2. Potchefstroom: A Fighting Location

In the mid-1920s African protest escalated throughout the Transvaal countryside. African labour tenants and farm workers, chafing under poor wages and working conditions, evictions from white farms, stock restrictions and Pass Laws, and Africans in countryside towns, weary of tightened restrictions and growing unemployment, began clamouring for black organisations to assist them. Although the ICU took the lead in responding to their grievances, the Communist Party also dispatched some of its precious few African organisers to small towns.¹³

Mofutsanyana drew one of the most daunting assignments when he was thrust into the lion's den - organising black protesters in Potchefstroom, a town of around 14 000 people about 80 miles south-west of Johannesburg. Mofutsanyana branded Potchefstroom 'the most backward place for mad people', ¹⁴an apt description for a town with a well-deserved reputation for its hostility to black people.

Potchefstroom's black population of a little over 4 000 lived in a location just north of the downtown business district. Some were descendants of black labourers who had worked on white farms in neighbouring districts and who had migrated to Potchefstroom during the economic disruptions of the Anglo-Boer War and World War I. A severe drought in 1926 drove even more rural folk into Potchefstroom to eke out a living.

Potchefstroom blacks endured an array of regulations that intruded into every aspect of their lives. In 1923, to quell unrest, especially by 'uncontrollable' black youth who stayed out late, the city council set a curfew of 10 p.m. for blacks, which was announced by the ringing of a bell. Black residents protested that the curfew bell was 'degrading' for 'law abiding' Christians. ¹⁵In June 1925 an ordinance requiring African men to carry passes between 10:30 p.m. and 4 a.m. was extended to African women. ¹⁶Women also resented the regulation requiring location houses to be whitewashed to improve their appearances, because the whitewash seeped into their homes when it rained. ¹⁷In September 1927 the municipality shut down many wells in the location, after claiming they were contaminated and a primary cause of infant mortality. The decision adversely affected washerwomen, who now had to walk at least a mile to a source of water.

Given the impact of these regulations specifically on women, it was not surprising that they were the backbone of protests. A procession of 200 black women in columns of four marched to the magistrate's office to challenge the well regulation. One woman plaintively questioned the painful choice confronting them. Was it worse, she wondered , ' for their children to die from drinking bad water or from starvation if they could not have a garden?' ¹⁸

The regulation that most angered location residents was the two shillings a month lodger's fee introduced in November 1927. The fee was targeted at individuals over the age of 18 who resided in the homes of standholders, whose rents had just gone up from 5 shillings to 9 shillings a month. ¹⁹Although the town council maintained it had to raise new revenues to pay for additional services - constructing a new health clinic, removing rubbish, putting in new roads and water taps, improving police wages, and treating venereal disease - the primary intent of the tax was to prevent the influx of more blacks into the location. The lodger's fee imposed a major burden on families at a time that unemployment was rising. Many residents who found it difficult to make ends meet even in the best of circumstances had older children living in their homes. If their children could not find work or keep their jobs, the lodger's fee meant that they had to seek work outside Potchefstroom. The tax also undercut household budgets by reducing the number of renters.

The town council could not have found a more ruthless zealot to enforce the lodger's fee regulation than the recently appointed location superintendent, Andries Johannes Weeks. 'Oubaas' Weeks was an overbearing bully, who went out of his way to insult and antagonise black people. He ran roughshod over township residents, beating them with his sjambok, breaking up their meetings and leading night searches of people's homes for tax violators, 'witchdoctors', 'muti sellers' and beer brewers. He was especially crude and insulting when dealing with black women. When Weeks and his location police were in turn attacked on several occasions, he appealed to the town council for an insurance policy to cover assaults. Because of Weeks' ruthless assault on the 'security of persons and property', 1 232 location residents signed a petition in late 1927 to the town council calling for his removal. Weeks dismissed their petition as an 'example of Communist intrigue and misrepresentation'. ²⁰

Location residents searched for ways to challenge the lodger's fee. Although the ANC and the ICU had a presence in the location, they did not have the resources to bring test cases to the courts. When a location committee contacted Communist Party headquarters in Johannesburg about forming a branch, ²¹Party officials dispatched one of their few African members, T. W. Thibedi, and Molly and Douglas Wolton, to hold a rally in March 1928. Enthusiastically received by a crowd of about 1 000, the trio were shadowed by ever-present police detectives and a group of white vigilantes who regularly disrupted black meetings. Speaking in English with Xhosa and Sotho interpreters, Thibedi maintained that the Communist Party was distinctive because it was engaged in a monumental struggle against capitalism and because it had no colour bar - it was open to 'men' of all races. During the Anglo-Boer War, he pointed out, black people had been promised many things 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.

