Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was born 150 years ago, on 9 October 1876. Today he is remembered as one of South Africa’s great literary and political figures, a man whose many achievements are justly celebrated — and whose vision of what South Africa could be inspired not only his contemporaries but later generations too.
Just look at how two of his passions — the ideal of equal rights before the law and equal status for South Africa’s indigenous languages — have found expression in South Africa’s Constitution.
Plaatje has been honoured in many other ways. In 2004 he was awarded the Order of Luthuli in Gold, the country’s highest award, recognising his “exceptional contribution to the struggle for democracy, human rights and justice in South Africa”. Ten years later, the new Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley, Plaatje’s home town, named after him, opened its doors to its first students. Now it has more than 7 000.
Plaatje’s life was one of commitment to the cause of his people. He was one of the founders of the South African Native National Congress, the precursor to today’s ANC, in 1912, and was its first secretary general. He led the campaign against the infamous Natives Land Act of 1913, travelled to England in 1914 as a member of a Congress deputation to protest against the British imperial government and then led an appeal for the support of the British public.
While there, he wrote his famous book, Native Life in South Africa, setting out the case of his people against the increasingly oppressive policies of the South African government. He continued to present their case at meetings, in speeches and in numerous newspaper articles for the remainder of his life.
The written record he has left, his articles packed with telling detail, documents and condemns South Africa’s turn to segregation in the early years of the past century.
In 1914, Plaatje made his name as a journalist, as editor of his own newspapers and as a contributor to white-owned newspapers like the Diamond Fields Advertiser and the Johannesburg Star. Still to come was his contribution to the preservation of Setswana, his native tongue, in the form of a book of proverbs with translations and equivalents and, in conjunction with Daniël Jones, an eminent phonetics professor at the University of London, a phonetic guide to Setswana.
After that he embarked upon the translation of some of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana, the product of his fascination with Shakespeare and his idea of using the plays as a means of showcasing — and preserving — the riches of Setswana, whose future he was desperately concerned about. He is known to have translated at least six of Shakespeare’s plays.
Only two were published — Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara (Julius Caesar) and Diphosho-phosho (Comedy of Errors). Tragically, the others were lost.
And then, in 1930, though it had been largely written 10 years earlier, his famous English-language novel Mhudi, which presents a distinctly African view of South Africa’s past. Mhudi explores the 19th-century history of the Barolong and their neighbours, setting in context the great betrayal, as Plaatje saw it, of the Land Act of 1913.
Plaatje, though, was no lonely genius. He was incredibly gifted, determined and resilient but it would be wrong to say that he rose above his circumstances or became disconnected from them. Rather, he was deeply rooted in the community, and communities, of which he was part, and he drew knowledge and strength from them. This sustained him throughout his life. It was pre-cisely because he was so connected to the lives of his people that his campaigns had such an impact.
He also owed a huge amount to individuals he encountered. When he lived with his elder brother, Simon, at the mission station in Pniel, near Kimberley, after his father moved on with other members of his family, he met missionaries Ernst and Marie Westphal. They recognised young Plaatje’s abilities and took a special interest in his progress and pro-vided extra tuition when he outgrew the limited offerings of the Pniel mission school. Here, for example, he learnt German and first encountered Shakespeare.
And then, when he moved to Kimberley in 1894 to take up a job in the post office, he learnt much from the group of mission-educated Africans, many of them of Xhosa origin, who had made their home on the diamond fields. Here they played cricket and rugby, sang in choirs and musical societies and discussed politics. They improved their knowledge of English at meetings of an organisation known as the South Africans Improvement Society — for in the British Cape Colony you needed English to get on. Despite the prejudices they faced in colonial society, this group of young men and women were optimistic about their future. Plaatje’s brilliant Mafeking Diary, penned during the siege of Mafeking in 1899 and 1900, after he had moved to the town to take up a job as a court interpreter, could not have been written without them.
After this, Plaatje embarked upon a career as a journalist, editing a weekly newspaper called Koranta ea Becoana. Most of it was in Setswana but it had some columns in English too. It aimed to promote solidarity and progress among the Tswana-speaking people. None of this would have been possible without the moral and financial support of the Barolong chief Silas Molema, who nearly bankrupted himself in the effort to keep Koranta afloat.
Other supporters included a group of hard-pressed Barolong landowners in Thaba Nchu in the Free State who helped finance Plaatje’s next newspaper, Tsala ea Becoana, and various white sympathisers in England — like Georgiana Solomon, the widow of a former Cape Colony statesman, who helped pay for Native Life in South Africa. All were inspired by Plaatje’s vision of South Africa’s future and his determination to defend the rights of his people.
Above all, Plaatje owed an enormous debt to his wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1898. She was a former teacher, of Mfengu origin, and she would devote much of her life to supporting her husband and raising their children, coping as best she could with his long absences from home as he campaigned at home and abroad — he was away in the UK and North America for four and a half years. Plaatje often acknowledged her contribution. At the beginning of Native Life in South Africa he includes her portrait as well as his own, and states that without her “loyal co-operation this book would never have been written”.
As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Sol Plaatje’s birth and recall his legacy, let us also remember the network of people who made his achievements possible, who helped sustain him in a life of ceaseless endeavour. Plaatje’s achievement was their achievement too.
Brian Willan is research fellow at Sol Plaatje University and Rhodes University and the author of Sol Plaatje: a life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876-1932 (Jacana, 2028).