Читать книгу Josie Mpama/Palmer - Robert R. Edgar - Страница 12

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Family Matters

Josie Mpama/Palmer’s chaotic childhood shaped her early life. As a court interpreter in Potchefstroom, her father held a privileged position in black society. But after her parents divorced when she was seven, she lacked an anchor in her personal life and struggled to find a semblance of family stability. Instead of being able to take advantage of the educational and social opportunities her father’s status might have offered her, she was passed around from one family member to another and struggled to find a stable home. And, as a teenager, she had to provide for herself and her ailing mother by taking jobs as a domestic servant in white homes and as a seamstress. Her early life would make her even more concerned with creating and protecting stable family and community structures for black people when she entered political life in the late 1920s.

For a country whose past is so closely identified with rigid racial segregation, what is striking about many South African families is how racially mixed their lineages are. This was certainly the case with the family line of Josephine Winifred Mpama. Her father was Stephen Bonny Mpama, the son of Zulu parents, July and Anna Mpama, who came from the Inanda mission reserve not far from Durban, which American Board missionaries had founded in the nineteenth century. Josie referred to her father as a “denationalised Zulu,” by which she meant that his family were amakholwa, Christian converts who lived on mission stations and who attended mission schools and absorbed Western culture. Born in 1881 in Kroonstad, Orange Free State, Stephen moved with his family to Johannesburg after gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886. From about 1894, Stephen worked for a firm of chemists, Wilson and Coghill, in Langlaagte, to the west of Johannesburg.

Figure 1.1. Stephen Mpama (top row, on the left), 1920s. (Vesta Smith)

Josie’s mother was Georgina Garson Gasibone. Born around 1883, Georgina was the daughter of Johanna Garson, whose parents were a Mfengu woman and an Afrikaner man. Johanna married a moSotho, with whom she had two daughters, one of them Georgina. After her husband died, Johanna remarried, this time to a Scotsman by the name of Garson with whom she had three sons. They were raised “white,” went to European schools, served in the South African Army during World War I, and eventually became strangers to their black half sisters.

Stephen and Georgina met in Johannesburg and were married in a civil ceremony on April 12, 1899, by the veldcornet (a field cornet was an official who performed military, administrative, and judicial duties) of Johannesburg and in a church by a Wesleyan Methodist minister on June 3, 1899. Her mother preferred that Georgina go live in the Cape Colony during the Anglo-Boer War while Stephen served as a guide in a British army infantry unit. After the war he returned to his old job at Wilson and Coghill for several years before taking up a position at Village Reef Gold Mining Company for fifteen months.

Following the war British colonial officials administered Potchefstroom, and Mpama was elevated to the apex of black colonial society when the Potchefstroom magistrate appointed him as a court interpreter at an annual salary of seventy-two pounds.¹ It was a position that educated Africans held in high esteem. As a young man in the Transkei before embarking on a law career, Nelson Mandela set his sights on becoming an interpreter for a magistrate or the Native Affairs Department because the post “was a glittering prize for an African, the highest a black man could aspire to.”² In the black reserves, Mandela added, “an interpreter in the magistrate’s office was considered second only in importance to the magistrate himself.”³ The English-speaking magistrate relied heavily on a multilingual black interpreter in the courtroom because the judge, plaintiff, defendant, counsel, and witnesses might all speak different languages. Drawing on his personal experience as a court interpreter in Kimberley, the veteran ANC leader Solomon Plaatje explained that an interpreter fluent in many languages and with an intimate knowledge of the law was essential so that a white judge “should clearly understand the evidence in any case upon which he sits in judgement, and the only means he has of attaining this in Southern Africa is by possession of a good interpreter.”⁴

Mpama fit the profile of many Africans educated at mission schools. Known as “school people,” they expected that their education and professional accomplishments would qualify them to be treated as the equals of whites. Mpama valued Africans advancing themselves through education. Because Africans who sought a college education could not have one in southern Africa, they went instead to the United Kingdom and the United States. To remedy this, in 1906, with 150 white and black delegates from all over South Africa, Mpama attended the Inter-State Native College Convention at Lovedale, the premier secondary school for Africans in the eastern Cape, which started the discussions for establishing an institution of higher education for black students, Fort Hare College (subsequently a university), a decade later.⁵

The school people also hoped that the British would not only preserve the qualified franchise for Africans and “Coloureds” (the apartheid-era term for people of mixed race) in the Cape Colony but also introduce it to their other South African colonies. School people were firm believers in bringing about change through constitutional means, but when a draft of the South Africa Act was released that proposed a constitution for a Union of South Africa that would keep political power in white hands, Africans from around the region met in Bloemfontein in 1909 to establish the South African Native Convention (SANC).⁶ After a SANC delegation sent to London to appeal to British officials achieved nothing, Africans began discussing the creation of an organization that would unify their organizations. Mpama attended meetings of the Orange Free State Native Congress and the SANC in August 1911 that laid the foundation for the establishment of the South African Native National Congress in 1912.⁷

