1
Family Matters
Josie Mpama/Palmer’s chaotic childhood shaped her early life. As a court interpreter in Potchefstroom, her father held a privileged position in black society. But after her parents divorced when she was seven, she lacked an anchor in her personal life and struggled to find a semblance of family stability. Instead of being able to take advantage of the educational and social opportunities her father’s status might have offered her, she was passed around from one family member to another and struggled to find a stable home. And, as a teenager, she had to provide for herself and her ailing mother by taking jobs as a domestic servant in white homes and as a seamstress. Her early life would make her even more concerned with creating and protecting stable family and community structures for black people when she entered political life in the late 1920s.
For a country whose past is so closely identified with rigid racial segregation, what is striking about many South African families is how racially mixed their lineages are. This was certainly the case with the family line of Josephine Winifred Mpama. Her father was Stephen Bonny Mpama, the son of Zulu parents, July and Anna Mpama, who came from the Inanda mission reserve not far from Durban, which American Board missionaries had founded in the nineteenth century. Josie referred to her father as a “denationalised Zulu,” by which she meant that his family were amakholwa, Christian converts who lived on mission stations and who attended mission schools and absorbed Western culture. Born in 1881 in Kroonstad, Orange Free State, Stephen moved with his family to Johannesburg after gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886. From about 1894, Stephen worked for a firm of chemists, Wilson and Coghill, in Langlaagte, to the west of Johannesburg.
Figure 1.1. Stephen Mpama (top row, on the left), 1920s. (Vesta Smith)
Josie’s mother was Georgina Garson Gasibone. Born around 1883, Georgina was the daughter of Johanna Garson, whose parents were a Mfengu woman and an Afrikaner man. Johanna married a moSotho, with whom she had two daughters, one of them Georgina. After her husband died, Johanna remarried, this time to a Scotsman by the name of Garson with whom she had three sons. They were raised “white,” went to European schools, served in the South African Army during World War I, and eventually became strangers to their black half sisters.
Stephen and Georgina met in Johannesburg and were married in a civil ceremony on April 12, 1899, by the veldcornet (a field cornet was an official who performed military, administrative, and judicial duties) of Johannesburg and in a church by a Wesleyan Methodist minister on June 3, 1899. Her mother preferred that Georgina go live in the Cape Colony during the Anglo-Boer War while Stephen served as a guide in a British army infantry unit. After the war he returned to his old job at Wilson and Coghill for several years before taking up a position at Village Reef Gold Mining Company for fifteen months.
Following the war British colonial officials administered Potchefstroom, and Mpama was elevated to the apex of black colonial society when the Potchefstroom magistrate appointed him as a court interpreter at an annual salary of seventy-two pounds.1 It was a position that educated Africans held in high esteem. As a young man in the Transkei before embarking on a law career, Nelson Mandela set his sights on becoming an interpreter for a magistrate or the Native Affairs Department because the post “was a glittering prize for an African, the highest a black man could aspire to.”2 In the black reserves, Mandela added, “an interpreter in the magistrate’s office was considered second only in importance to the magistrate himself.”3 The English-speaking magistrate relied heavily on a multilingual black interpreter in the courtroom because the judge, plaintiff, defendant, counsel, and witnesses might all speak different languages. Drawing on his personal experience as a court interpreter in Kimberley, the veteran ANC leader Solomon Plaatje explained that an interpreter fluent in many languages and with an intimate knowledge of the law was essential so that a white judge “should clearly understand the evidence in any case upon which he sits in judgement, and the only means he has of attaining this in Southern Africa is by possession of a good interpreter.”4
Mpama fit the profile of many Africans educated at mission schools. Known as “school people,” they expected that their education and professional accomplishments would qualify them to be treated as the equals of whites. Mpama valued Africans advancing themselves through education. Because Africans who sought a college education could not have one in southern Africa, they went instead to the United Kingdom and the United States. To remedy this, in 1906, 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