LITMIR.BIZ

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      Wherever the lodger’s permit was introduced in South Africa, Africans deeply resented it because it undermined the integrity and cohesiveness of black family life by requiring any children over the age of eighteen of registered householders to take out a monthly permit to live with their parents. This often compelled them to take up employment at very cheap wages or to leave their homes for other urban areas such as nearby Johannesburg—in which case their families lost their incomes. Stand owners also lost rental income from lodgers.

      A black newspaper, the African Leader, published an indignant editorial in 1933 that highlighted how the lodger’s permit had undermined the African family’s moral code: “Africans have a definite moral code of their own, especially in the upbringing of children. One of their important rules or moral codes lies in the strength of parental control. A child is never free from it until he or she is emancipated.” The editorial went on to argue that the permit split the “family in a most savage and inhuman way” by taking away the right of parents “to supervise, tend and nurse the character of their children.¹⁹

      The town council relied on Andries Johannes Weeks, hired as the location superintendent in December 1926, to keep residents in line. If moviemakers were casting the role of a callous brute, they could not have chosen better than Weeks. He zealously took up his new position and swaggered around the location terrorizing people with his sjambok. He was constantly on the lookout for ways in which the town council could squeeze more revenue from location residents. After visiting Boksburg in 1930 to study how the government there maximized the collection of lodger’s fees, he concluded that the Potchefstroom municipality was being shortchanged and could increase its ten-pound monthly revenue from residents by 400 percent.²⁰

      By May 1928, location residents had become so fed up with Weeks that 1,232 of them signed a petition calling him “as not a fit and proper person to hold the office of Superintendent.” They listed a litany of complaints: his inability to speak any African languages contributed to misunderstandings between him and residents; he regularly whipped residents with his sjambok; he harshly treated people who did not whitewash their homes; he arrested people for vagrancy; he led indiscriminate night searches of people’s homes; and he routinely broke up their meetings. They pointed out his “insulting manner towards our women” and that he used the provisions of the Urban Areas Act “as weapons to deprive us of the ordinary rights of mankind, to security of person and property” instead of using the regulations to improve the lot of the people. They concluded, “In general we are voicing the united protest of our people against the excessive hardship and totally uncalled for suffering which is the lot of the residents of this location.”

      Copies of the petition were sent to the town council as well as the prime minister, the ministers of justice and of native affairs, and the press. Not surprisingly Weeks summarily dismissed their complaints as communist propaganda. “In my opinion,” he charged, “the petition is a very good example of Communist intrigue and misrepresentation.”²¹

      The petition made no impact on white authorities, and Weeks intensified his campaign of terror against location residents. For instance, Benjamin Mohlomi, an assistant teacher at the Dutch Reformed Church school, complained to the mayor that Weeks had it in for him. He had used abusive language toward him, threatened to “break his neck,” and leaned on Mohlomi’s school to dismiss him. Mohlomi complained that one time he was standing outside school before classes one day when “all of a sudden [Weeks] pointed [at] me vigorously with his finger and called me a Baster [bastard] etc. I am afraid this seems to be a continual practice and has grown into a habit now.”²² Weeks’s sjamboking of a black woman led to even more protests.²³

      One weapon that location residents effectively wielded to combat Weeks and the town council was the legal system, but the key was finding an organization that would bring cases to court. The Transvaal African National Congress and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) had branches in Potchefstroom, but they were not able to organize effectively. In May 1926, an ICU organizer Sidney Buller, who had applied to the council to stay in the location, was turned down. Buller did not pull any punches about why he had been sent to Potchefstroom. “I came here to agitate amongst the natives in respect of the trade, stories and their services with the white population. . . . I am here to agitate in respect of the economic wages.” He added, “We drive to prosecute the master and compel him to pay a month’s wage”²⁴ Not surprisingly, F. van der Hoff, the location superintendent at the time, did not consider Buller “a fit and proper person because he is an agitator” who had no employment or a place to live.

      Although faced with the same opposition to their sending organizers, the CPSA, whose lawyers were prepared to take on court cases, proved to be the most effective organization for mobilizing protests. The party had a presence in Potchefstroom since 1926 when two of its African members asked for permission to live in the location. After the superintendent refused to issue them lodger’s permits, they unsuccessfully approached the town council. As a last resort, they appealed to the local magistrate, U. G. Horak. The party’s attorney argued that the location superintendent had not used proper discretion and had refused them permission solely because they were members of a party that was still legal. The magistrate agreed with his logic and ruled that since the defendants had not been doing anything subversive in the location, they should not have been penalized just because they were CPSA members. Since the superintendent had not taken all the facts into consideration, Horak directed him to issue permits to the party members.²⁵

      This was not the last time that party lawyers succeeded in challenging the authorities in Potchefstroom. After location activists approached the central party office in Johannesburg about establishing a branch in Potchefstroom, the party dispatched T. W. Thibedi, one of the first African communists, and Douglas and Molly Wolton in March 1928 to speak at a rally that drew a crowd of about a thousand. Thibedi reminded the attendees that the British had promised them many things during the Anglo-Boer War in exchange 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.²⁶

      A white policeman then disrupted Thibedi’s speech and asked him whether he had permission to hold a public meeting in the location. He then took Thibedi to the magistrate’s office where he was charged with convening a meeting without a permit and inciting racial hostility, an offense made illegal by the recently passed Native Administration Act. Thibedi was represented by the party’s chair, Sidney Bunting, who argued that the charge did not precisely detail what the offense was and that Thibedi’s speech had not created any hostility between the races. Accepting Bunting’s line of reasoning, the magistrate backed the right of free speech and dismissed the charge, stating that if Thibedi and the party operated in a constitutional manner, they had a right to challenge what they saw as unjust laws.

      The party celebrated the victory by immediately organizing a rally in Potchefstroom’s market square. But white vigilantes, who were ever present at black meetings, were so incensed by Wolton’s speech that they started roughing him up. Blacks and whites in the crowd then turned on each other and touched off a melee.²⁷

      Thibedi’s triumph in court was a demonstration that the party could deliver and was the starting point for establishing a party branch in the location. Six weeks later the Potchefstroom branch was claiming seven hundred members. A month after that, Bunting inflated the figure to four thousand.²⁸ In June, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana and Shadrach Kotu were dispatched to organize the branch properly and to launch a “school for the purpose of extending the knowledge of party work amongst the members.” They opened an office outside the location.

      Figure 2.3. Edwin Mofutsanyana, 1940. (Inkululeko)

      Born in 1899 in Witzieshoek in the Orange Free State, Mofutsanyana had worked in the Western Cape before attending Bensonvale Institution in the

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