The real Sol Plaatje
One was the British colonial tradition that supported racial oppression and segregation. The other, as the Cape liberal Sir James Rose Innes put it in a speech in 1929, was that in South Africa “any white moron can vote”. And these white morons were certainly not prepared to listen to or be persuaded by a black man. The tyranny of the white majority, led and facilitated by Barry Hertzog, who also became prime minister, and Smuts was too great a force to be countered by Plaatje’s judicial pleas and testimonies. After coming back from tours of the US and Britain in 1923, he would meet his friend Burton (by then the finance minister) in Tokai, Cape Town, but, as Willan puts it, this friendship was now “distinctly out of place” in the Union of South Africa.
There is another story enmeshed in this narrative — that of Plaatje’s domestic life. Despite his clear love for his family, he was something of a nomad.
He spent many years away in Britain and the US spreading the news of the Natives Land Act (1913) and of the conditions of “native life in South Africa”, which was the title of his most famous political work. In fact, this wandering never quite stopped. Even after returning to South Africa he started touring the country for weeks at a time with a mobile cinema.
This, as Willan describes, took its toll on his family. His wife, Elizabeth, and his oldest son, St Leger, would have to shoulder the burden. And it would lead to the cessation of St Leger’s promising academic career.
One gets the sense that at the heart of this was an almost pathological urge to communicate, an urge that was being arrested at each step by the ever-growing racial laws after the union was established.
Mhudi, which was written in English, was in many ways another attempt to communicate to a broader world that would not listen. It would take Plaatje 10 years to find a publisher.
Again, as Willan suggests, at the root of Mhudi was a repository of his liberal political and philosophical thinking. Its feminine lead character and sympathetic representation of certain Boers and Matabeles testifies to this. In his other literary endeavours, he would continue to hold a candle for Shakespeare and the English language in one hand, while shining a lantern on Setswana and its culture with the other.
These culturally diverse sets of interests are delved into by Willan and the research and discoveries he has made in the past decades are of great historic and literary interest. With regard to Setswana, Plaatje went on what might be termed a “cultural struggle”. Once again the gathering forces of the white morons would go some way towards defeating him. However, Willan’s biography has managed to pull out of the divisive ministries of cultural evisceration some of the history of this remarkable man’s work on his own language and its culture.
At the heart of Sol Plaatje are the actions of a man whose beliefs lay in a general honest thought to all. This interest in the common good that Plaatje had (perhaps almost to a fault) was passed down to many other ANC leaders, most notably Nelson Mandela. Just who the current keeper of that flame is in South Africa and indeed the world is unclear. Liberals of Plaatje’s nature are in a state of near extinction.
Willan’s book is, in its field, a masterpiece of writing and research. There are few of these kinds of books around in the world and fewer still in South Africa.
What is more, the subject may well have been forgotten if it wasn’t for Willan’s academic persistence.
Of course, it does have some complicated narratives that are today unpopular. It might not quite reveal the Plaatje some might want to hear about.
It is a history not written simply to please and the accurate and authentic approach to its subject is refreshingly honest.