‘Ooh, eh eh … Just One Small Cap is Enough!’ Servants, Detergents, and their Prosthetic Significance

This article explores the potent entanglements of race and servitude in the historical drama of dirt and domesticity. I focus on a recent advert in South Africa for the laundry detergent Omo, in which a black ‘fairy godmother’ maid magically materialises in an on-screen suburban domestic scene, whacking her white madam on the hand, while humorously admonishing her: ‘Ooh eh eh … just one small cap is enough!’ I argue that the iconographic assemblage of maid-madam-dirt-detergent-machine in the Omo advert dramatises the labouring hands of black servants that have historically kept their colonial masters (literally and figuratively) white. Tracing the histories of servants and detergents, laundry and labour, and tool and toil, I argue that the Omo ad resolved – through inversion, parody and humour – the colonial paradox of the dependency of white cleanliness on ‘unclean’ black labour, by figuring the servant as a prosthesis, and as a joke. The servant, however, is uncanny, the joke is unfunny, and the laughter attending the ad is nervous.