The Role of Solomon T. Plaatje (1876-1932) in South African Society
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THE ROLE OF SOLOMON T. PLAATJE (1876-1932) IN SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIETY by Brian Peel Willan Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London November 1979 ProQuest Number: 11010557 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11010557 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 i ABSTRACT Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was born to Tswana, Christian, parents in 1876, and grew up on a mission station near Kimberley. After first working as a post office messenger, in 1898 he moved to Mafeking to become a court interpreter, and served in this capacity during the famous siege. In 1902 he became editor of an English/Tswana newspaper, Koranta ea Becoana, and established his reputation as a journalist and spokesman for his people. Shortly after Union in 1910 he moved to Kimberley and became editor of another newspaper, Tsala ea Becoana, and was then prominently involved in the founding of the South African Native National Congress, becoming its first Secretary. He took a leading role in the campaign against the Natives1 Land Act of 1913, and in 1914 travelled to England as a member of a Congress deputation to the imperial government. Here, he wrote and published Native Life in South Africa, together with two books in Tswana. Returning to South Africa in 1917 he resumed his political role, and sought to establish an organisation known as the Brotherhood Movement which he had encountered in England. In 1919 he returned to England with a second deputation, and subsequently carried his campaign to North America, seeking to publicise the grievances of his people and to raise funds for his Brotherhood work. Writing extensively in both black and white news papers in South Africa in the 1920s, Plaatje came to devote more of his time and energy to literary activities of various kinds; his novel, Mhudi, was published in 1930. Involved in his later years in a temperance organisation, whose journal he edited in 1931, Plaatje died in Johannesburg in 1932 after a lifetime of ceaseless activity. ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations have been used: APS Anti-Slavery and Aborigines1 Protection Society DFA Diamond Fields Advertiser ICS Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London JAH Journal of African History JSAS Journal of Southern African Studies LMS ' London Missionary Society OFS Orange Free State SAIRR South African Institute of Race Relations SANAC South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903-05 SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies 9 UCT University of Cape Town UNISA University of South Africa, Pretoria Wits University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT 1 ABBREVIATIONS 2 INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER 1 : Early Years: Pniel and Kimberley 22 CHAPTER 2 : 'The Essential Interpreter' 45 CHAPTER 3 : Editor of Koranta ea Becoana 69 CHAPTER 4: : Union, the South African Native National Congress, and the Natives' Land Act of 1913 96 CHAPTER 5 : England, 1914-17 135 CHAPTER 6 : Sechuana Proverbs and A Sechuana Reader 161 CHAPTER 7 : South Africa, 1917-19 183 CHAPTER 8 : England and America, 1919-23 211 CHAPTER 9 : The 1920s: A Leader without a People? 240 CHAPTER 10 : 'A Pioneer in Literature' 270 CHAPTER 11 : Final Years and Retrospect 306 BIBLIOGRAPHY 319 4 INTRODUCTION Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was born in 1876 and died in 1932. During the course of an exceptionally full and varied life he was, at various times, an assistant teacher at a mission school, post office messenger, court interpreter, newspaper editor and journalist, political leader,'social worker and educator, writer and-novelist. A man of immense natural talent and ability, Plaatje rose by his own efforts to become, during his lifetime, one of the best known black South Africans of his generation, in the forefront of the public affairs of his people for the greater part of his adult life. One of the founders of the South African Native National Congress - fore runner of today1s African National Congress - Plaatje twice travelled overseas to represent the interests of his people, and wrote a political book, Native Life in South Africa, that stands to this day as one of the most powerful polemics - and there have been many - to have been written on South Africa.