Interrupted by Sergeant Claasen, who asked him if he had permission to hold a meeting in the location, Thibedi stated that as far as he was concerned they were not in the location and that he would continue with the meeting. Claasen then accompanied Thibedi to the magistrate's office, followed by a large crowd that grew as they walked along.

Thibedi was charged with convening a meeting without a permit and inciting racial hostility, an offence under the recently enacted Native Administration Act. ²²His defence lawyer, CPSA chairman Sidney Bunting, argued that while the indictment against Thibedi had spelled out what he had said, it did not specify an offence. Moreover, his speech did not amount to 'promoting hostility between Europeans and Natives', as the legislation stipulated. In acquitting Thibedi, the magistrate Boggs followed Bunting's line of reasoning and supported Thibedi's right to free speech. The prosecution had not proved that Thibedi 'unambiguously' provoked people to act. Although Thibedi was clearly recruiting people to the Party, the magistrate contended that as long as people acted in a constitutional manner, Africans who were 'fighting for their rights' could challenge unpopular laws and policies such as the Pass Laws.

While Thibedi slipped out of a side door of the courthouse, Party officials quickly organised a victory rally at Market Square. Douglas Wolton's speech so antagonised whites in the crowd that they pulled him from a wagon and began beating him. Blacks and whites armed with clubs and sticks engaged in a wild melée.

The Thibedi case proved to be the launching pad for the Party in the location. The Party had demonstrated that it had recourse to lawyers who could successfully overturn an arrest such as Thibedi's. ²³In late May, six weeks after the Potchefstroom branch was formed, the Party claimed that 700 members had signed up. ²⁴A month later, Bunting enthusiastically reported that party membership in Potchefstroom had swelled to 4 000 and the branch had formed an executive of 21 members. Two Party members even had seats on the Potchefstroom Location Advisory Board. ²⁵Bunting's membership figures were probably inflated, but there is no question of the Party's impressive start.

In June the Party sent Mofutsanyana and Shadrach Kotu to Potchefstroom to reorganise the branch and start a 'school for the purpose of extending the knowledge of party work amongst the members'. They established a branch office outside the location. ²⁶Kotu and Mofutsanyana did not work well together, and Kotu appealed to Thibedi to have Mofutsanyana removed. However, after consulting with Mofutsanyana, Thibedi decided that Mofutsanyana should stay on. ²⁷

By August Superintendent Weeks was diligently working to expel Mofutsanyana and Kotu, and the Potchefstroom CPSA branch reported 'intense persecutions'. ²⁸The town council prohibited all political meetings in the location. Mofutsanyana and Kotu were arrested once for illegally trading in the Indian bazaar ²⁹and twice for sleeping in the location without a permit. The pair had to sleep in an open field outside the location. Although the magistrate dismissed the permit cases, Weeks still would not issue them with a permit. They appealed again to the magistrate, who ruled that a person could not be classified as an 'undesirable' solely because he was a Communist. Weeks was forced to issue a permit to Mofutsanyana and Kotu that was valid until the end of 1929. ³⁰

To Mofutsanyana, Weeks' persecution validated his decision to join the Party. He was now even more convinced that the Party was the salvation of black people and the only party that stood for the rights of workers. 'When I come to think that I have no home, no rest, and no happiness, I simply offer no apology for being a Communist. ³¹

Although location residents had many grievances, Mofutsanyana and the Party focused on the lodger's fee and joined the community in waging legal battles against evictions and mobilising demonstrations. Although some residents were initially reluctant to join an organisation they perceived to be headed by Europeans, the Party's campaign eventually won them the loyal support of most township residents. ³²With its ability to bring court challenges against the lodger's permit, the Party signed up members in droves, using house-to-house recruiting as well as holding mass meetings. Mofutsanyana remembered:

We were drafting everybody who joined ... So after I gave a speech, many people would flock and give their names. We would call them members of the Party. So we could have had hundreds and hundreds of them, but we had no way of organising them. We had a big, loose Party and we called them Communists ... Of course, later when they understood what it was to be a Communist, then there was a change. In those days there was just a mass calling of people to join. Some of the people who came to us thought they were Communists because they had given us their names.

To many Party members there was no contradiction between joining the Party and remaining faithful to the church.

Yes, you see those who joined the Party at that time did not worry they were Christians or what. We were just taking them all. They became members of both the church and the Party ... Some of them drifted in and out. The Party was like a revolving door.

Mofutsanyana's point is important because Party membership throughout South Africa during these years is often pegged as at least several thousand; and most of those members were probably enrolled at Potchefstroom. The Party was successful precisely because it tapped into the grievances of Potchefstroom blacks, who were more concerned with the Party's ability to lead their protests than with its ideological leanings.

