Lembede also participated in the Orange Free State African Teachers’ Association, an organisation he scathingly censured in a letter to Umteteli wa Bantu (8 November 1941).
Every year, many resolutions are adopted by the Conference. What is the fate of many of them? Some end just on the paper on which they are written. They are not acted upon, thus they fail to realise their ultimate destiny – action … We must be action-minded. The philosophy of action must be the cornerstone of our policy … In our ranks we have men and women of high talent and ability. Our poor, disorderly position is not occasioned by lack of talent, but (a) by lack of scientific organisation and utilisation of that talent, (b) by lack of will-power. Africans! Our salvation lies in hard and systematic work!
Never one to hold back his criticisms of shortcomings, Lembede’s impatience with the Association’s inaction and lax discipline and his desire for positive action foreshadowed sentiments that made their way into his political views several years later.
Lembede also attended church services of the African branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church [DRC]), where he occasionally translated Afrikaans sermons into seSotho. Khaketla was struck by Lembede’s fluency in both languages, and that he was willing to attend and appreciate services of other denominations. His attitude was that “God is indivisible”. He put on his best clothes and prepared himself for the monthly nagmaal services. Lembede thought nagmaal (Holy Communion) was more graceful and meaningful than the Holy Communion celebrated in the Catholic church; and he even told Khaketla, an Anglican, that he could never understand the joy of nagmaal because Anglicans celebrated communion too frequently.
This is a pertinent anecdote because much has been made of Lembede’s attachment to the Catholic church. Khaketla recollected that, during one vacation, he went to Johannesburg and met Lembede by chance at Park Station. Lembede invited him to visit a friend, A P Mda, in Orlando township. As they approached the Roman Catholic church in Orlando, they saw Mda in the churchyard. Khaketla recognised Mda because they had trained together as teachers at Mariazell school near Matatiele. Lembede asked Khaketla not to tell Mda that he had regularly attended DRC services in Heilbron. To Lembede, church affiliation did not mean as much as a belief in God. Moreover, participating in the DRC had partly been a tactic to get a job. He represented the DRC at Bantu United School, where every sponsoring denomination had to be represented on the staff.
An interesting sidelight of Lembede’s stay in the Orange Free State was his search for a wife. According to his Parys roommate Victor Khomari, Lembede had a great reverence for educated women.18 He vowed that he wanted to meet and marry the most brilliant woman he could find rather than confining himself to someone from within his own ethnic group. When he read in the press about a woman from Lesotho who had been a spectacular student at Morija Training College and the University College of Fort Hare, he decided to go to Mafeteng in Lesotho with Khomari on their school holiday. Khomari loaned him a bike to peddle to Thabana Morena, the school where the woman was teaching, but he was not able to meet her. By coincidence, the young woman in question, Caroline Ntseliseng Ramolahloane, later married B M Khaketla, Lembede’s Heilbron roommate, in 1946.
One of Lembede’s last acts before moving to Johannesburg was to contact J D Rheinallt Jones, Director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, in June 1943, offering to do research for the Institute during the July vacation period. Rheinallt Jones asked Lembede to conduct a study of how black South African youths became “delinquents” by examining the records of the Diepkloof Reformatory to determine how young people had run foul of the law. In accepting the offer, Lembede replied: “I think the work will be of some educative value to me also; and I hope my knowledge of Zulu, Sesotho and Afrikaans will help me a lot in the investigation.”19 We do not have any record of the study that Lembede was commissioned to carry out, but his experience is probably reflected in the occasional comments on the deleterious impact of urban life on African youth that were woven into his political essays.
JOHANNESBURG
When Lembede had finished his LLB, he took up an offer to serve his articles with the venerable Pixley ka Seme, who had established one of only a handful of black law firms in Johannesburg. After practicing law for over three decades, Seme was in poor health and on the verge of retirement, and he was looking for someone to take over his practice. His law career had had its less than distinguished moments. In 1932 he was struck from the roll of attorneys in the Transvaal, but was reinstated in 1942.20
He had also been a founding father of the ANC in 1912, and had served as its president from 1930 to 1937. A conservative, autocratic figure, Seme’s presidency was marked by discord, and when he was ousted as president, he left the ANC at a low ebb. By the time Lembede began to work in his law firm, Seme was no longer a major player in ANC politics.
Whatever vicissitudes Seme had experienced in his legal and political careers, Lembede held him in high regard. Moreover, because Seme was still a respected figure, he certainly eased Lembede’s entry into Johannesburg’s political and social circles.21 In 1946, after Lembede had served his articles, Seme made him a partner. An Umbumbulu businessman, Isaac Dhlomo, loaned Lembede £500 to buy into Seme’s firm.22
Lembede’s law career was brief, but his linguistic abilities and his uniqueness as a black South African lawyer provided some memorable moments. One was when he shocked a magistrate in Roodepoort by conducting his case in Afrikaans. Another was when Lembede broke into Latin in a magistrate’s court in Johannesburg, prompting the magistrate to interrupt and implore him: “Please, Mr Lembede, this is not Rome, but South Africa.”23
On another occasion Lembede appeared in a criminal case in a Pretoria court. The court officials were either unaware that there was a black attorney practicing or did not want to acknowledge him. So when Lembede arrived and informed the prosecutor that he was the attorney of record, the prosecutor brushed him off. Lembede responded by sitting in the public gallery. When his case was called, Lembede jumped up and announced from the gallery that he was appearing for the accused. The magistrate was taken aback by a person from the gallery claiming to be a lawyer and called the prosecutor and Lembede into his chambers. Lembede came out to represent the defendant. The incident caused a stir among the black South Africans in the gallery, primarily because they, too, were unaware that there were black attorneys, and because of the boldness of Lembede in challenging the prosecutor.24
After moving to Johannesburg, Lembede also renewed his friendship with A P Mda, whom he had first met in 1938 at a Catholic teachers’ meeting in Newcastle. The two exchanged addresses, and when Lembede had occasion to visit Johannesburg, he would look up Mda. Born in 1916 in the Herschel district, near the Lesotho border, Mda had also received a Catholic education and earned his Teachers’ Diploma at Mariazell. He moved to the Witwatersrand in 1937 and, after taking up a variety of jobs, he landed a teaching post at St. Johns Berchman, a Catholic primary school in Orlando Township. He rapidly rose to prominence in the Catholic African Union, the Catholic African Teachers’ Federation and the Transvaal African Teachers’ Association. In the latter organisation, he became a leading figure in the campaign to improve teachers’ salaries and conditions of service.
He was also a veteran of political organisations. He had been baptised into politics by attending the All African Convention (AAC) meeting in Bloemfontein in 1937. But he soon grew disenchanted with the AAC and moved into the ANC when it was revitalised in the late 1930s. Mda was clearly more politically experienced than Lembede. As Ngubane put it, living on the Witwatersrand had seasoned Mda as a political thinker and “as a result he had more clearly-defined views on every aspect on the race problem.”25
For a while Mda and Lembede shared a house in Orlando. And as Lembede