at a dramatic hearing in Moscow that turned out to be a life-and-death showdown between CPSA factions.
Although a disciplined Communist Party member, Josie held independent views and was not reluctant about candidly expressing her dissatisfaction in the 1930s with the party on issues such as the content of its newspaper, its declining membership, its relations with Christians, and the difficulty of organizing black and white workers in joint actions. Nevertheless, with the party on the brink of collapsing in the late 1930s, she took strong stances on preserving it and opposing a controversial proposal to split it into black and white wings.
African National Congress (ANC) narratives dominate much of the scholarship on South Africa’s freedom struggle. Josie’s political life offers a different perspective. The CPSA was her primary political home, and that determined how she participated in leading black political organizations of the time: the ANC, the All-African Convention (AAC), and the Non-European Unity Front (NEUF).
She engaged publicly in local and national struggles. In keeping with her defense of family and community, she defended black townships such as Alexandra from being torn apart and expelled by the Johannesburg municipal council and was a leading figure in a national antipass campaign from 1943 to 1945 organized by the CPSA and the ANC.
Josie engaged in gendered politics. Most black women involved in political issues operated on the margins of male-dominated black organizations. Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered black women from actively participating in politics, she was an outspoken advocate for women’s social equality and encouraged black women to become more involved in issues of direct relevance to them: high rents, beer brewing, pass laws, police raids, education, health care, high bus fares, and the protection of black communities from forced removals and evictions. She did not see defending family structures and livelihoods as defining women as mothers and homemakers or a retreat from public life but as a way of mobilizing them politically.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Josie’s views evolved on how black women should relate to black men in political initiatives. Initially she supported women working cooperatively with men in political organizations but then shifted to women forming autonomous organizations such as the Daughters of Africa. By the end of the 1940s, she was one of the founders of the Transvaal All-Women’s Union, which advocated women of all racial groups joining together in one organization.
After the white National Party came to power in 1948 and began implementing the apartheid system, it intensified its attacks on the Communist Party, declaring it illegal and forcing it to disband in 1950. Josie remained involved in critical issues, especially protests against the Bantu Education Act and African women being forced to carry passes. In 1954, she was a leading figure in establishing the Federation of South African Women, which was open to women of all races.
Served a banning order by the government in 1955 and facing health challenges, she had to withdraw from formal politics and devoted her energy for the rest of her life to women’s groups in the Anglican Church in her township, Mzimhlophe. She did not conform to the image of a communist as one opposed to religion. She remained loyal to the banned CPSA and did not see a contradiction between her beliefs as a Christian and as a communist. She was also an active presence in her neighborhood and drew on her knowledge of Afrikaner folk medicine to treat illnesses.
1
Family Matters
Josie Mpama/Palmer’s chaotic childhood shaped her early life. As a court interpreter in Potchefstroom, her father held a privileged position in black society. But after her parents divorced when she was seven, she lacked an anchor in her personal life and struggled to find a semblance of family stability. Instead of being able to take advantage of the educational and social opportunities her father’s status might have offered her, she was passed around from one family member to another and struggled to find a stable home. And, as a teenager, she had to provide for herself and her ailing mother by taking jobs as a domestic servant in white homes and as a seamstress. Her early life would make her even more concerned with creating and protecting stable family and community structures for black people when she entered political life in the late 1920s.
For a country whose past is so closely identified with rigid racial segregation, what is striking about many South African families is how racially mixed their lineages are. This was certainly the case with the family line of Josephine Winifred Mpama. Her father was Stephen Bonny Mpama, the son of Zulu parents, July and Anna Mpama, who came from the Inanda mission reserve not far from Durban, which American Board missionaries had founded in the nineteenth century. Josie referred to her father as a “denationalised Zulu,” by which she meant that his family were amakholwa, Christian converts who lived on mission stations and who attended mission schools and absorbed Western culture. Born in 1881 in Kroonstad, Orange Free State, Stephen moved with his family to Johannesburg after gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886. From about 1894, Stephen worked for a firm of chemists, Wilson and Coghill, in Langlaagte, to the west of Johannesburg.
Figure 1.1. Stephen Mpama (top row, on the left), 1920s. (Vesta Smith)
Josie’s mother was Georgina Garson Gasibone. Born around 1883, Georgina was the daughter of Johanna Garson, whose parents were a Mfengu woman and an Afrikaner man. Johanna married a moSotho, with whom she had two daughters, one of them Georgina. After her husband died, Johanna remarried, this time to a Scotsman by the name of Garson with whom she had three sons. They were raised “white,” went to European schools, served in the South African Army during World War I, and eventually became strangers to their black half sisters.
Stephen and Georgina met in Johannesburg and were married in a civil ceremony on April 12, 1899, by the veldcornet (a field cornet was an official who performed military, administrative, and judicial duties) of Johannesburg and in a church by a Wesleyan Methodist minister on June 3, 1899. Her mother preferred that Georgina go live in the Cape Colony during the Anglo-Boer War while Stephen served as a guide in a British army infantry unit. After the war he returned to his old job at Wilson and Coghill for several years before taking up a position at Village Reef Gold Mining Company for fifteen months.
Following the war British colonial officials administered Potchefstroom, and Mpama was elevated to the apex of black colonial society when the Potchefstroom magistrate appointed him as a court interpreter at an annual salary of seventy-two pounds.1 It was a position that educated Africans held in high esteem. As a young man in the Transkei before embarking on a law career, Nelson Mandela set his sights on becoming an interpreter for a magistrate or the Native Affairs Department because the post “was a glittering prize for an African, the highest a black man could aspire to.”2 In the black reserves, Mandela added, “an interpreter in the magistrate’s office was considered second only in importance to the magistrate himself.”3 The English-speaking magistrate relied heavily on a multilingual black interpreter in the courtroom because the judge, plaintiff, defendant, counsel, and witnesses might all speak different languages. Drawing on his personal experience as a court interpreter in Kimberley, the veteran ANC leader Solomon Plaatje explained that an interpreter fluent in many languages and with an intimate knowledge of the law was essential so that a white judge “should clearly understand the evidence in any case upon which he sits in judgement, and the only means he has of attaining this in Southern Africa is by possession of a good interpreter.”4
Mpama fit the profile of many Africans educated at mission schools. Known as “school people,” they expected that their education and professional accomplishments would qualify them to be treated as the equals of whites. Mpama valued Africans advancing themselves through education. Because Africans who sought a college education could not have one in southern
