important to note that an analysis of past historical research (Bujra, 2000; Mählck, 2024) reveals that domestic workers were among the first to form unions in Tanzania. In 1955, the Tanganyikan Federation of Labour (TFL) was established to advocate for the rights of all unions. One of the 10 unions that united under this coalition was the Hotel Workers’ and Domestic Servants’ Union. Domestic workers played a crucial role in a series of strikes for workers’ rights that spread across the country in 1956. These protests preceded the new Employment Ordinance (CAP 366 in 1957), which underscored that a contract of employment is a voluntary agreement between the employer and the employee. In this context, it is worth noting that women did organize within the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), at the forefront of the political movement for independence, but this is less documented in the colonial archives (see Geiger, 1987 for examples that draw from oral history). Moreover, women have frequently organized support groups and networks beyond formal labour unions. In 1979, more than 7500 women’s groups were identified in mainland Tanzania (Kiaga, 2007: 42). In her research Marjorie Mbilinyi (2023) points out the many forms in which women in Tanzania (Tanganyika and Zanzibar) have organized through history:

Examples of women’s agency have taken many forms, including efforts to act on their own behalf to survive, to improve their situation, and that of their families and communities, in many cases to challenge oppressive as well as exploitative structures and systems through open and hidden resistance and struggle. They also included advancing oneself through accommodation within the dominant power structure while opening doors for other girls/women. (Mbilinyi, 2023: 2)

Mbilinyi (1988, 2023) draws from historical research and her own research into the archives, which shows how women have mobilized against the German colonial army and missionary schools introduced by the British colonial administration. Moreover, women have sometimes worked collectively for the independence movement, in the shape of dance clubs for example, and organized collectively to secure the beer brewing industry, which was essential to livelihoods in urban areas such as Dar es Salaam (Mbilinyi, 2023). In light of these numerous examples of women's collective labour for change, it is pertinent to examine how the Rafiki network unlearn collectively.

Unlearning collectively

In the corner of my eye, I see Maria waving at me: ‘here we are!’ It's my second meeting with the group and I’m looking forward to meeting them again. Maria along with Rusi and one other colleague first formed the Rafiki group to support domestic workers. Maria has 30 years of experience as a domestic worker. After an incident of employer abuse, Maria decided to take action and reach out to her friends and colleagues, hoping to prevent this from happening to any of them. During our conversation prior to this meeting, she explained to me that she wants the domestic workers to learn their rights as well as build a community that can work in and for solidarity.

During the group meeting, Maria narrates an example which I will analyse with regard to the content. The narrative centres on how she was asked to help an employer find a cook. At the core of her narrative are diplomas, contracts and employers who, as they strive to keep salaries down, sometimes prefer to hire staff without educational diplomas, as they then can pay a lower wage. She finishes her narrative by inviting the domestic workers to pursue educational diplomas and to reflect critically on when, if and how to show their employers they have them. This example points to several processes of unlearning taking place. Firstly, unlearning is taking place in terms of the content of the narrative. More specifically, it points at how Maria uses her literacy to unlearn employers’ selective use of diplomas as a means of exploiting domestic workers and producing a malleable workforce for their needs. Here, I employ literacy in Paulo Freire’s (1998) sense, which extends the meaning of literacy beyond being able to read to learning from one’s position in society and, from this, navigating and, if possible, also reversing relations of oppression. In the meeting that I attend, Maria invites the domestic workers to unlearn the subject-position that is produced from the employer’s attempt to selectively degrade their work and them as workers, a position that would be that of an unskilled worker unable to fight for his or her rights.

Further expanding on the content of the meeting, my field notes reveal how the domestic workers share their knowledge from negotiating salaries or employers that are disrespectful, as well as which schools they have enrolled their children in, and the best way to negotiate husbands who have left them, how to commute to and from work, if the roads have been destroyed because of heavy rains, how to best save money to be able to buy a piece of land so they can cultivate crops and contribute to their daily subsistence. During this meeting, and supported by various interviews before and after the meeting, the domestic workers described to me how they imagine their preferred future life. Their dreams revolve around similar themes that are brought up in the meeting: owning a piece of land, opening a small shop, being able to care for their children, and influencing stakeholders on the rights of domestic workers. Charmaine Pereira’s (2002) theoretical contribution, which underscores the relationship between knowing and imagining, is useful for the analysis. Pereira asserts that imagination is crucial for seeking knowledge that can bring about change for individuals and collectives. She argues that without imagination, it is impossible to pursue the type of knowledge that allows us to move from our current state to where we aspire to be. In the context of the research presented here, I interpret domestic workers’ visions for the future as being closely tied to their learning and unlearning from everyday experiences. However, as I will argue in the following section, what extends these processes of learning, unlearning and imagining beyond individuals’ desire for better life conditions to a radical proposition for a prefigurative politics of life’s work is the form these processes of learning and unlearning take. The following digs deeper into this theme.

