SOL SEARCHING

More than a century after the publication of the story of the iconic Sol Plaatje is as vivid and relevant as ever

In July 1913 — 105 years ago to the month — tens of thousands of black tenant farmers, their families and their stock took to the roads of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Thanks to the infamous Natives Land Act of 1913 they were unable to live on farms as sharecroppers, as they once had. In haste and desperation, they sought land elsewhere.

The act proscribed the terms of their tenancy, under which they offered their labour in return for a share of the crop. They could, however, be servants, with their stock surrendered to the farmer whose land they occupied. Rather than submit to this deeper form of servitude, they walked away. To where, they often did not know.

It was SA’S first great act of civil disobedience.

By law, their animals could neither graze nor be watered on the lands through which they trampled, so their journeys were not only dominated by the vaguest sense of destination; they were death-haunted. Here was tragedy on an epic scale.

The travails of this landless peasantry were documented by Sol Plaatje in Native Native Life in South Africa, Life in South Africa, a book published with great difficulty in 1916. In it, he undertook what he called a “tour of observation”, visiting where the wanderers crossed the Vaal River or disappeared into the interior, clouds of their animals’ dust in their wake.

Plaatje called July 1913 “Black July”, a reference to the hardness of the season and the harshness of a countryside already crippled by a long summer drought. “Pray that your flight be not in winter,” he writes in the opening to chapter four.

Under the act, even sympathetic white farmers were constrained. Should you, as a farmer, fail to comply with the new law, you could either be fined £100 or imprisoned. Times were hard. Folk had neither the sense of charity nor the stomach for such threats. Most averted their eyes.

There were exceptions. In chapter seven, “Our Indebtedness to White Women”, he writes of a redoubtable farmer’s wife who ingeniously puts the fears of the farm’s tenants to rest. “Some farmers (unfortunately too few) who had at first intended to change the status of their native tenants,” writes Plaatje, “had been obliged to abandon the idea owing to the determined opposition of their wives.”

Born on October 9 1876 on a farm in the