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 Herschel District of the Eastern Cape for four years, where one of his classmates was Albert Nzula, who was to become the first African general secretary of the CPSA.29 Working as a clerk at the New Modderfontein mine in Benoni, Mofutsanyana became politicized by the African National Congress in the early 1920s. He joined the party in 1927 after his interest was piqued by a British communist, Jimmy Shield, who was speaking at a rally in Vereeniging. Mofutsanyana soon became an ardent communist, attending a party night school and throwing himself into CPSA campaigns. Shortly after being sent to Potchefstroom, he met Josie Mpama, a single woman with two daughters. The two fell in love and had a daughter, Hilda, the following year. We do not have any record of why and how Josie decided to join the protests, but she soon became one of the CPSA’s most vocal leaders.
Several months after Mofutsanyana and Kotu arrived in Potchefstroom, Superintendent Weeks tried to expel the pair, and the town council attempted to ban all political meetings in the location. After Mofutsanyana and Kotu were arrested several times for staying in the location without permits, they were forced to sleep in the open veld. They turned again to the courts, and a sympathetic magistrate ruled that simply being a communist was not ample justification for their being declared “undesirable.” Weeks was forced to issue them a permit allowing them to stay until the end of 1929.
The lodger’s fee was Weeks’s favored weapon for gaining greater control over every aspect of the lives of location residents. He successfully lobbied the Public Health Committee for a monthly fee of two shillings to be exacted on every lodger’s permit, which was put into effect in January 1928. This allowed him to keep tabs on everyone living in the location. Those who did not pay would be prosecuted and expelled.
With the location already at a boiling point, the lodger’s fee was the tipping point for activists such as Josie, who led campaigns against it. Protesters brought a test case in late 1928. The lawyer representing the accused argued that section 17 of the regulations under the Urban Areas Act authorized the municipal authority to levy charges for services on every registered occupier, but he maintained that since this was covered under the monthly levy of nine shillings on standholders, imposing an additional fee for the lodger’s permit was excessive. Although the magistrate ruled against the accused, he did not impose a fine, but he advised location residents in the court that he believed the fee was reasonable.30
The confrontation escalated when Frank Molife, who had been born in the location, challenged the legality of the lodger’s permit. After the magistrate ruled that the bylaw was valid, Molife’s lawyer, T. Tom, appealed to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal on December 5, 1929.31 Eventually Molife and his wife and three children were evicted for not paying the lodger’s fee,32 and they were escorted to a place on the veld, where their furniture was dumped. This aroused the ire of the black community, which maintained that Molife but not his family should have been evicted. When a delegation approached the magistrate about this, he directed them to the town clerk, who then sent them to a council member, a Mrs. Nel, chair of the location committee. She said she could do nothing for the Molifes. Several hundred protesters decided to bring Mrs. Molife, the children, and their furniture back to the location. Weeks called in the police to deal with the group.
The protests turned violent on December 16, 1929. To commemorate Dingaan’s Day and the freedom struggle against white domination, the party organized a rally and distributed an incendiary flyer to attract more people.33 The flyer stated:
Roll up in your thousands! African workers! You have no guns or bombs like your masters, but you have your
