with 150 white and black delegates from all over South Africa, Mpama attended the Inter-State Native College Convention at Lovedale, the premier secondary school for Africans in the eastern Cape, which started the discussions for establishing an institution of higher education for black students, Fort Hare College (subsequently a university), a decade later.5
The school people also hoped that the British would not only preserve the qualified franchise for Africans and “Coloureds” (the apartheid-era term for people of mixed race) in the Cape Colony but also introduce it to their other South African colonies. School people were firm believers in bringing about change through constitutional means, but when a draft of the South Africa Act was released that proposed a constitution for a Union of South Africa that would keep political power in white hands, Africans from around the region met in Bloemfontein in 1909 to establish the South African Native Convention (SANC).6 After a SANC delegation sent to London to appeal to British officials achieved nothing, Africans began discussing the creation of an organization that would unify their organizations. Mpama attended meetings of the Orange Free State Native Congress and the SANC in August 1911 that laid the foundation for the establishment of the South African Native National Congress in 1912.7
While Mpama’s professional and political life was taking off, his personal life was in turmoil. Georgina and Stephen lost three children at birth before Georgina gave birth to Josephine—nicknamed “Josie” by her father—on March 21, 1903. According to Stephen, he and Georgina lived “happily” until 1908, when their relationship deteriorated and they divorced. Their divorce proceedings were messy, with both sides offering very different explanations for why the marriage collapsed. Stephen’s version was that his wife had cheated on him. After he and a policeman caught his wife in bed with another man, he initiated divorce proceedings. Georgina countered by accusing Stephen of raping a woman. As a result, she took Josie and went to stay with her mother in Sophiatown, a black township in Johannesburg. After returning to Potchefstroom in April 1909, she claimed that when they were staying with her uncle, Stephen assaulted her. Stephen admitted as much but testified that he was provoked by catching her in bed with another man. The circuit court judge sided with Stephen and ruled that Georgina had committed adultery. He awarded Stephen half of their communal property, damages of fifty pounds, and, most important, custody of Josie.8
Figure 1.2. Baby photo of Josie Mpama/Palmer. (Palmer family album)
The fallout from her parents’ bitter split scarred Josie’s childhood and certainly shaped her yearning as an adult for a stable home and family life and her compassion for children neglected by or alienated from their families. Interestingly, her personal account of her youth is a sad story of rancor, turbulence, and abandonment.9 Her memory of the outcome of her parents’ divorce was at odds with the court record. She believed the court had stipulated she could stay with her mother until she decided with which parent she wanted to live. She remembered leaving Potchefstroom with her mother on a train, and as her father was in the process of saying good-bye, he suddenly reached in the window and pulled her out. While her mother continued to fight for custody, she remained with her father in his five-room home in the Potchefstroom location.10
Stephen brought in a young man to look after her while he was at work, but after her mother protested that arrangement, her father employed a young woman. He then sent Josie to stay with his eldest sister, who lived a few miles from Josie’s mother in Johannesburg. There she claimed she was treated poorly—clothes her mother sent her ended up being given to her aunt’s daughter, for example. After Georgina brought a formal complaint to a court, her father took Josie back to Potchefstroom and called on his younger sister to stay with her.
This arrangement did not work any better. Josie claimed that she was treated as if she were “in jail.” She was not allowed to play with her friends at school. On one occasion she ran away from home and met up with a group of her friends who were searching in a field for cow manure to use as cooking fuel. She had the shock of her life when what they thought was a pile of manure turned out to be a curled-up snake. She fled home, where she found that her father and other family members were frantically looking high and low for her because they thought her mother had kidnapped her. “Now instead of father scolding me for my wrong doings he took me on his lap and wept together with me as was his habit.”11
Once it became clear that Stephen’s sister could not look after her, Josie was shipped to the home of her uncle, Josiah Jolly Mpama, at Robinson Deep Mine in Johannesburg. “Life in that house,” as she described it, “was something unheard of.” In Potchefstroom she had attended an English-medium school, but at her new school, run by German-speaking Lutheran missionaries, English classes were held only a few times a week. Moreover, her aunt treated her abysmally, even withholding her food for lunch at school. Her uncle was aware of this, and he often slipped her food or money so she could buy lunch. His wife would also thrash Josie with a sjambok for the slightest offense, but after her uncle beat his wife so badly after one spanking that a doctor had to treat her, Josie was never again beaten when he was at home.12 His wife also forced Josie to help her sell wine illegally to mine workers. Josie’s responsibility was to keep an eye out for “the detectives who if I see them coming should give her a warning.”
Josie’s mother came to visit her occasionally on Sundays, but since her aunt was always present, Josie was afraid to speak up about her treatment. When her mother decided to remarry, she bought a nice outfit for Josie, but on the wedding day her aunt refused to let her bathe, dressed her in a plain frock, and made excuses for not attending the wedding reception.
One day Josie was surprised when Georgina unexpectedly showed up at the school gate. She asked Josie if she wanted to come and live with her—something she had always hoped for. Her mother wrote a note to Josiah and his wife: “Don’t look for [Josie]. I have taken her. She is at my place and I shall only hand her up when the highest court in the land compels me too [sic].”13 A few days later Stephen arrived at Josie’s granny’s house, where they were staying. He spoke to her in isiZulu and told her that she had to go with him, but this time she “blankly refused and made him understand that I am now with mother and intend to stay with [her].”14 When her father grabbed her by the arm, she clung fiercely to a door and screamed so loudly that others intervened to separate them. Later her grandmother showed her father the bundle of clothes she was wearing when her mother fetched her at school. It contained “boots that had no soles. Socks that had just the up’s and the feet rags, bloomers that had so many windows that one could see the whole earth without opening one.”15 Stephen was so ashamed to learn this that he gave up on trying to keep her, even though his relatives swore that they would not “leave their blood with bushmans.”16 They were true to their word, for several weeks later they attempted to drag her out of the house. This time her mother’s husband and her brothers jumped into the fray. A fistfight broke out, and her father’s relatives were ejected from the premises. The fight then went to the courtroom, where her mother was charged with stealing a child. The case exposed all the unpleasant things her uncle and aunt had done to her, and she was allowed to stay with her mother at her grandmother’s place.
In 1917, Josie’s mother’s legs began weakening, and her husband urged her and Josie to go back to Potchefstroom. He promised to support them with his job in Johannesburg. They bought a three-room house with a small garden. Josie attended school, while her mother earned money washing clothes for white families. But when her mother’s health worsened and she became an invalid, her husband reneged on his promise to look after them. Josie had to pitch in to wash and iron clothes on the side, and on Saturdays she cleaned the home of an elderly white woman.
Eventually her need to support her mother forced her to leave school and serve an apprenticeship with a tailor. In 1918, she and her mother moved to Doornfontein in Johannesburg, where they rented a room. Josie found work at an Indian tailor