While Mpama’s professional and political life was taking off, his personal life was in turmoil. Georgina and Stephen lost three children at birth before Georgina gave birth to Josephine—nicknamed “Josie” by her father—on March 21, 1903. According to Stephen, he and Georgina lived “happily” until 1908, when their relationship deteriorated and they divorced. Their divorce proceedings were messy, with both sides offering very different explanations for why the marriage collapsed. Stephen’s version was that his wife had cheated on him. After he and a policeman caught his wife in bed with another man, he initiated divorce proceedings. Georgina countered by accusing Stephen of raping a woman. As a result, she took Josie and went to stay with her mother in Sophiatown, a black township in Johannesburg. After returning to Potchefstroom in April 1909, she claimed that when they were staying with her uncle, Stephen assaulted her. Stephen admitted as much but testified that he was provoked by catching her in bed with another man. The circuit court judge sided with Stephen and ruled that Georgina had committed adultery. He awarded Stephen half of their communal property, damages of fifty pounds, and, most important, custody of Josie.⁸

Figure 1.2. Baby photo of Josie Mpama/Palmer. (Palmer family album)

The fallout from her parents’ bitter split scarred Josie’s childhood and certainly shaped her yearning as an adult for a stable home and family life and her compassion for children neglected by or alienated from their families. Interestingly, her personal account of her youth is a sad story of rancor, turbulence, and abandonment.⁹ Her memory of the outcome of her parents’ divorce was at odds with the court record. She believed the court had stipulated she could stay with her mother until she decided with which parent she wanted to live. She remembered leaving Potchefstroom with her mother on a train, and as her father was in the process of saying good-bye, he suddenly reached in the window and pulled her out. While her mother continued to fight for custody, she remained with her father in his five-room home in the Potchefstroom location.¹⁰

Stephen brought in a young man to look after her while he was at work, but after her mother protested that arrangement, her father employed a young woman. He then sent Josie to stay with his eldest sister, who lived a few miles from Josie’s mother in Johannesburg. There she claimed she was treated poorly—clothes her mother sent her ended up being given to her aunt’s daughter, for example. After Georgina brought a formal complaint to a court, her father took Josie back to Potchefstroom and called on his younger sister to stay with her.

This arrangement did not work any better. Josie claimed that she was treated as if she were “in jail.” She was not allowed to play with her friends at school. On one occasion she ran away from home and met up with a group of her friends who were searching in a field for cow manure to use as cooking fuel. She had the shock of her life when what they thought was a pile of manure turned out to be a curled-up snake. She fled home, where she found that her father and other family members were frantically looking high and low for her because they thought her mother had kidnapped her. “Now instead of father scolding me for my wrong doings he took me on his lap and wept together with me as was his habit.”¹¹

Once it became clear that Stephen’s sister could not look after her, Josie was shipped to the home of her uncle, Josiah Jolly Mpama, at Robinson Deep Mine in Johannesburg. “Life in that house,” as she described it, “was something unheard of.” In Potchefstroom she had attended an English-medium school, but at her new school, run by German-speaking Lutheran missionaries, English classes were held only a few times a week. Moreover, her aunt treated her abysmally, even withholding her food for lunch at school. Her uncle was aware of this, and he often slipped her food or money so she could buy lunch. His wife would also thrash Josie with a sjambok for the slightest offense, but after her uncle beat his wife so badly after one spanking that a doctor had to treat her, Josie was never again beaten when he was at home.¹² His wife also forced Josie to help her sell wine illegally to mine workers. Josie’s responsibility was to keep an eye out for “the detectives who if I see them coming should give her a warning.”

Josie’s mother came to visit her occasionally on Sundays, but since her aunt was always present, Josie was afraid to speak up about her treatment. When her mother decided to remarry, she bought a nice outfit for Josie, but on the wedding day her aunt refused to let her bathe, dressed her in a plain frock, and made excuses for not attending the wedding reception.

