A new biography gives

Sol Plaatje was a man of prodigious talents. He had mastered seven languages before the age of 20 and was a writer of prevailing prose. He was a court translator and newspaper editor. He met and was admired by Lloyd George, the British prime minister, and WEB du Bois, the American scholar and civil rights activist. He would go on to be one of the first African novelists to write in English and was a translator of Shakespeare. But he is best remembered as one of the founders of the forerunner of the ANC, the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), in 1912.

Except for the small biography written by Seetsele Molema, a friend of his family, Plaatje has only ever had one other biographer, Brian Willan. Willan has spent decades researching Plaatje and the biography that has been published under the title Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje 1876-1932 is not simply a revision of his 1985 book; it’s an entirely new take.

In it Willan follows Plaatje’s life from his birth into a family of Tswana Christian converts and his education by German missionaries near Kimberley. He traces Plaatje’s life as a court translator, a diarist of the Siege of Mafikeng, a newspaper editor and the first general secretary of the SANNC. He gives accounts of Plaatje’s deputations to Britain, his travels in the United States and the final decade of his life when he published his novel, Mhudi.

The book is a triumph of research to which its length gives testimony.

But to say that Sol Plaatje is simply a biography of one man would be a mistake. It is far more than that. It is a documentation of not only a single life but also the “Cape liberal tradition” with which Plaatje associated. Although the term may have been discredited over the past 60 years of South African politics, Willan suggests that Plaatje was very much a proponent of Cape liberalism. Plaatje, after all, agreed fundamentally with its major tenets: equality before the law and a nonracial franchise. What was more, like the many white liberals who were his friends and political associates, he believed racial segregation was not only impractical in South Africa but morally unconscionable.

Willan’s biography is not a contemporary attempt to revise Plaatje as an early militant. Rather, the work presents Plaatje as a man of remarkable social and persuasive abilities in a time and place that had little interest in these qualities. Historian Tony Judt once said that liberals are the “canaries in the sulfurase mine shaft”. Willan represents Plaatje as just this.

In its pages we see how Plaatje dedicated his life to writing and speaking out against the illiberalism and inequities of the growing race laws in the Union of South Africa.

Perhaps the main feature of the book is just how effective and persuasive Plaatje was in certain circles. Not only did he befriend the white advocate and government minister Henry Burton (who proved a useful ally both in court and in government) but also several members of the British suffragette and Christian brotherhood movements. With their help, he managed to convince large swaths of the British public, including Lloyd George, of the crisis taking place in South Africa. As Willan uncovered, Lloyd George, having been persuaded to meet Plaatje by members of the brotherhood, wrote to the prime minister, Jan Smuts, on two occasions pleading with him to take Plaatje and his organisation seriously. They had, Willan stated, serious grievances and he noted that Plaatje was able to secure “the sympathy of people of power and influence”.

But Plaatje’s problem was twofold.