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A Fighting Location

Although Potchefstroom was a small town in the western Transvaal where segregation and white domination were deeply entrenched, its black residents had a long record of standing up for their rights and challenging unjust regulations. Josie’s baptism into politics came in the late 1920s when residents of Potchefstroom’s black location battled white municipal authorities over a host of oppressive regulations, the most hated being the lodger’s permit, which required residents to pay a fee for anyone over the age of eighteen, including their own children, staying in their homes. Residents of the location, with women such as Josie in the forefront, put up a vigorous challenge to the permit and virtually shut down the town briefly in 1930.

Vital organizational and legal support for the challenges was provided by the Communist Party of South Africa. Josie, who married one of the CPSA’s organizers, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, joined the party in 1928, and it was to be her primary political home until the South African government outlawed it in 1950. Although the Potchefstroom protests achieved little in the end, they were a critical experience that shaped her political life and views after she and Edwin were chased out of Potchefstroom and moved to Johannesburg in 1931.

Figure 2.1. A street in Makweteng Location, Potchefstroom, 1904. (Postcard in Robert R. Edgar collection)

The Place of Sod

Potchefstroom’s white stadsraad (town council) had established the black location Makweteng (“Place of Sod”) in 1888 on very generous terms to its black standholders, who paid an annual fee of ten shillings for stands on a perpetual lease, which could be passed on to their children. Many of the stands had ample kitchen gardens and orchards.¹

After the Anglo-Boer War, British colonial officials residing in Potchefstroom took over administration of Makweteng and began attempting to undermine the residents’ rights by restricting tenure to a monthly basis with a rent of ten shillings per month. Location residents successfully challenged British authorities by bringing a case in 1905 to the Supreme Court, which ruled that since the British had not officially proclaimed Makweteng a location, the prewar regulations still stood. However, the following year the British authorities, despite the continuing opposition of location residents, introduced a new proposal for leasing stands for fifteen years at a monthly rental of four shillings.² Indian Opinion, which championed the rights of Indian traders in towns such as Potchefstroom, called the official intervention a “breach of faith,” a reversal of their promise to maintain the prewar status of black people. The newspaper commented: “Europeans are terrified lest he [an African] should own land in his own name. He is labeled and marked, stigmatized and insulted. At nine o’clock at night, a lugubrious bell reminds him of his permanent inferiority to the white man, and warns him, like a criminal, to depart from the holy precincts of the towns to his locations.”³

In 1908, location residents formed the Basotho Committee, which delegated Stephen Mpama, L. R. Muthle, and George Mtombela to conduct an interview with Transvaal’s minister of native affairs, Johann Rissik, to remind him about the rights that location residents had to land and the annual rental agreement that they believed carried over from the late nineteenth century. They were concerned that the town council was not recognizing these rights.⁴ The committee agreed to accept the minister’s decision, which supported some individuals’ claims to stands but disallowed others. That same year, the town council “gained the legal right to force any black person not living on the premises of a white employer to reside in the location.”⁵

The conflict between location residents and the town council was reignited several years after the Transvaal became part of the Union of South Africa in 1910. In 1912, the Potchefstroom Town Council appointed a new location superintendent, a Mr. Dormyl, whose primary responsibility was to raise more money from location residents by collecting arrears on rents and sanitation fees, which they had resisted paying. The first time he met with township residents, on February 1 after arriving on his bicycle, he immediately began demanding passes from the men. He then told residents that they had to reregister and that the names and occupations of people living on stands had to be stated on the yearly stand permit. Residents complained to the town clerk about his attitude:

Sir, is it right that a gentleman or Supt. should use such words if we had known he was the Supt. and had come in a better manner we are sure he (the boy) would of showed more civility. We are coloured but we know how to respect our superiors. But the way the new Supt. came and spoke to us and the words used we took him to be one of the many which knock about the location.⁶

Dormyl continued his boorish behavior by roaming around the location, knocking over water containers and cooking pots and entering people’s homes without warning.

The local magistrate added fuel to the conflict by ruling that boys and girls over the age of fourteen had to take out permits to live in the location. Previously standholders could take out an annual permit that covered all members of their family and any lodgers. Residents interpreted the new rule as targeting women and girls for control under the pass laws that regulated where blacks could live, move, and work.

