Place of Thorns. Tshepo Moloi
blamed Keable ’Mote, the secretary of the ICU in the OFS, as the prime instigator. The Northern Times, a local newspaper, reported that in 1927 ’Mote and his supporters (presumably within the ICU) discredited the Native Advisory Board and encouraged the residents to refuse to pay tax and rent to the council – which responded by threatening to evict residents in arrears. This raised the ire of the residents. In her seminal work on the ICU, Helen Bradford argues that in fact it was not ’Mote who incited the rent boycott but the ICU Women’s Section, which was defending its members’ middle-class status: ‘[T]he Kroonstad ICU Women’s Section leaders were distinguished from those forced into the labour-market by possession of a house, and hence ability to draw rent from lodgers.’42
It has been noted above that from the 1920s a significant number of black people were moving to Kroonstad in search of employment and somewhere to stay. The new arrivals included a sizeable number of women. In 1923 General Jan Smuts’s government – despite resistance by some municipalities in the OFS – passed the Natives Urban Areas Act which stopped black women from carrying passes and effectively removed all restrictions on women entering urban areas. However, the 1930s was not a good time to enter the urban areas, especially Kroonstad, as the NP government which came to power in 1929 did everything possible to provide job opportunities for ‘poor whites’ at the expense of blacks. Because of this, and the already limited job opportunities in Kroonstad, black workers found themselves either out of work or forced to settle for meagre pay and it was impossible for tenants to pay their accommodation fee regularly. Others, particularly those who were forced out of work to be replaced by poor whites, probably could not even pay their rent. This affected the stand-owners’ livelihoods. When the town council hiked rent charges, the women, some of whom depended solely on the tenants’ rental (and sometimes on the sale of home-brewed beer), rallied and refused to pay, and by the time ’Mote was arrested for supporting the boycott, the residents owed the council £4 000. This protest prompted the town council to begin to take note of the ICU’s presence in the area.
In 1928, serious tensions had developed between the ICU founder, Nyasaland-born Clements Kadalie, and ’Mote. There is no available evidence to explain the exact reason for this tension, but it is possible that after his trip overseas Kadalie, as the leader of the union, felt that ’Mote was becoming too radical. Kadalie favoured a moderate approach.43 This was evident when, during the ICU’s fight against the Kroonstad Town Council for threatening to evict the rent defaulters, Kadalie (and other local leading figures in the ICU) failed to come to ’Mote’s defence,44 instead distancing himself and the national council of the ICU from ’Mote and insisting that he was away in Europe at the time and therefore could not be associated with ’Mote’s actions. Kadalie’s changed position had a great deal to do with his fear of being deported to Nyasaland.
When ’Mote advocated the replacement of the Native Advisory Board with a new association, after concluding that the body was not advancing the residents’ interests, his proposal was hotly challenged. In a letter to the Kroonstad Times, MM Tladi, a schoolteacher at Bantu United, accused ’Mote of deception. He argued that ’Mote had informed the newspaper that an association was to be formed which would get rid of the Native Advisory Board, and said he had interviewed the teachers and ministers of the church whom ’Mote claimed to have mobilised and who said they knew nothing about the imminent association. In addition, Tladi accused ’Mote of being deceptive because he had encouraged the residents to continue with the protest and promised he would settle the deficit owed to the council. He concluded his letter by asking ’Mote: ‘Where is the £4 000 promised to wipe out the deficit?’ The story did not end there. Soon rumours that ’Mote was embezzling ICU funds began making the rounds. To contain him, in 1928 the union decided to transfer him to the Transvaal. In response, ’Mote threatened to secede from the ICU. But after negotiations he reconsidered. He later hit back by associating himself and the ICU in the OFS with the campaign organised by the Communist Party of South Africa to burn passes on Dingaan’s Day, 16 December 1929.
Kadalie, who by then had made a deal with the government that he would not be deported, openly opposed the campaign. This put the final nail in the coffin of the relationship between the ICU and its OFS branch. By this point there were serious tensions and differences within the ICU’s national leadership. In April 1931, ’Mote convened a conference in Kroonstad of ICU branches in the OFS and the Western Transvaal. At the meeting fifty-seven delegates formed the Federated Free State ICU of Africa and elected Selby Msimang president and ’Mote secretary. However, this new organisation was stillborn, and in 1934 the ICU branch in Kroonstad ceased to function on the farms and in the location which had once led Kadalie to boast that ‘the ICU have never failed in Kroonstad’.45
The conflicts within and finally the demise of the ICU in Kroonstad not only paved the way for native advisory boards (and other moderate bodies) to function without any hindrance, but also arrested vibrant political engagement in the locations for the next two decades.
‘Moderate’ bodies in Kroonstad
In response to the growing schism between urban blacks and whites, particularly the officials in various towns, which were reflected in widespread protests, the government, through the Native Affairs Department, recommended the creation of advisory boards instituted through the Urban Areas Act of 1923 to encourage harmonious cooperation between urban Africans and local officials. However, the boards had no real power. Nieftagodien contends: ‘... they were explicitly denied any real power and their overall functions were limited to an advisory capacity and local authorities were neither obliged to consult the advisory boards nor to take into account any recommendations by them’.46
More worrying was the fact that the boards ‘tended to be drawn from the members of the petty-bourgeoisie, the teachers and semi-literate’. Board members had to be upstanding members of the community, ‘free of rental arrears’ – in short, exemplary people in the community who ‘did not agitate for radical change’.47 In Kroonstad, for example, the board was composed essentially of teachers – which is hardly surprising, because from the late 1920s Kroonstad had become one of the important centres of black education in the country. Some of the members of the Native Advisory Board in Kroonstad were Manes, Pitso, Makhetha, Damane, Dingalo, Molete, Modise, Tladi (the complainant against ’Mote, above) and Lekhetha, but despite their educational background and standing in the community they not only failed to influence the town council but also condoned some of its unpopular decisions, thus further denting the board’s credibility in the eyes of black residents.
Although teachers were not prohibited from becoming members of political organisations or participating in the activities of organisations associated with opposition politics, the government took exception to their political involvement. Participation in opposition politics could lead to outright dismissal. Elias Maliza, for instance, was dismissed because of his active membership in the ICU.48 But it was the case of Abiel Thabo Seele that probably caused teachers in the OFS, especially Kroonstad, to be particularly cautious. Seele, a teacher at Heilbron United Native School, was humiliated by the Department of Native Education, which demanded he write a letter giving reasons why the department should not dismiss him after he addressed a meeting of the ICU on 1 November 1936. In his reply, Seele, who was not a member of the ICU, wrote, in part:
In the first place may I sincerely apologise for having participated at all – this error was done in ignorance. To relate ... circumstances attending this participation may I mention that on this day while proceeding from church I was requested by the officials of the said movement to assist them in interpretation – to this request I readily acceded because there be no one efficient for the purpose. At the end of the meeting I was asked to say a few words ... I had not the least desire or motive of creating a spirit of ill-feeling and hostility between white and black, nor did I harbour any malicious intention of publicly criticising government administration.49
Seele’s dismissal was finally shelved after Reverend C Jummen intervened on his behalf, stating that Seele had learned his lesson and pleading with the department to forgive him.50 Such intimidation and threats probably explain why teachers in Kroonstad (which is about eighty kilometres from Heilbron) felt more comfortable working within ‘moderate’ bodies such as the Native Advisory Board.