Behind the windows of Minerva Ladies’ Residence works Muriel Amos, a residence cleaner at Stellenbosch University for the last 21 years. In a candid interview with SMF News’ Emma Giles, she looks back on years of dedication, connections, and insight only she can provide.
Muriel Jeniffer Amos is a cleaner at Stellenbosch University. She goes by ‘Tannie Muriel’ and has been a residence cleaner for the last 21 years, currently working at Minerva Ladies’ Residence on Hofmeyr Street. PHOTO: Emma Giles
When residents of Stellenbosch University’s Minerva Ladies’ Residence gather on their front lawn, you don’t miss it. Bright red and booming, their presence is all-encompassing. If you zoom past their jumping heads – to the window overlooking the crowd – a pair of eyes, turned up at the end, looks down on them. Those eyes belong to Muriel Amos, one of Minerva’s residence cleaners. With 21 years of experience, she has seen it all before.
“I’m like the furniture here,” says Muriel, affectionately known at Minerva as Tannie Muriel.
It’s her hour-long lunch break and she’s spending it in the common area of one of her designated sections. She’s a small woman, only taking up half the space on the couch. The room is organised with all the furniture precisely in its place. Minerva* residents, who call themselves ‘Minervianers’, move through the room and occasionally stop to greet her. “Hi, Tannie Muriel,” they say.
Muriel Amos often gazes out this window at the Minerva residents gathered on the lawn for residence activities and house bonding events down below. PHOTO: Emma Giles
A timeless routine
After two decades following the same routine, Muriel still loves her job. Minervianers sometimes apologise for the messy state of their rooms. Expecting disappointment, they are greeted with a warm yet determined tone. “No, it’s fine, I love it,” Muriel will tell the residents.
Muriel’s day is usually just standard procedure. She sweeps, mops, wipes, then goes to the next room and sweeps, mops and wipes. Place, shift and move. Lift, arrange and throw away. While most consider this mundane, for her it is everything. As she says, it’s “exciting”.
In her eyes, the messier the better. “The room can look like whatever,” she says, sitting comfortably on the couch. When there are rooms covered in clothes and unwashed dishes, she is not deterred. Rather she is inspired to transform that room so that when the resident returns, they enter a comfortable space.
“If I work the whole day it doesn’t matter. For me it’s nothing to work the whole day. I love it,” she says.
The pillows on the couch shift as she adjusts her posture, her hand raised to her chin. She believes her dedication to her work comes from her mother.
“I learnt it from home. If you do something, you do it properly,” she says.
A life outside Minerva
Muriel was born in 1963 and raised in Ida’s Valley, where she still resides. She attended Idas Valley Primary and Lückhoff High School. She is one of four girls. From a young age, her mother identified her as the one who loved to clean. This is still the case.
“Relax. The whole week you’re working and cleaning,” her husband often says at home. She explains that she can’t just “relax”. She’s a mother, a grandmother and a soon-to-be great-grandmother, meaning she rarely takes a break.
“A mother’s work never ends,” she says.
She cleans the rooms of Minerva, then her family, and finally her own.
Along with cleaning the residents’ rooms, Muriel Amos cleans the bathrooms in her respective sections at Stellenbosch University’s Minerva Ladies’ Residence. Her reflection is seen in the mirror, as she sweeps rhinestones off the floor from Minerva’s space-themed house fund dance that took place the previous night. PHOTO: Emma Giles
Currently, Muriel also takes care of two young girls. Kena, her granddaughter, was brought into her home at five months old when Muriel’s son was unable to continue caring for her. Muriel’s daughter also stays with her, with her husband and their daughter. Alongside Kena, they are turning five this year, just two days apart.
Muriel loves her granddaughters and feels grateful to have such a close relationship with them. Her youngest son passed on from TB when he was 25 years old. He didn’t have children. “[I] didn’t see [his] grandkids,” she says.
On Saturday nights, she goes to karaoke at the granddaughters’ school and on Sunday’s after lunch she watches the news and her favourite “soaps”. Her husband often hears her cackling into the night as she catches up on her shows.
