Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje is one of the most consequential figures in the history of South African intellectual and civic life. He was a journalist, novelist, linguist, political organiser, musician and Setswana philosopher.
Admirable strides have been made to restore his name to public consciousness. In the Northern Cape there is the Sol Plaatje Municipality and Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley. Scholarship delve in the many facets of his life, yet much remains under the surface.
Two PhD theses studying Plaatje have emerged from the University of the Witwatersrand in seven months. One of those was authored by me and it studied Plaatje’s journalism and how he convened a Setswana public sphere. The other is by Otshepeng Moletsane on Plaatje’s collection of Setswana proverbs, their translations and European equivalents.
The study of Plaatje’s journalism was long overdue. For more than 100 years, the newspaper archive was a curiosity with no full study devoted to it. With my thesis, I have reckoned with the realities of black life in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century. The realities of oppression and protest; betrayal and hope; the energy of tea meetings, concerts and church sermons juxtaposed against harsh treatment and unfair administration of justice are in full display. Today, on the occasion of his 150th birthday, I briefly analyse 10 historical moments between 1899 and 1932. They demonstrate that Plaatje shaped the response to the foundational crises of 20th century South Africa in ways that determined the subsequent character of the liberation movement, the form of the national anthem, the theory of civil disobedience and the political philosophy that has guided African governance claims for more than a century.
The prevailing account of Plaatje as a “moderate constitutionalist” is not wholly historically accurate. A close reading of his Setswana journalism columns reveals his radical arguments in a philosophical tradition the colonial state could not refute. I call for a reappraisal of Plaatje’s place in history as an important thinker.
The moments mentioned are not the most famous. Together, they constitute the case for a reappraisal of his place in our national history.
Mafeking Diary
Plaatje was a 23-year-old court inter-preter when the siege of Mafeking began in October 1899 as Boer forces encircled the colonial town and cut it off from British supply. Black people were dying from starvation-related illness while the horses of the British garrison were fed and white civilians were rationed. Plaatje wrote it down because he couldn’t allow what he witnessed to go unrecorded. The black population of Mafikeng had no voice. The official record would not include them. He became the record. The act of recording became the founding act of Plaatje’s investigative journalism and the governing commitment of his subsequent career.
The Mafeking diary changed South Africa because it established that black South Africans would document their own history and reverse a narrative that sought to erase them from the official record. The Diary was published in 1973, more than 70 years after it was written and some 30 years after Plaatje’s death.
The founding of ‘Koranta ea Becoana’
Funded by Silas Molema of the Barolong chiefly family, Koranta was the first wholly black-owned and controlled newspaper in South Africa. Unlike its predecessors and contemporaries, it received no sub-sidy from white political parties or white business backers. Its independence was real. That independence made it capable of speaking without fear and challenging the oppressive colonial state.
Investigative programme and accountability journalism
Between 1901 and 1909, Plaatje conducted four bodies of accountability journalism that together constitute a sophisticated investigative practice available in the South African press, and that anticipated by two decades the formalisation of investigative journalism as a professional genre in North American scholarship.
These were the railway discrimination coverage of June 1902; the South African War compensation documentation; the native tax documentation; and the franchise guide of December 1903. The newspaper was not merely reporting on civic life. It was performing the functions of a citizens’ advice bureau, a legal aid clinic and a community organiser.
Investigative accountability journalism stands as a black South African intellectual practice.
Two languages, two philosophies
The English and Setswana columns of the newspaper are different arguments, made from different philosophical traditions, for different audiences, towards the same political goal.
In his Setswana columns, Plaatje was deploying an African philosophical framework. The constitutional argument in the English columns was the argument the colonial state could respond to, dismiss or delay. The proverb in the Setswana column was the argument that operated outside the colonial tradition’s frame of reference. Accounts of Plaatje’s political thought didn’t take a full account of his Setswana columns.
This demonstrates that African languages contain philosophies that the European philosophical tradition cannot access, replicate or refute. Plaatje used this to his advantage.
