Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was born into a Barolong family at the interface of established indigenous systems of authority and Christian missionary networks.
His early missionary schooling facilitated literacy in Setswana through London Missionary Society orthographic standards, alongside advanced competence in English.
Plaatje’s later roles as a court interpreter, journalist, novelist, and political activist for the South African Native National Congress (SANNC; subsequently the ANC) positioned him, following Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s formulation, as a “linguistic bordercrosser”, that is, an actor mediating among linguistic repertoires, cultural formations, and political alignments within a structurally unequal colonial context.
Plaatje is renowned for his searing challenge to the 1913 Natives Land Act through Native Life in South Africa and the novel Mhudi, but we overlook another front he fought on: newspapers.
Plaatje wrote relentlessly to editors, officials, publishers, and allies. All his life he battled over how his own language should be written, letter by letter. In his hands, correspondence and orthography became weapons of resistance.
The letter as journalism
Plaatje was a journalist first. In 1901 he joined Koranta ea Becoana, a Setswana and English weekly in Mafikeng, and edited it from 1902. In 1910 he started Tsala ea Becoana in Kimberley, renamed Tsala ea Batho in 1912. These papers did something new. Before Plaatje, written Setswana belonged mostly to missionaries such as Robert Moffat, Brown and Wookey. It carried the Bible, hymns and catechism to converts and mission pupils. Plaatje used it to carry news and political argument to Batswana readers.
His journalistic voice did not stop at the newsroom door. His letters to white newspapers, officials and sympathisers abroad read like opinion pieces. They state a grievance, give evidence and call for action. The black press was always short of money and readers. A well-placed letter reached people his own newspapers could not. The letter was his portable newspaper.
Publishing as a site of power
Black writers depended on mission presses, colonial editors and foreign publishers. These gatekeepers decided what was printed, in which language and in which spelling. Spelling itself was a record of power. Early European visitors heard the name of the language through their own ears and wrote it as Bootchuana, Beetjuana and Sichuana. Missionaries settled on Sechuana, then Secoana. It took more than a century for the language's own sound, tsw, to win the spelling Setswana.
Plaatje worked inside this system, and his choices were deliberate. In 1916 he published two books. Sechuana Proverbs used the inherited missionary spelling. A Sechuana Reader, written with the phonetician Daniel Jones, used the International Phonetic Orthography. Plaatje could write Setswana sounds precisely. Using the missionary spelling in the proverbs was a choice for legibility and readership, not a sign that he lacked the means to do otherwise. He accepted some conventions so that his books could reach readers and advance his cause.
Challenging authority from the margins
Plaatje rarely held formal power. What he had was language. In his letters, he used courtesy as strategy. He wrote with the polish colonial officials expected, then used it to make demands they could not easily dismiss. He quoted their own laws and promises back to them. When he travelled to London with the SANNC delegation in 1914, his correspondence kept the cause alive between meetings and kept pressure on people who would rather have forgotten. This was negotiation from a position of disadvantage. It is the same strategy we see in his books: use the available colonial conventions, then fill them with African authorship and African knowledge.
Language, register and translation
Sechuana Proverbs shows this most clearly. Plaatje collected 732 proverbs and gave each a literal translation and equivalents in six European languages. The message was plain: Setswana thought stood on equal ground with European thought.
His translation choices were careful. Where he could find an English equivalent without loss, he used it. “Fa o nngapa, ke tlaa go ingapela" (if you scratch me, I will scratch you too) became “Tickle me, Bobby, and I will tickle you." A warning against provocation became nursery play. But where an English equivalent would erase the culture, he kept the Setswana image. “Ga boo motho, go thebe phatswa" (a man's home has a fine black and white shield) has no English partner, so the shield stayed. His translations of Shakespeare, Diphosophoso (The Comedy of Errors) in 1930 and Julius Caesar, published in 1937, made the same point from the other direction. Setswana could carry the greatest works of the English canon.
Why this matters now
Plaatje moved written Setswana from a missionary instrument to a Motswana's medium, even while he wrote in the missionaries' spelling. We still argue over who controls publishing, whose dialect becomes the standard and who decides how African languages are written. Today's spelling reforms are not solving these questions for the first time. They are renegotiating a settlement Plaatje helped to shape.
We should collect, digitise and teach his letters, and his 732 proverbs, as seriously as we teach his novel. A Setswana proverb says the one who rises early is the one who sees it. Plaatje rose early. Our task is to carry his written legacy forward.
Dr Otshepeng Moletsane is a Setswana lecturer in the Department of African Languages at the University of South Africa. His research focuses on Sol T. Plaatje, Setswana orthography and decolonial approaches to African linguistics.