(0 He was a prolific political journalist, writing both in his own newspapers, and - in his later years - for other African and European newspapers. And he made an outstanding contribution in the field of literature: in collecting the proverbs and folk lore of his native language, Tswana; in collaborating in a pioneering phonetic study of the same language; in translating Shakespeare; and in writing a novel, Mhudi, one of the most imaginative and sophisticated works to have emerged out of the coming together of African and European cultures in the continent as a whole^^ 1. S.T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (London, 1916). To say that Plaatje1s life and career - remarkable enough by any standards - have been neglected would be an understatement. For some thirty years or so after his death few references to him could be found in the secondary literature. Most of these were confined to noting in the briefest terms the part he had played in the early days of the South African Native National Congress, and that he had been the first black South African to have written a novel in English. Not that Mhudi was taken very seriously. When not ignored, the treatment it received was . t usually superficial and often patronising,,'* It is only within the last ten years or so - thanks mainly to the work of Tim Couzens - that Plaatje's literary reputation has been established, that Mhudi has come 2, SoT. Plaatje, Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents (London, 1916); D. Jones and S.T. Plaatje, A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography (London, 1916); S.T. Plaatje, Diposho-posho/ Comedy of Errors (Morija, 1930); S.T. Plaatje, Dintshontsho tse bo-Juliuse Kesara (Johannesburg, 1937); S.T. Plaatje, Mhudi (Lovedale, 1930); also published - with an Introduction by T. Couzens - in the Heinemann African Writers Series, 1978. 3. For example, J.Jahn, A History of Neo-African Literature (London, 1966), 90, where Mhudi is classified not as LTapprentice literature' , or 'protest literature1', but as 'neutral' , or 'hedging* ; and characterised by a 'padded 'Victorian' style1- (p.105); and J.P.L. Snyman, The South African Novel in English, 1880-1930 (Kimberley, 1952), where Plaatje is considered to have been 'unable to span the gap and live in the period about which he is writing'"; both authors quoted in T. Couzens, 'Sol Plaatje's Mhudi', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, VII, no.l, June 1973, 1-2. to be seen as anything more than a quaint curiosity; ^ that the discovery and publication of Plaatje1s diary, kept during the siege of Mafeking, has drawn attention to his role in one of the best known episodes in British imperial history, and his ability and perception as a diarist;and that a new interest in twentieth-century African political history in South Africa has shed further light on the history of the African National Congress, with which he was - in its early days at least - so closely associated. The absence for so long of any serious consideration of Plaatje1s political or literary significance is comment in itself upon the nature of South African society in general, upon its traditions of historiography and literary criticism in particular. Plaatje is not, of course, the only prominent African figure of his time to have suffered neglect at the hands of posterity. Contemporaries or near contemporaries like Tengo Jabavu, John Dube, W.B. Rubusana -men of the same mission-educated stratum of society - have similarly failed to 4. In addition to the above article, see also T. Couzens, fThe Dark Side of the World: Sol Plaatje's Mhudi*, English Studies in Africa, XIV, 2 (1971); Introductions to Quagga Press (Johannesburg, 1975) and Heinemann African Writers Series (London, 1978) editions of Mhudi; T. Couzens and S. Gray "Printers1 and Other Devils: the Texts of Sol T. Plaatjefs Mhudi", Research in African Literature, Vol.9, no.2, Fall 1978; see also S. Gray, 'Sources ofthe First Black South African Novel in English1’, Hunger Africana Library Notes, December 1976; S. Gray, 'Plaatje's Shakespeare1’, English in Africa, Vol.4, no.l, March 1971; T. Couzens and B.P. Willan, ’’Sol T. Plaatje, 1876-1932: an Introduction', English in Africa, Vol.3, no.2, September 1976. 5.. John Comaroff (ed.), The Boer War Diary of Sol T. Plaatje: an African at Mafeking (London, 1973). 6. For example, M. Benson, The African Patriots: the story of the African National Congress (London, 1963); L. Kuper, ’African Nationalism in South Africa, 1910-19641 , in M. Wilson and L. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, Vol.2, (London, 1971); P. Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: the African National Congress, 1912-1952 (London, 1970); T. Karis and G. Carter (eds.), From Protest to Challenge: a Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa,1882- 1964 (4 volumes, Stanford, 1972-1977). """"" attract full-length biographical treatment.^ Such a state of affairs contrasts sharply with the attention that has over the years been devoted to the lives of the men who were in many ways their predecessors, the African chiefs of the nineteenth century, men who had fought - with varying degrees of success.- to preserve and defend their societies in an earlier phase of white expansion,.