Dormyl followed up by threatening to sell the stands of any resident who had not paid up their rental arrears by April 10. On March 16, police raided the location before dawn and arrested twenty-three girls and seven boys, who all received a fine of one pound or a sentence of ten days in jail unless they took out a permit within ten days. Taking up the cause of the residents, an Anglican priest, Frederic Sharman, encouraged them not to pay their taxes or take out new residential permits until an appeal of the new regulations was heard in the Supreme Court. “The natives of this location,” he asserted, “are all prepared to go to prison rather than submit.”⁷ The legal adviser to the town council accused Sharman of being responsible for creating the unrest in the location by putting “these natives into a state of ferment, even rebellion, to defy the Superintendent and the law and that your action can never bring about that point desired: viz: to have friendly cooperation.”⁸

With women in the lead, location residents made several appeals to higher authorities. One was to the Native Affairs Department, whose acting secretary wrote the town clerk questioning why local officials thought it was necessary to add stricter controls, since the regulation had not been followed for some years. A petition, headed by Rachel Moloto, to Lord Gladstone, the British governor-general, detailed how the raid of March 16 had generated fear within the community:

The Superintendent has the power at any time to refuse to renew our permits without stating any reason, and we have no right to appeal, so that if we continue to stay with our fathers and mothers, or our children, he or his Police boys, may arrest us in any place, at any time of the day or night, and drag us off to prison. . . . We pray for your noble Lordship’s mercy and consideration of our prayers and cry to you.⁹

When the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the regulation by Dora Magati and sixteen others, Judge J. P. de Villiers wondered why not getting a permit could be a punishable offense. The court upheld the residents’ objections by ruling that the town council and the superintendent should have given the residents a warning before they imposed any new regulations.¹⁰ That was a victory for the township. The Native Affairs Department also dispatched a magistrate to mediate between the town council and location leaders. His solution was for the town council to stop enforcing the rule requiring boys and girls over the age of fourteen to have a permit. In October 1912, the Native Affairs Department went further by specifying that women in the location did not have to have a permit. These rulings kept an uneasy peace for a decade.¹¹

In 1925, the national census put Potchefstroom’s population at 13,363, comprising 8,180 whites, 4,241 Africans, 224 Indians, and 708 Coloureds.¹² In the location most blacks were seTswana speakers, but a significant number were Oorlams, blacks who had acculturated to Afrikaner culture and whose home language was Afrikaans. Because white farmers in the neighboring countryside were experiencing hard times, many black farmworkers had moved into town where there was already high unemployment, partly because the “civilized labor” policy of Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog’s government was aimed at ensuring employment for poor whites. This policy lowered the wages for black domestic servants in white homes.

To control Potchefstroom’s growing black population, the town council relied on the government’s recently enacted Urban Areas Act of 1923, which was designed to allow town councils to regulate the administration of Africans living in urban areas, through establishing segregated locations for them, controlling their influx into urban areas, establishing advisory boards, and creating “native” accounts into which went revenues from beer-hall sales, rents, fines, and fees. Municipal councils had the discretion to decide which of the provisions to enact, and Potchefstroom’s town council tried to implement most of them.¹³

Throughout the 1920s, the battles between location residents and the location superintendent and town council escalated as more and more restrictions and fees were imposed on location residents. In 1923, the location superintendent, complaining about a younger class of blacks becoming uncontrollable and making a ruckus in town, imposed a 10:00 p.m. curfew to quell unrest.¹⁴

The town council also levied a series of measures that directly affected women and their families. The Night Pass Ordinance, requiring black women to carry passes between 10:30 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., was put into effect on June 1, 1925.¹⁵ That same year a fee of ten shillings and sixpence was imposed on location residents to pay for laying water pipes. Because the standards for clean water had been tightened and improved, many wells for water had been closed. New pipes meant water could become accessible closer to people’s homes, but if they were shut down, people had to walk a mile to find a source of water.

Because many location women earned their income washing clothes for white families, the new levy directly affected them. On September 28, 1927, a procession of two hundred black women, marching in columns of four and carrying a red, white, and blue banner with “For Mercy” inscribed on it, went to see the magistrate, who explained that the municipality was following rules set by officials in Pretoria. The town council was improving water standards to lessen the infant mortality rate caused by bad well water, and it was not raising rates for washing water but for gardens.

