the rule requiring boys and girls over the age of fourteen to have a permit. In October 1912, the Native Affairs Department went further by specifying that women in the location did not have to have a permit. These rulings kept an uneasy peace for a decade.11
In 1925, the national census put Potchefstroom’s population at 13,363, comprising 8,180 whites, 4,241 Africans, 224 Indians, and 708 Coloureds.12 In the location most blacks were seTswana speakers, but a significant number were Oorlams, blacks who had acculturated to Afrikaner culture and whose home language was Afrikaans. Because white farmers in the neighboring countryside were experiencing hard times, many black farmworkers had moved into town where there was already high unemployment, partly because the “civilized labor” policy of Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog’s government was aimed at ensuring employment for poor whites. This policy lowered the wages for black domestic servants in white homes.
To control Potchefstroom’s growing black population, the town council relied on the government’s recently enacted Urban Areas Act of 1923, which was designed to allow town councils to regulate the administration of Africans living in urban areas, through establishing segregated locations for them, controlling their influx into urban areas, establishing advisory boards, and creating “native” accounts into which went revenues from beer-hall sales, rents, fines, and fees. Municipal councils had the discretion to decide which of the provisions to enact, and Potchefstroom’s town council tried to implement most of them.13
Throughout the 1920s, the battles between location residents and the location superintendent and town council escalated as more and more restrictions and fees were imposed on location residents. In 1923, the location superintendent, complaining about a younger class of blacks becoming uncontrollable and making a ruckus in town, imposed a 10:00 p.m. curfew to quell unrest.14
The town council also levied a series of measures that directly affected women and their families. The Night Pass Ordinance, requiring black women to carry passes between 10:30 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., was put into effect on June 1, 1925.15 That same year a fee of ten shillings and sixpence was imposed on location residents to pay for laying water pipes. Because the standards for clean water had been tightened and improved, many wells for water had been closed. New pipes meant water could become accessible closer to people’s homes, but if they were shut down, people had to walk a mile to find a source of water.
Because many location women earned their income washing clothes for white families, the new levy directly affected them. On September 28, 1927, a procession of two hundred black women, marching in columns of four and carrying a red, white, and blue banner with “For Mercy” inscribed on it, went to see the magistrate, who explained that the municipality was following rules set by officials in Pretoria. The town council was improving water standards to lessen the infant mortality rate caused by bad well water, and it was not raising rates for washing water but for gardens.
Figure 2.2. Washing clothes, Makweteng Location, Potchefstroom, 1905. (Postcard in Robert R. Edgar collection)
The protesters voiced their disagreement. One retorted that they had been drinking the well water for many years without ill effects, while “another asked whether it was worse for their children to die from drinking bad water or from starvation if they could not have a garden.”16
The issue that touched off the most vigorous protests was the lodger’s fee. The Native (Urban Areas) Act encouraged town councils to upgrade facilities in locations and offer new services, but they typically had to be paid for by raising fresh sources of revenue from location residents. A key way was the lodger’s permit, “a licence issued by a municipality to a person who lived in a hired room or rooms in the house of another, including any male child above eighteen years of age or adult female or daughter of the registered owner of a house.”17 The permit’s objective was twofold: to control and regulate blacks in urban areas and, in the case of Potchefstroom’s location account, to cover a large deficit that would otherwise have had to be made up by white residents.18
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