We sit in a circle, and some of the women bring food with them, which is shared in the group. Someone orders soft drinks to share, and conversation flows easily. The meeting begins with a shared prayer, which emphasizes hope and thankfulness for being able to come together. The women, many of whom I have interviewed elsewhere, have frequently told me how they appreciate these meetings because of the space the meeting offers for sharing personal experiences, for the comfort and hope that sharing these experiences produces, and, in the context of the narrative from Maria, possibilities for learning and for unlearning. In the group, some domestic workers are employed, some are currently unemployed, and one domestic worker is now working as a sex worker. Further underlying the role of the form of this meeting, domestic workers share meals and transport money for those who are unemployed or employed but so poorly paid that they lack even the most basic necessities for life. The meeting appears to me as a safe space where expressions of joy, grief and anger are shared without hesitation. Moreover, it feels relaxed, with comfortable chairs and something to eat and drink. ² The conversation flows easily among the group’s members, some of whom have known each other for many years. Despite the women’s experiences of harsh life conditions shared in the meeting, my interpretation of the group’s meeting is that the underlying structure is one of hope. The following will elaborate on this line of thought.

In her work Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003), bell hooks emphasizes the importance of learning through dialogue, extending beyond face-to-face communication in the classroom to learning with social groups and engaging with the broader world. hooks’ understanding of collective learning is worth outlining at length as – I will argue – it is central for prefigurative politics. hooks’ (2003) understanding of collective learning has a spiritual dimension to it: it implies learning ‘the great things’ of the world and with ‘the grace of great things’ (hooks, 2003: xvi). As I have suggested elsewhere (Mählck, 2024), spirituality has an element of hope in it, which is fundamental for organizing collectively for social transformation. hooks’ argument on the link between learning community and learning hope refers to an understanding that emphasizes hope, not as a naïve and individual inward-looking daydream, but instead the hard work of unlearning collectively for a different way of life.

Against this backdrop, the content and the form of the Rafiki group’s meetings can be read as a spiritual/hopeful and political example of unlearning collectively, imagining and working for a different (work)life future. Here, I suggest that the form of the meeting, sharing meals, money and experiences in the group, resonates with another example put forward in Syliva Tamale’s work Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (2020). Here she discusses the role of Ubuntu philosophy in the critique and reconstruction of the structural foundations of the political economy of gender. She makes a distinction between Ubuntu philosophy, which centres compassion and interdependence, and Ubuntu as a politics for the common good and respect for nature (Tamale, 2020). Ubuntu philosophy, in its different forms, runs deep through various African societies – Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe to mention but a few (Ogude and Dyer, 2019). The axiom ‘I am because you are’ sums up the reciprocity and interconnectedness of Ubuntu philosophy. In other words, it highlights how Ubuntu is a philosophy about lived experiences of being in relation to others. Moreover, the axiom reveals the view of an individual as an inherently communal being embedded in social relations. Tamale (2020: 141) underlines that Ubuntu transmits a particular view of communitarianism which acknowledges the importance of individuality but ‘lays a much heavier emphasis on the value of community. It values “unity in diversity”’, which I here suggest resonates with the pedagogical work of prefiguration in social movements, which, as mentioned before, centres on finding affinity-for-affinity. However, while the pedagogical work of finding affinity-for-affinity is central to working for change in social movements, that work is still embedded in historical and contemporary structural relations of colonialism and capitalism. The following section looks deeper into the necessity of naming and theorizing locality in prefigurative politics.

