The conflict between location residents and the town council was reignited several years after the Transvaal became part of the Union of South Africa in 1910. In 1912, the Potchefstroom Town Council appointed a new location superintendent, a Mr. Dormyl, whose primary responsibility was to raise more money from location residents by collecting arrears on rents and sanitation fees, which they had resisted paying. The first time he met with township residents, on February 1 after arriving on his bicycle, he immediately began demanding passes from the men. He then told residents that they had to reregister and that the names and occupations of people living on stands had to be stated on the yearly stand permit. Residents complained to the town clerk about his attitude:
Sir, is it right that a gentleman or Supt. should use such words if we had known he was the Supt. and had come in a better manner we are sure he (the boy) would of showed more civility. We are coloured but we know how to respect our superiors. But the way the new Supt. came and spoke to us and the words used we took him to be one of the many which knock about the location.6
Dormyl continued his boorish behavior by roaming around the location, knocking over water containers and cooking pots and entering people’s homes without warning.
The local magistrate added fuel to the conflict by ruling that boys and girls over the age of fourteen had to take out permits to live in the location. Previously standholders could take out an annual permit that covered all members of their family and any lodgers. Residents interpreted the new rule as targeting women and girls for control under the pass laws that regulated where blacks could live, move, and work.
Dormyl followed up by threatening to sell the stands of any resident who had not paid up their rental arrears by April 10. On March 16, police raided the location before dawn and arrested twenty-three girls and seven boys, who all received a fine of one pound or a sentence of ten days in jail unless they took out a permit within ten days. Taking up the cause of the residents, an Anglican priest, Frederic Sharman, encouraged them not to pay their taxes or take out new residential permits until an appeal of the new regulations was heard in the Supreme Court. “The natives of this location,” he asserted, “are all prepared to go to prison rather than submit.”7 The legal adviser to the town council accused Sharman of being responsible for creating the unrest in the location by putting “these natives into a state of ferment, even rebellion, to defy the Superintendent and the law and that your action can never bring about that point desired: viz: to have friendly cooperation.”8
With women in the lead, location residents made several appeals to higher authorities. One was to the Native Affairs Department, whose acting secretary wrote the town clerk questioning why local officials thought it was necessary to add stricter controls, since the regulation had not been followed for some years. A petition, headed by Rachel Moloto, to Lord Gladstone, the British governor-general, detailed how the raid of March 16 had generated fear within the community:
The Superintendent has the power at any time to refuse to renew our permits without stating any reason, and we have no right to appeal, so that if we continue to stay with our fathers and mothers, or our children, he or his Police boys, may arrest us in any place, at any time of the day or night, and drag us off to prison. . . . We pray for your noble Lordship’s mercy and consideration of our prayers and cry to you.9
When the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the regulation by Dora Magati and sixteen others, Judge J. P. de Villiers wondered why not getting a permit could be a punishable offense. The court upheld the residents’ objections by ruling that the town council and the superintendent should have given the residents a warning before they imposed any new regulations.10 That was a victory for the township. The Native Affairs Department also dispatched a magistrate to mediate between the town council and location leaders. His solution was for the town council to stop enforcing 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,