One day Josie was surprised when Georgina unexpectedly showed up at the school gate. She asked Josie if she wanted to come and live with her—something she had always hoped for. Her mother wrote a note to Josiah and his wife: “Don’t look for [Josie]. I have taken her. She is at my place and I shall only hand her up when the highest court in the land compels me too [sic].”¹³ A few days later Stephen arrived at Josie’s granny’s house, where they were staying. He spoke to her in isiZulu and told her that she had to go with him, but this time she “blankly refused and made him understand that I am now with mother and intend to stay with [her].”¹⁴ When her father grabbed her by the arm, she clung fiercely to a door and screamed so loudly that others intervened to separate them. Later her grandmother showed her father the bundle of clothes she was wearing when her mother fetched her at school. It contained “boots that had no soles. Socks that had just the up’s and the feet rags, bloomers that had so many windows that one could see the whole earth without opening one.”¹⁵ Stephen was so ashamed to learn this that he gave up on trying to keep her, even though his relatives swore that they would not “leave their blood with bushmans.”¹⁶ They were true to their word, for several weeks later they attempted to drag her out of the house. This time her mother’s husband and her brothers jumped into the fray. A fistfight broke out, and her father’s relatives were ejected from the premises. The fight then went to the courtroom, where her mother was charged with stealing a child. The case exposed all the unpleasant things her uncle and aunt had done to her, and she was allowed to stay with her mother at her grandmother’s place.

In 1917, Josie’s mother’s legs began weakening, and her husband urged her and Josie to go back to Potchefstroom. He promised to support them with his job in Johannesburg. They bought a three-room house with a small garden. Josie attended school, while her mother earned money washing clothes for white families. But when her mother’s health worsened and she became an invalid, her husband reneged on his promise to look after them. Josie had to pitch in to wash and iron clothes on the side, and on Saturdays she cleaned the home of an elderly white woman.

Eventually her need to support her mother forced her to leave school and serve an apprenticeship with a tailor. In 1918, she and her mother moved to Doornfontein in Johannesburg, where they rented a room. Josie found work at an Indian tailor shop making buttonholes and hand sewing. She also learned how to make trousers. But, always on the lookout for better-paying positions, she became a domestic servant for an elderly white couple. And knowing that cooks were paid a bit more, she learned enough, “with the aid of cooking books and recipes in newspapers,” to find work as a servant and cook. She even polished floors, despite the toll it took on her knees and legs.

Working for a family of Russian Jews, she learned for the first time about the communist revolution of 1917. They “spoke about a revolution in that country and me, not knowing anything about politics and the birth of a new world, took no notice of what they were speaking about. Until 1928 when I got an idea of the revolution of which they spoke.”¹⁷

Josie had her first child, Carol, with a Coloured man in Doornfontein in 1920, but she kept her maiden name. Around the time of the Rand Rebellion in 1922, when a white mine workers’ strike almost brought Johannesburg to its knees, Josie, Carol, and her mother moved back to Potchefstroom and stayed in Stephen’s comfortable house in the location surrounded by fig and apple trees. She gave birth to a second daughter, Francis, by another man in 1926.¹⁸

Although her childhood was rough, she acknowledged in an interview late in her life that she “learnt the value of doing things myself instead of always depending on the next person.”¹⁹

While Josie and her mother were eking out a living, Stephen was doing well as an interpreter at the magistrate’s court until a reorganization of staff led to his being retrenched in May 1912. After that he was used on a temporary basis.²⁰ He was a highly respected figure in Potchefstroom. In 1915, the local magistrate described him this way: “I may add that so far as this particular Native is concerned I can only say that in regard to linguistic accomplishments, civility, sobriety, general behavior and ability, he is altogether exceptional.”²¹ But in late 1916, his world was turned upside down when he was charged with knowingly receiving stolen property.

The case revolved around some sheets of corrugated iron that another black person, John Konden, had stolen from his employer and various other people and sold to Mpama in August 1916. Konden claimed that Mpama bought the goods knowing they were stolen. He testified that Mpama had seen him in front of the courthouse and asked him if he had any sheets of corrugated iron for sale. Because Mpama made it clear to him that he did not want to buy costly material from a white person, Konden inferred that Mpama did not care how he procured the material. He then stole the iron sheets as well as pipes and gutters. After delivering the goods to Mpama’s home during the day, Mpama upbraided him for not bringing them at night. Then, when Konden was caught stealing some doors, he confessed to the police that Mpama had paid him for the sheets in front of the post office.

Mpama’s version of his dealings with Konden was very different. He said he was tending his garden at his home when Konden came by and asked him why he did not put a furrow under the bridge in his garden so that water could flow easier. Konden offered to sell him materials for the furrow. When he arrived several days later with some secondhand sheets of corrugated iron in a handcart, Mpama bought five of them and placed them in his backyard.