This point is confirmed by several CPSA documents from 1932. Citing its experiences in Potchefstroom and the Transkei, the CPSA secretariat commented on the 'very loose and indefinite basis' of membership and 'the enrolment of all kinds of socially different elements into the ranks of the Party'. By 1932, after the Potchefstroom protests had waned, the vast majority of these members were no longer in the Party (an estimated 25 members were still active in Potchefstroom); and the remaining members were considered 'a loose group of sympathisers in agreement with the main line of the Party'. ³³A few months later, the Comintern representative in South Africa, Eugene Dennis, challenged a claim that Party membership might have been as much as 5 000 at any time. According to him, 5 000 membership cards had probably been distributed, which was not the same as having disciplined members. ³⁴He noted that most of the 1 000 people who enrolled in one meeting in Potchefstroom were farm workers. In retrospect Mofutsanyana noted that it was not until World War II that the Party began carefully scrutinising new members and instilling discipline in them.

DINGAAN'S DAY

From the late nineteenth century Afrikaner nationalists had appropriated 16 December as a sacred holiday to commemorate their victory over the Zulu king Dingaan's army at Blood River on 16 December 1838. In 1929 the CPSA designated 16 December as the day to remember the freedom struggle against white domination and instructed Party branches around the country to hold rallies. ³⁵Mofutsanyana diligently went to work organising the Potchefstroom location and using the occasion to protest the Pirow Bills being debated before Parliament and to burn passes. It was to be a day in which he and many others almost lost their lives.

The day before Dingaan's Day Hilda Nyembeni, a worker in the location superintendent's office, told Mofutsanyana that she had overheard a police sergeant conferring with Superintendent Weeks about having Mofutsanyana shot. She warned him: 'You get the Johannesburg train at two o'clock. You mustn't be at that meeting ... She even told me the person who was going to shoot me.' Mofutsanyana's reaction was that the superintendent took him for a 'fool' and had sent Nyembeni with a 'bloody story' to scare him off. 'I am organising people all over the farms to come here and they will find me gone. I thought she was just bluffing.' Although Mofutsanyana also heard rumours that a group of white vigilantes would try to break up their meeting, he went ahead with his planning. ³⁶Because African politicians usually spoke English at meetings, he called on J. B. Marks, an Afrikaans-speaking teacher from nearby Ventersdorp, to interpret for him on the platform. ³⁷Marks, who was not yet a Party member, had been introduced to Mofutsanyana by the Party's general secretary, Albert Nzula. Mofutsanyana confessed:

I did something that was not really good. I hadn't told him [Marks] what I had heard. I was scared like hell, but I kept cool because I thought, if I tell this fellow what may happen, he might leave.

When the meeting opened at 10 a.m. an estimated 500 Africans and 120 Europeans were in the audience, and another 20 policemen watched nearby. Mofutsanyana delivered some opening remarks, but as soon as Marks began translating, whites interrupted him, hurling insults. Marks did not back down. 'I am surprised to see Europeans here who have come to cause trouble, whereas others are at home having their holiday.' He contrasted their behaviour with that of black people, who did not disrupt white meetings. His comments struck a raw nerve among the whites. Some shouted in Afrikaans: 'Jy lieg' ('You are a liar') and 'Hou jou bek, kaffir' ('Shut your mouth, kaffir'). Then, someone alerted Mofutsanyana's attention to a white man who was pointing a revolver at him, and he and Marks dived head first to the ground. A wild melée broke out, and Joseph Henry Weeks, secretary of the school board and the location superintendent's brother, began wildly firing his revolver at the black crowd he later claimed were charging him. Later that day he was arrested and charged with murder. ³⁸Of the four blacks injured in the fracas, the most seriously wounded was Hermann Lithipe, a driver for a railway cartage contractor, who came to the rally merely out of curiosity. He was shot twice in the leg and two policemen picked him up and transported him to the local hospital.

The police caught Weeks as he reloaded his revolver and charged him and 14 other whites with public violence. A group of whites 'remained near the location interfering with pedestrians . and even stopping traffic. They declared that they were guarding the entrance of the town.' That afternoon African men armed themselves with sticks and gathered for a meeting at which Mofutsanyana and the Potchefstroom magistrate A. W. Wilmot spoke. After expressing his regret on behalf of the police and municipal government officials who, he said, were not responsible for the fracas, Wilmot called on blacks not to exact reprisals, but to let the authorities bring the guilty to justice. His speech apparently had a calming effect and the crowd soon dispersed.

However, tensions remained high as Lithipe's leg became infected and his condition worsened. After doctors amputated his leg on Saturday 21 December, he died suddenly of a heart attack the following morning. ³⁹On the news of his death, Mofutsanyana, Nzula, Kotu and Marks spoke for six hours to a crowd of 400 behind the Wesleyan church. Mofutsanyana's impassioned speech was full of bitterness:

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 [Europeans] 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.

