Josie Mpama/Palmer. Robert R. Edgar
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.
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