Josie Mpama/Palmer. Robert R. Edgar

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       2

       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 СКАЧАТЬ