Directing his appeals to the largely Christian crowd, Mofutsanyana stressed that Christians and Communists shared the common ground of promoting equality and social justice. Because Jesus Christ was a 'friend' of the downtrodden, he was despised by the very same 'exploiters, capitalists and profiteers' who now oppose the Communist Party. Mofutsanyana summoned an exchange between Christ and his disciple Simon Peter. When Christ asked him, 'Lovest thou me?', Simon Peter responded, 'I love you, Lord.' Mofutsanyana's interpreted this as Christ enjoining Simon Peter to look after and feed his lambs. However, were Christ ever to come to South Africa (and Mofutsanyana doubted that he would), he wondered who would assume the role of Simon Peter and 'feed these lambs'? Like Christians, the Communists shared a love for the people but, he said, they were prepared to fight for people's rights in this world rather than wait for a heavenly dispensation. 'If we cannot show love in this world, then that beautiful place called Paradise is no use to us - to hell with it. ⁴⁰

The day after Lithipe's death, Bunting delivered an oration at Lithipe's funeral. Mofutsanyana recollected: 'I still remember the speech at the funeral of this chap. Mr Bunting said that on the blood of the deceased grows a seed of liberation.'

PROTESTS AND THE LODGER'S FEE

Throughout 1928 and 1929 Superintendent Weeks sustained his offensive against location residents. Zealously collecting the lodger's fee, he raised an extra £500 for the council during the 1929/1930 budget year. He brought dozens of court cases against people in arrears, and evicted many who could not pay. But location residents fought back. The Potchefstroom Party brought dozens of court actions challenging the evictions and the legality of the lodgers' by-law. Although an appellate court overturned the by-law, the municipality quickly drafted and introduced a new one. In the case of evictions, when Frank Molife's appeal to the Transvaal Supreme Court was dismissed in December 1929, disappointed Party activists turned to more militant tactics. ⁴¹

Mofutsanyana, in the thick of these actions, clearly understood that the location women were the driving force behind the protests. One of their leaders was Josie Palmer, whom Mofutsanyana had fallen in love with shortly after he arrived in Potchefstroom. ⁴²After calling for a general strike on 27 January 1930, the women organised pickets, blocking the roads and preventing any blacks from going to work. On the morning of the strike some four to five hundred black men and women marched to the courthouse and presented the magistrate A. W. Wilmot with a petition objecting to the fee and demanding Weeks' dismissal. ⁴³The magistrate enjoined Weeks from arresting more residents, and the town council agreed to postpone trials for several weeks. D. W. Hooks, a representative of the Native Affairs Department sent to investigate the causes of the unrest, recommended that the city council scrap the lodger's fee, but keep Weeks on as location superintendent. Despite the continuing turmoil and mounting legal fees (£200 in 1930 alone), the council was in no mood to abolish an important source of revenue. However, in March 1930 it made two concessions: raising the age of the lodger's fee for males to 21; and exempting unmarried sons over the age of 21 who were the sole source of support for their mother's households.

Not all white officials agreed with Weeks' tactics. In contrast to his aggressive enforcement of the lodgers' fee, Magistrate Wilmot sympathised with the plight of location residents. A number of location residents were prosecuted and convicted, but when they were presented with the choice of a fine of £1 or ten days in jail with hard labour, most chose to serve their sentences. Wilmot suspended payment of the fines for a month or longer, knowing full well that the fines would still not be paid; and he was lenient with those who owed back rent. Wilmot's behaviour incensed Weeks so much that he charged him with making 'me to look a fool in the presence of the natives'. ⁴⁴

Even though Wilmot's actions released some tension, they did not resolve the grievances. Additional protest marches were organised, and at a 'To Hell with the Union Jack Rally' in April Mofutsanyana told his audience that even though there were no more slaves under the Union Jack, he couldn't say the same for South Africa. ⁴⁵

In May 1931, after protracted debate, the town council finally abolished the lodger's fees. However, this was no victory for location residents because the town council recouped the lost revenues by increasing rents on both small and large stands. Although some location residents set up a vigilance committee to challenge the higher rents, their protests quickly died out. ⁴⁶

By then Mofutsanyana was in another trouble spot. In late 1930 CPSA officials instructed him to leave Potchefstroom immediately for Durban, where police had killed Party organiser Johannes Nkosi and three others on Dingaan's Day. However, Mofutsanyana lasted only a few months in Durban because the authorities were clamping down on 'agitators', and they expelled him from Natal for two years. Back in Potchefstroom, activists resented the abrupt manner in which Mofutsanyana was pulled out without a replacement, because it undermined their own energetic efforts. Josie Palmer later criticised national officials for this decision. 'The [national] Party did not care what happened, and when I was there, I was asked: why does the Party neglect us in this way? They were right. The same thing happened in other places. We had branches and secretaries who were active and then they are called away to the centre.' ⁴⁷For the next decade, the Party largely abandoned community organising, as its leaders became obsessed with ideological disputes.