Josie Mpama/Palmer. Robert R. Edgar
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
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