A mother to many
After a few outfit changes and morning dances, she walks her grandchildren to school on her way to Minerva. Her motherly instincts, however, don’t leave her side. The pillows shift again. Her face lights up as a past resident, Nikita Poirier, comes to mind.
“I hear she’s still in Stellenbosch. She’s teaching here,” she says and her eyes shift to the room previously belonging to Poirier.
Their connection is certainly not one-sided, as when approached for this article, Poirier, who resided in Minerva from 2022 to 2025, said that hearing from Muriel “made [her] whole day”.
“It was always comforting to have a motherly figure around,” Poirier says about her time in Minerva. As an organised and neat person, Poirier took cleaning into her own hands and always politely declined the extra help. Eventually, Muriel asked Poirier when she was going to let her clean her room.
“From then on, I would look forward to Wednesdays and Fridays when she would pop by to clean so that I could chat to her,” Poirier says.
Gentlemen
Four Minervianers walk past the common area, carrying a fridge up the stairs and bellowing the house song. While Poirier and Muriel have fond memories, this is not true for all.
Muriel started as a cleaner for Stellenbosch University (SU) at Helshoogte Men’s Residence in 2005 and then switched to Minerva in 2009, to Huis Visser Men’s Residence in 2015 and then back to Minerva in 2022. (SU is partnered with an external cleaning company that often rotates the cleaning staff between the residences.)
Photographs of Muriel Amos, a residence cleaner, stuck up on the wall of her cleaning closet at Stellenbosch University’s Minerva Ladies’ Residence. She has been a cleaner at Minerva, Helshoogte Men’s Residence and Huis Visser Men’s Residence and is known for being the “best and friendliest cleaning lady”. PHOTO: Emma Giles
“For me, the men are much better than the girls,” Muriel says. Although the men’s rooms, bathrooms and common areas were messier than the women’s rooms, Muriel says the men still take her preference.
This is “because the ladies like to complain”, she says. At the men’s residences they established a language of understanding. “No, Tannie, it’s fine. You keep our place so nice and clean…,” they would sometimes say to her. Then they would proceed to sit with her, make her coffee and tell her she must take time to “relax”.
Beyond a casual greeting that she receives in the female spaces, the male residents demonstrated an intentional type of care that Muriel will never forget.
“While many residences already have strong relationships between staff and students, there is often room to create more intentional, respectful, and mutually beneficial integration,” says Dr Melanie Petersen, residence head of Minerva.
A sense of belonging
Petersen says Muriel “approaches each task with warmth, care, and professionalism, and has become a trusted presence in the residence. Her daily interactions contribute greatly to the sense of belonging and stability that students experience, while being a great pillar of support to the residence head and fellow colleagues”.
Muriel’s relationship with Minerva is detailed and complex. Her description of Minerva varies from deeply nostalgic to, sometimes, disconnected.
Yet, she can take one look at a lost pair of shoes lying in the hallway and know exactly who they belong to. She knows the residents, their rooms and their belongings like the palm of her hand.
And all the residents know her, although she finds this intriguing. How do they know her name, she often wonders.
Muriel Amos walks into her cleaning closet at Stellenbosch University’s Minerva Ladies’ Residence. She suspects the residents know her name because they look straight at her closet door when they come up the stairs. PHOTO: Emma Giles
But one could also ask whether knowing Muriel’s name actually translates into knowing her.
Muriel likes to remain discreet. It takes more than just a greeting and a few conversations to begin to know and understand the person behind the name put up on the door of the cleaning closet.
Muriel has two years left until her retirement. Soon, she hopes, her residence stories will be told in a book. This time, perhaps, with her name in the byline.
With dreams of being an author, she hopes to capture 21 years of observing, living and cleaning the residences of SU. One thing is certain, Muriel will always find a way to keep herself busy. After all, and to quote her, if she does something, she does it properly.
*Emma Giles resided in Minerva from 2023 to 2025.