Figure 2.2. Washing clothes, Makweteng Location, Potchefstroom, 1905. (Postcard in Robert R. Edgar collection)

The protesters voiced their disagreement. One retorted that they had been drinking the well water for many years without ill effects, while “another asked whether it was worse for their children to die from drinking bad water or from starvation if they could not have a garden.”¹⁶

The issue that touched off the most vigorous protests was the lodger’s fee. The Native (Urban Areas) Act encouraged town councils to upgrade facilities in locations and offer new services, but they typically had to be paid for by raising fresh sources of revenue from location residents. A key way was the lodger’s permit, “a licence issued by a municipality to a person who lived in a hired room or rooms in the house of another, including any male child above eighteen years of age or adult female or daughter of the registered owner of a house.”¹⁷ The permit’s objective was twofold: to control and regulate blacks in urban areas and, in the case of Potchefstroom’s location account, to cover a large deficit that would otherwise have had to be made up by white residents.¹⁸

Wherever the lodger’s permit was introduced in South Africa, Africans deeply resented it because it undermined the integrity and cohesiveness of black family life by requiring any children over the age of eighteen of registered householders to take out a monthly permit to live with their parents. This often compelled them to take up employment at very cheap wages or to leave their homes for other urban areas such as nearby Johannesburg—in which case their families lost their incomes. Stand owners also lost rental income from lodgers.

A black newspaper, the African Leader, published an indignant editorial in 1933 that highlighted how the lodger’s permit had undermined the African family’s moral code: “Africans have a definite moral code of their own, especially in the upbringing of children. One of their important rules or moral codes lies in the strength of parental control. A child is never free from it until he or she is emancipated.” The editorial went on to argue that the permit split the “family in a most savage and inhuman way” by taking away the right of parents “to supervise, tend and nurse the character of their children.¹⁹

The town council relied on Andries Johannes Weeks, hired as the location superintendent in December 1926, to keep residents in line. If moviemakers were casting the role of a callous brute, they could not have chosen better than Weeks. He zealously took up his new position and swaggered around the location terrorizing people with his sjambok. He was constantly on the lookout for ways in which the town council could squeeze more revenue from location residents. After visiting Boksburg in 1930 to study how the government there maximized the collection of lodger’s fees, he concluded that the Potchefstroom municipality was being shortchanged and could increase its ten-pound monthly revenue from residents by 400 percent.²⁰

By May 1928, location residents had become so fed up with Weeks that 1,232 of them signed a petition calling him “as not a fit and proper person to hold the office of Superintendent.” They listed a litany of complaints: his inability to speak any African languages contributed to misunderstandings between him and residents; he regularly whipped residents with his sjambok; he harshly treated people who did not whitewash their homes; he arrested people for vagrancy; he led indiscriminate night searches of people’s homes; and he routinely broke up their meetings. They pointed out his “insulting manner towards our women” and that he used the provisions of the Urban Areas Act “as weapons to deprive us of the ordinary rights of mankind, to security of person and property” instead of using the regulations to improve the lot of the people. They concluded, “In general we are voicing the united protest of our people against the excessive hardship and totally uncalled for suffering which is the lot of the residents of this location.”

Copies of the petition were sent to the town council as well as the prime minister, the ministers of justice and of native affairs, and the press. Not surprisingly Weeks summarily dismissed their complaints as communist propaganda. “In my opinion,” he charged, “the petition is a very good example of Communist intrigue and misrepresentation.”²¹

The petition made no impact on white authorities, and Weeks intensified his campaign of terror against location residents. For instance, Benjamin Mohlomi, an assistant teacher at the Dutch Reformed Church school, complained to the mayor that Weeks had it in for him. He had used abusive language toward him, threatened to “break his neck,” and leaned on Mohlomi’s school to dismiss him. Mohlomi complained that one time he was standing outside school before classes one day when “all of a sudden [Weeks] pointed [at] me vigorously with his finger and called me a Baster [bastard] etc. I am afraid this seems to be a continual practice and has grown into a habit now.”²² Weeks’s sjamboking of a black woman led to even more protests.²³

One weapon that location residents effectively wielded to combat Weeks and the town council was the legal system, but the key was finding an organization that would bring cases to court. The Transvaal African National Congress and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) had branches in Potchefstroom, but they were not able to organize effectively. In May 1926, an ICU organizer Sidney Buller, who had applied to the council to stay in the location, was turned down. Buller did not pull any punches about why he had been sent to Potchefstroom. “I came here to agitate amongst the natives in respect of the trade, stories and their services with the white population. . . . I am here to agitate in respect of the economic wages.” He added, “We drive to prosecute the master and compel him to pay a month’s wage”²⁴ Not surprisingly, F. van der Hoff, the location superintendent at the time, did not consider Buller “a fit and proper person because he is an agitator” who had no employment or a place to live.