The investigating officer, Detective Robert Glass, questioned Mpama about where he had bought the iron sheets. Put on the defensive, Mpama first denied knowing Konden at all. Then, when Glass said that he would search Mpama’s home, Mpama admitted that Konden had given him one piece of piping as a present. After going to Mpama’s house, Glass found some of the stolen property, which had identifying marks, in the backyard. When Glass asked Mpama a second time if he had purchased any property from Konden, Mpama swore again that he had not. Glass said that if he found out that Mpama was lying, then he would be arrested. After ascertaining that the material was stolen, he arrested Mpama who, as a result, was suspended from his interpreter’s job.

After reviewing the evidence, the magistrate found Mpama guilty on October 5 and sentenced him to three months in jail. He suspended the sentence on condition of good behavior over the next three months. But, because of the conviction, the court had no alternative but to dismiss him from his post as interpreter.

Mpama appealed to the secretary for justice to overturn the conviction and reinstate him to his post. One wonders whether white officials had used Konden, who had been convicted five times for theft, to undermine Mpama because of his involvement in local and national politics. Indeed, once Mpama became aware of Konden’s criminal record, he argued that the presiding magistrate should have dismissed the case, and he asked the secretary to review the trial evidence carefully. Mpama received strong backing from members of the Potchefstroom Side Bar and the Wesleyan Methodist minister, Reverend Whitehouse, who wrote the secretary calling for Mpama’s reinstatement.²² He pointed out Mpama’s reputation for honesty from all quarters. “He may have been foolish but I think everyone is agreed that his character remains unsullied.” Despite these letters of support, the secretary replied that he could not intercede on Mpama’s behalf because he had been found guilty of a crime and thus had to leave the service.

In the meantime, Stephen had remarried around 1915.²³ He met his new wife, Clara Emma (1893–1980), while she was visiting an aunt in Potchefstroom. Her mother was of mixed Sotho and European parentage, and her father was thought to be a Griqua chieftain. She had a fourth-grade education,²⁴ and though she was largely self-educated, she could read and write well and kept up with the newspapers. The couple’s first of four daughters, Marcy Elizabeth, was born on April 15, 1917.

Stephen eventually found employment after his brother Josiah, a clerk at the Robinson Deep Mine at the bottom of Eloff Street in downtown Johannesburg, unexpectedly died at the age of forty-three in October 1917. After mine officials invited Stephen to take over his brother’s position,²⁵ he built a wood-and-corrugated-iron home in the residential area reserved for married African clerks.²⁶ In the homes of Stephen and his wives, the primary language was Afrikaans, but Clara Emma also spoke English and insisted that her daughters use it exclusively in public.²⁷ An unabashed admirer of British royalty, she would embarrass her children by insisting that they dress up and stand at such prominent viewing places as in front of the Rand Club when a member of the British royal family was visiting Johannesburg.

In Johannesburg, Stephen fit comfortably into the social network of the African social and political elite. George Montshioa, an advocate and a founder of the South African Native National Congress, and Isaiah Bud-M’belle, chief interpreter of the Supreme Court of Griqualand West at Kimberley, were godfathers to two of his children. Josie’s half sisters remembered their family mixing with the leading lights of the time, such as Sol Plaatje. Stephen was active in the Transvaal Native Mine Clerks’ Association, which he served as chair for several years;²⁸ the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives, which promoted interracial cooperation; and the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, a social, cultural, and athletic hub in downtown Johannesburg established in 1924 that catered to educated Africans.

Stephen’s children with Clara Emma recollected few stories about Stephen because they were so young when he died. They do remember him as a very strict person who expected his wife to set the table for tea at four o’clock sharp. Josie told them that he was highly intelligent and “a swanky old chap” who carried a hankie in his pocket to buff his shoes.

Stephen was forty-five when he died on May 3, 1927, at the Robinson Deep Mine Hospital.²⁹ An indication of his stature is that his funeral drew three hundred people, including officials of the Transvaal Native Mine Clerks’ Association; compound indunas; leaders of the Joint Council of Europeans and Natives, such as R. V. Selope-Thema and Selby Msimang; T. D. Mweli-Skota, representing the ANC; and a Mr. Devenish, who promised that Stephen’s “widow and children would never be in want so long as he was Compound Manager of Robinson Deep.”³⁰ Indeed, the family was allowed to stay in their home at the mine until they moved to Vrededorp in the early 1940s. Clara Emma made ends meet working as a seamstress, upholsterer, and housekeeper for white employees at the mine. After they later moved to Vrededorp, she was employed at a boys’ school in Mountain View (now Parktown Boys’ High School).

At his death Stephen had achieved a reputation as a model of respectability and a voice of moderation. The next year, his daughter Josie joined the Communist Party in Potchefstroom, where she became a radical proponent for confronting white power head-on through grassroots organizing.