When it came out in 1930, Sol Plaatje’s epic Mhudi was the first full-length novel in English written by a black South African. In fact, the author completed writing it in 1920 but it was published only a decade later.
At the time Lovedale Press published Mhudi, there were just a few novels written by southern Africans, notably Sesotho novels Moeti wa Bochabela and Chaka by Thomas Mofolo and An African Tragedy, a shorter work of fiction in English by RRR Dhlomo.
However, Plaatje’s novel was a head above many.
What makes his work outstanding, especially for the time in which it was written, was that the author has centred a woman in the story. The title is the name of the main character, Mhudi.
For a novel written by a man in 1919 and 1920, that was a rare feat. For this portrayal of the African woman, Plaatje was lauded by scholars through many decades after the publication of Mhudi.
In Bringing Plaatje Home — Ga e Phetsolele Nageng: Re-Storying the African and Batswana Sensibilities in His Oeuvre, Sekepe Daniel Matjila and Karen Haire argue that the character of Mhudi “exhibits an independence that challenges the stereotypical, traditional conception of a woman as a minor and dependant”. By doing so, they further argue, Plaatje implicitly critiques African society for its exclusion of women from public decision-making and, by extension, African society’s general disregard for their potential in public life.
“He frequently shows superior judgment of women, as when Mhudi instinctively distrusts the headman who invites her husband, Ra-Thaga, on a hunting trip.
“Ra-Thaga, who misses the finer subtleties of character, accepts the offer, putting both his wife and himself in considerable danger. Indeed, Ra-Thaga accepts the invitation to the hunt, despite Mhudi’s premonitions and warnings. Male chauvinism brings Mhudi into direct conflict with her husband.”
Plaatje wrote in the foreword that at the time he wrote Mhudi, South African literature was “almost exclusively European”. More than a century since the novel was published, Mhudi exemplifies what Chinua Achebe meant in The Empire Fights Back, when he wrote about “new ways to write about Africa”.
He further argues that these were efforts of “reinvesting the continent and its people with humanity, free at last of those stock situations and stock characters, ‘never completely human’, that dominated European writing about Africa for hundreds of years”.
By emphasising that South African literature was almost exclusively European, Plaatje took up the responsibility of being the righter of the wrongs of a literature that Achebe argued to be “the colonisation of one people’s story by another”. One may say that when Plaatje took up the vocation of writing, specifically when he set out to write Native Life in South Africa and later Mhudi, he assumed the role of the lion’s historian as posited in the phrase that Achebe used extensively: “Until the lion has his or her own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best part of the story.”
In portraying the extent of the destruction that came with Western civilisation, Plaatje, began his story by using the imagination to present to us Africa on which no European had set foot: “Two centuries ago the Bechuana tribes inhabited the extensive areas between Central Transvaal and the Kalahari Desert. Their entire world lay in the geography covered in the story in these pages.
“In this domain they led their patriarchal life under several chiefs who owe no allegiance to any king or emperor. They raised their native corn which satisfied their simple wants and, when not engaged in hunting or pastoral duties, the peasants whiled away their days in tanning skins or sewing magnificent rugs. They also smelted iron and manufactured useful implements.”
What Plaatje, as well as other African writers like Achebe, Amos Tutuola, Mongo Beti, Peter Abrahams, Mariama Bâ, Bessie Head and Thomas Mofolo, did was reimagine the African into a story in which he was thrust in a way he would not want to see himself, nor believe the portrayal was real or even affirming. To Plaatje and the other writers, Africa had to be re-storyed and they took it upon themselves to do that.
This shows us that at the time when a people’s history has been fictionalised, historical fiction, such as Mhudi, can serve to correct that history and return the dignity of those whose stories have been incorrectly told.
More than 100 years after Plaatje sat down to write Mhudi, the novel remains a text with which we can examine our lives, collectively and individually.
The occasion of Plaatje’s post-humous 150th birthday gives us an opportunity to revisit his text, relook at how he lived his short life of 55 years and draw lessons, derive inspiration and attempt to answer the questions he posed to us. Sabata-mpho Mokae is the author of The Story of Sol T. Plaatje. He teaches Creative Writing at Sol Plaatje University.