Although faced with the same opposition to their sending organizers, the CPSA, whose lawyers were prepared to take on court cases, proved to be the most effective organization for mobilizing protests. The party had a presence in Potchefstroom since 1926 when two of its African members asked for permission to live in the location. After the superintendent refused to issue them lodger’s permits, they unsuccessfully approached the town council. As a last resort, they appealed to the local magistrate, U. G. Horak. The party’s attorney argued that the location superintendent had not used proper discretion and had refused them permission solely because they were members of a party that was still legal. The magistrate agreed with his logic and ruled that since the defendants had not been doing anything subversive in the location, they should not have been penalized just because they were CPSA members. Since the superintendent had not taken all the facts into consideration, Horak directed him to issue permits to the party members.²⁵

This was not the last time that party lawyers succeeded in challenging the authorities in Potchefstroom. After location activists approached the central party office in Johannesburg about establishing a branch in Potchefstroom, the party dispatched T. W. Thibedi, one of the first African communists, and Douglas and Molly Wolton in March 1928 to speak at a rally that drew a crowd of about a thousand. Thibedi reminded the attendees that the British had promised them many things during the Anglo-Boer War in exchange for their support:

You people were well-to-do before that war, but your property was taken away from you. You were given pieces of paper and were promised that your property will be restored to you after the war. Was your property returned to you after the war? No! You were poor people when the war was over and you are being kept poor.²⁶

A white policeman then disrupted Thibedi’s speech and asked him whether he had permission to hold a public meeting in the location. He then took Thibedi to the magistrate’s office where he was charged with convening a meeting without a permit and inciting racial hostility, an offense made illegal by the recently passed Native Administration Act. Thibedi was represented by the party’s chair, Sidney Bunting, who argued that the charge did not precisely detail what the offense was and that Thibedi’s speech had not created any hostility between the races. Accepting Bunting’s line of reasoning, the magistrate backed the right of free speech and dismissed the charge, stating that if Thibedi and the party operated in a constitutional manner, they had a right to challenge what they saw as unjust laws.

The party celebrated the victory by immediately organizing a rally in Potchefstroom’s market square. But white vigilantes, who were ever present at black meetings, were so incensed by Wolton’s speech that they started roughing him up. Blacks and whites in the crowd then turned on each other and touched off a melee.²⁷

Thibedi’s triumph in court was a demonstration that the party could deliver and was the starting point for establishing a party branch in the location. Six weeks later the Potchefstroom branch was claiming seven hundred members. A month after that, Bunting inflated the figure to four thousand.²⁸ In June, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana and Shadrach Kotu were dispatched to organize the branch properly and to launch a “school for the purpose of extending the knowledge of party work amongst the members.” They opened an office outside the location.

Figure 2.3. Edwin Mofutsanyana, 1940. (Inkululeko)

Born in 1899 in Witzieshoek in the Orange Free State, Mofutsanyana had worked in the Western Cape before attending Bensonvale Institution in the Herschel District of the Eastern Cape for four years, where one of his classmates was Albert Nzula, who was to become the first African general secretary of the CPSA.²⁹ Working as a clerk at the New Modderfontein mine in Benoni, Mofutsanyana became politicized by the African National Congress in the early 1920s. He joined the party in 1927 after his interest was piqued by a British communist, Jimmy Shield, who was speaking at a rally in Vereeniging. Mofutsanyana soon became an ardent communist, attending a party night school and throwing himself into CPSA campaigns. Shortly after being sent to Potchefstroom, he met Josie Mpama, a single woman with two daughters. The two fell in love and had a daughter, Hilda, the following year. We do not have any record of why and how Josie decided to join the protests, but she soon became one of the CPSA’s most vocal leaders.