The Maitisho column
It was written in a female voice addressed to the women of the Setswana community on questions of the tension of marriage, the colonial disruption of Setswana domestic life, the erosion of female authority in a community whose structures were being destabilised and the dignity of women in conditions designed to deny it. Scholars who have noticed the Maitisho column have speculated that it was Plaatje’s voice, adopting a female editorial persona to address what a male editor, under his own name, could not address within the social conventions of the era.
The column produced a sustained feminist political journalism that preceded many equivalents in the South African black press by decades.
Journalism as the infrastructure of liberation
The South African Native National Congress (SANNC later changed to ANC) was founded on 8 January 1912, a date Plaatje picked. He was selected as the general secretary and had been one of the most important black journalists for 11 years.
The newspaper he founded later in 1912, Tsala ea Batho (Friend of the People) became the organ of the new organisation.
It published the SANNC’s resolutions, analysed parliamentary debates that affected African inter-ests and provided the communication infrastructure through which the early liberation movement maintained its coherence across the geographical dispersal of its membership.
Theory of civil disobedience
In June 1913, Tsala ea Batho published an editorial that was an instruction to civil disobedience. As women of Waaihoek in Bloemfontein marched against passes, Plaatje wrote: “Let no woman pay a fine. Let them build new gaols. It is no disgrace to occupy them for your liberty.”
This was 39 years before the ANC’s Defiance Campaign adopted civil disobedience as a liberation strategy. The 1913 campaign produced what scholarship has not connected to it: the Bantu Women’s League (1918), the legislative exclusion of women from pass laws (1923) and the foundation for the 1956 march on the Union Buildings. The 1913 women walked first and built the road on which 1956 walked.
Field journalism and the counter archive of dispossession
On 19 June 1913, the Natives Land Act came into force. Sol Plaatje got on a bicycle and crossed the border from the Cape Colony into the Orange Free State in the days that followed. He found families being driven off the land that the Act had declared white-only territory.
The method was field journalism — the journalist going to the source, without institutional support or editorial budget, in the knowledge that if he does not record the suffering, the record of what the Land Act did to people will not exist.
The bicycle journey produced the journalism that became Native Life in South Africa, published in London in 1916 and is the most extended act of investigative advocacy journalism in the history of the South African early black press and the text that brought the Land Act’s consequences to international attention.
The voice in the archive
On 16 October 1923, Sol Plaatje recorded Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika in a studio at Hayes, Middlesex. It is the first known archival recording of the hymn that would become the central anthem of the liberation movement and the national anthem of a democratic South Africa and Tanzania while Zambia uses its melody.
On a doomed advocacy trip to England to petition a British government that had made clear it would not intervene in South Africa’s native policy, Plaatje committed the song to wax. He was preserving the future he would not live to see.
The full body of work — an unmatched intellectual
No South African thinker of the 20th century has produced a body of work that matches it in breadth, rigour and consequence.
From the South African War diary, three newspapers across 15 years constituting the most extensive documentary record of black South African community life in the early 20th century; Native Life in South Africa; Mhudi; hundreds of Setswana proverbs collected; a phonetic study of Setswana co-authored with Daniel Jones of University College London; Shakespeare translations into Setswana; a musical recording archive. This is a description of a specific intellectual pro-gramme. It is a demonstration, across multiple genres and multiple languages, that African intellectual life was as complex, as philosophically rich and as culturally ambitious as anything the European tradition had produced.
Plaatje achieved this under conditions that would have defeated a lesser person. He was largely broke, spent years in England and North America making arguments that the governments he addressed were not prepared to act on. He watched the Land Act dispossess his people and saw the world largely fail to respond but he kept working.
The hardest thing to acknowledge about Plaatje’s story is that many of the political goals of his journalism were not achieved but the community he convened produced the political formation that eventually dismantled the system he could not.
Dr Lesley Mofokeng holds a PhD in journalism and media studies from Wits University where he lectures.