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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