Unlearning from the margin

A prevalent theme of this meeting, and as I met with the domestic workers elsewhere (Mählck, 2024), was the narrative of debt and the dependency of domestic workers on their expatriate employers. This dependency emerged from domestic workers taking loans from their employers, as their salaries were too small to live on. A main reason for taking the loans, the domestic workers explained to me, was to be able to pay for their children’s school fees. The employer took the repayments for the loan out of the domestic workers’ wages, sometimes leaving them as little as 100,000 TKS (approx. 34 euros) to live on per month. This way of organizing labour through relations of debt was first put into practice by the British colonial administration in a different part of the world, Mauritius. Central here was a system of ‘free’ workers brought to the plantations in the colonies. These workers were controlled through debt relations to the employers. The debt relation was used to force workers to stay on the plantation, sometimes for their entire lives, working off their debts. In important ways the debt relations narrated in my interviews differed from this system, which had been put into practice and controlled by the colonial state. In my interviews, debt relations are articulated between private actors. In addition, the domestic workers all felt that they could leave if the situation became unbearable. Importantly, the domestic workers emphasized to me that they thought they were entitled to this loan as the salaries were, indeed, too small to live on. The following will expand on this line of thought.

The example above points to the importance of theorizing social reproductive labour through the lens of variegated social reproduction, indicating the importance of analysing locality – in other words, the particularities of conditions for paid domestic and care work that take place in expatriate households in Dar es Salaam. Yet, these conditions are connected to larger structures of colonialism and capitalism that extend over different geographic places and over time. From a variegated social reproduction approach, the debt relations described by the domestic workers need to be taken out of their usual economistic framing (see also Cavellero and Gago, 2021). Moreover, when contemporary dependency relations are theorized from the perspective of the everyday lives of domestic workers, the understanding of the labour involved in life’s work is broadened and nuanced. In the context of the research presented here, this means recognizing the colonial, racist and capitalist underpinnings of the history of indenture and the domestic worker’s agency.

In her work ‘Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness’ (1989), bell hooks asserts that taking on the perspectives of margin is a political decision rather than something which is inherited or given in educational practice and research. The crucial point for the discussion in this article is that she asserts that marginality can be a central location for the production of counter-hegemonic discourses as it nourishes a person’s capacity to resist (hooks, 1989). As noted by Keyl (2017), hooks’ work highlights transgression and not only places processes of liminality and dislocation at the centre, but also brings a particular notion of spatiality to processes of learning. In other words, a spatial perspective on learning is crucial for recognizing what perspectives from below and from within can bring to a prefigurative politics of life’s work. Bearing in mind that the majority of the world’s population labour under conditions of informality and precarity, the importance of locality, i.e. speaking from the margin, for unlearning cannot be overestimated. Here, I suggest that taking seriously how domestic workers unlearn the social and material practices that would construct a loan from their employer as a mechanism for control and domination only, recognizes the importance of unlearning from the margin. This involves theorizing life’s work at the intersection of critical scholarship from the West, from the non-west and non-Western scholars trained in the West. This is a complex, sometimes contradictory, and unfinished endeavour.

Conclusion

Framing the analysis of moving towards a decolonial feminist prefigurative politics of life’s work through the lens of unlearning means emphasizing the historical emergence, the embodied, emotional and spatial relations in the contextual present as well as the possibilities for imagining a future which we do not know. By analysing empirical examples of the content, form and locality of how domestic workers in Dar es Salaam negotiate exploitation and organize collectively for change, I have argued that it is imperative to recognize the complexity and diversity of life’s work and of prefigurative politics. Taking seriously how domestic workers working in expatriate households in Dar es Salaam negotiate life’s work brings a spatial perspective to the various struggles taking place under contemporary forms of capitalisms, as different as these may be. It also brings to the forefront the agency, persistence and solidarity that people who are living under precarious conditions are capable of as they strive to secure and, when possible, change their conditions for life’s work.

Drawing on research produced in the West, in the non-West and by non-Western scholars trained in the West, this article advocates for a pluralistic perspective. I propose that perspectives originating from within and below are essential for progressing towards a feminist and decolonial prefigurative politics of life’s work. This involves understanding that before we can dismantle current dominant conditions for life’s work, we must unlearn, and privileged subjects need to unlearn more. Developing intersectional, embodied and plural Pedagogies of Unlearning, aimed at finding common ground and coexistence among diverse realities while recognizing existing tensions and hierarchies, is an ongoing, unfinished and always political project.