Several months after Mofutsanyana and Kotu arrived in Potchefstroom, Superintendent Weeks tried to expel the pair, and the town council attempted to ban all political meetings in the location. After Mofutsanyana and Kotu were arrested several times for staying in the location without permits, they were forced to sleep in the open veld. They turned again to the courts, and a sympathetic magistrate ruled that simply being a communist was not ample justification for their being declared “undesirable.” Weeks was forced to issue them a permit allowing them to stay until the end of 1929.

The lodger’s fee was Weeks’s favored weapon for gaining greater control over every aspect of the lives of location residents. He successfully lobbied the Public Health Committee for a monthly fee of two shillings to be exacted on every lodger’s permit, which was put into effect in January 1928. This allowed him to keep tabs on everyone living in the location. Those who did not pay would be prosecuted and expelled.

With the location already at a boiling point, the lodger’s fee was the tipping point for activists such as Josie, who led campaigns against it. Protesters brought a test case in late 1928. The lawyer representing the accused argued that section 17 of the regulations under the Urban Areas Act authorized the municipal authority to levy charges for services on every registered occupier, but he maintained that since this was covered under the monthly levy of nine shillings on standholders, imposing an additional fee for the lodger’s permit was excessive. Although the magistrate ruled against the accused, he did not impose a fine, but he advised location residents in the court that he believed the fee was reasonable.³⁰

The confrontation escalated when Frank Molife, who had been born in the location, challenged the legality of the lodger’s permit. After the magistrate ruled that the bylaw was valid, Molife’s lawyer, T. Tom, appealed to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal on December 5, 1929.³¹ Eventually Molife and his wife and three children were evicted for not paying the lodger’s fee,³² and they were escorted to a place on the veld, where their furniture was dumped. This aroused the ire of the black community, which maintained that Molife but not his family should have been evicted. When a delegation approached the magistrate about this, he directed them to the town clerk, who then sent them to a council member, a Mrs. Nel, chair of the location committee. She said she could do nothing for the Molifes. Several hundred protesters decided to bring Mrs. Molife, the children, and their furniture back to the location. Weeks called in the police to deal with the group.

The protests turned violent on December 16, 1929. To commemorate Dingaan’s Day and the freedom struggle against white domination, the party organized a rally and distributed an incendiary flyer to attract more people.³³ The flyer stated:

Roll up in your thousands! African workers! You have no guns or bombs like your masters, but you have your numbers; you have your labour and the power to organize and withhold it. These are your weapons; learn to use them, thereby bringing the tyrant to his knees.³⁴

Before the rally, Mofutsanyana caught wind of a rumor that an attempt was going to be made on his life. He thought that Weeks was deliberately spreading it to try to scare him off, so he kept the information to himself and told no one on the platform.³⁵ The meeting opened at 10:00 a.m., with about 500 Africans and 120 whites in the audience and twenty policemen monitoring the proceedings. As soon as Mofutsanyana started speaking, whites began heckling him. His interpreter, J. B. Marks, who was to become a party stalwart, was translating into Afrikaans, and he did not hold back. “I am surprised to see Europeans here who have come to cause trouble, whereas others are at home having their holiday.” He asked why they were disrupting black meetings, while Africans refrained from interfering in any white meetings. As the whites hurled insults, Mofutsanyana saw someone pointing a gun at him, and he and Marks leaped off the stage to the ground. The man brandishing the gun was Joseph Weeks, the location superintendent’s brother, who began shooting wildly into the crowd. Five blacks were injured in the ruckus. The most critically injured among them was Hermann Lithipe, who was attending the rally merely out of curiosity. He suffered a wound that became so severely infected that doctors had to amputate his leg. Then, on December 22, he suffered a heart attack and died.³⁶

Learning of his death, Mofutsanyana addressed a rally next to the Methodist church, severely criticizing whites:

It seems to be the policy of the ruling classes to shoot the nigger. These honourable hypocrites, these civilisers of the Black man, these people, under the shield of Christianity, told them that fear of the Lord was the beginning of knowledge. They had been shooting, they were shooting and they still intended to shoot. The Black man should let them see that he had power though he had no machine guns, aeroplanes, or cannons. The Black man’s power lay in his own hands.³⁷

Drawing a connection between Christianity and communism, he stressed that both believed in equality and social justice and that Christ, like the Communist Party, stood with the outcasts and the oppressed and was prepared to stand up for people’s rights. However, communists wanted to change things for the better now, not in the afterlife: “If we cannot show love in this world, then that beautiful place called Paradise is no use to us—to hell with it.”³⁸