Stephen Gray
SOL PLAATJE: SELECTED WRITINGS edited by Brian Willan (WUP, R120)
THE British scholar Brian Willan’s selection of the journalism of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was first announced all of 20 years ago, when the centenary of his subject’s birth was being celebrated as visibly as possible by the few literary fundis then in the know.
To mark the occasion, together with Tim Couzens, Willan filled to bursting an issue of English in Africa with Plaatje texts most readers had never heard of – Shakespeare critiques, biographies of vanished great men, Setswana folk-tales, pamphlets, plangent protest. He was, after all, the first secretary general of the African National Congress.
At best an interim measure, this was the kind of strategic, in-your-face tactic the great recuperators of the South African heritage were driven to adopt in the darkest apartheid days. It had to be shown that they resisted that great act of political illiteracy, which came soon after Plaatje’s death in 1932 – being struck off the voters’ roll – and devoted their written skills to making a lot more than Xs. See the evidence: books the size of bricks.
First there was the astounding discovery in 1973 that, like many of his superiors trapped in the siege of Mafeking, whose diaries he tapped out for them on the office typewriter, Plaatje too kept a record. Horseflesh days. First issued as The Boer War Diary of Sol T Plaatje, in 1989 it was reissued with Willan’s annotations as the plainer Mafeking Diary.
There was his novel, Mhudi, now an evergreen of the Heinemann African Writers Series, and his Native Life in South Africa of 1916, about “the crime of being black without a white master”, reprinted with an unfussy introduction by Willan in 1982 by Ravan.
Two years later he pulled his activities together with Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, the magnificent, step-by-step biography that was more than the story of one brave, dedicated leader-of-his-people; it was an exhibition of what segregation detached us from … and lost us. Plaatje’s house at 32 Angel Street in Kimberley was declared the first museum devoted to a black South African (though temporarily it has become a primary school!).
There was opposition to Willan’s provocations. Some cultural workers resented being upstaged by that old string-pulling ombudsman, Outa Sol, always with his hat in his hand, suspecting the white liberals behind him of grievous manipulation. But who other than Willan, without affiliation and unfunded, has bothered to do the job?
This new selection is his second go at the Plaatje story, really, because the essence of all the foregoing is between these covers, with every introductory note, footnote, endnote and illustration that could be desired. Most items have not previously been collected.
Under the new South African dispensation Plaatje at last comes across as unshackled. There are many examples of that cheeky editorial plural (“We have not demonstrated our fealty to the throne for the sake of sd, but we did it to assist in the maintenance of the open door”) and those well-turned polemics (“To solve the native question, keep him away from liquor and lawyers, give him the franchise and your confidence”). His off-the-cuff speech to Lloyd George, the British prime minister, during the ANC’s second deputation to London in 1919 – fortunately taken down in shorthand – is just one of many examples of that grand rhetorical genius he called “essential interpreting” in action. Time and again the articles, letters, talks and accounts assembled here exemplify the man’s eloquent mastery.
Perhaps even more impressive is the private person who, while the battle for human rights was being waged, somehow got suppressed. Off the record this Solomon Plaatje was a gas. A teetotaller, he was nevertheless hooked on Springbok cigarettes. He chirpily sent himself up – when reeling with seasickness on board ship he used to declare his “raw kaffir constitution” would see him through. Once on a train through the US, he recorded of his fellow passengers: “Now and again one of them would speak to me precisely as if the world had no such thing as colour.” And this is the man Barry Hertzog described as a baboon.
An intimate of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, he could spare time to make endearing notes about his children and about everything else (Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, he called “only human”). Until the end he called the province of his birth the Orange “Free” State. Willan’s compendium is an eye-opener, indeed.
Meanwhile, the Institute for the Study of English in Africa in Grahamstown has reissued, as a booklet called Sol Plaatje’s Selected Shorter Writings, that centenary issue of two decades ago. An opportunity has been missed to correct some original errors, but since the contents of this and the Willan selections hardly overlap, the voracious will undoubtedly have to go for both.