Sol Plaatjie and the back of the native mind
The author, reporter, editor and chronicler was both a man of his time and ahead of it
It is given to some to excel at one endeavour. But a very few are versatile in their pursuits and awesome in the success they attain in each of them. Such was Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, author of Mhudi, the first novel written and published in English by an African writer.
In his preface to The Loveday Press first edition of Mhudi in 1930, Plaatje notes, “South African literature has hitherto been almost exclusively European, so that a foreword seems necessary to give reasons for a Native venture ... This book has been written with two objects in view, viz. (a) to interpret to the reading public one phase of ‘the back of the Native mind’; and (b) with the readers’ money, to collect and print (for Bantu Schools) Sechuana [sic] folk tales, which, with the spread of European ideas, are fast being forgotten.”
Plaatje wrote those words at his Angel Street home in Kimberley in August 1930. Under two years later, on 19 June 1932, he died in Nancefield, snatched away by pneumonia and bronchitis, at the age of 55. The loss to family, friends, literary peers like HIE Dhlomo, journalism, English-setswana translation, and South African letters and politics, was immeasurable.
Plaatje had been a superb reporter, an acute newspaper editor, a detailed chronicler of the Siege of Mafeking (sic) and a translator into Setswana of five Shakespeare plays, including Othello and Julius Caesar, the second of considerable relevance to Mhudi.
Beyond that, he was a political activist of the first degree. He is probably best known as one of the founders of the South African Native National Congress, the forerunner to the ANC, and as the mind and pen behind Native Life in South Africa (1916), his withering response to, and rebuke of, the Land Act of 1913 that made “legal” the countrywide mass theft of land from black South Africans.
But, in certain ways, the achievement of Mhudi eclipses even that of Native Life. Though published in 1930, it’s likely that Plaatje was working on it at least a decade and a half earlier. In the preface, he laments that “this book should have been published over 10 years ago”.
Whatever the exact chronology, Plaatje published a novel in English about the culture and history of his Barolong people that preceded Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by nearly three decades.
Today’s reader of Mhudi can see Plaatje wrestling with how to convey to a “foreign” reader the intricacies and particularities of Barolong life, behaviour and belief, as well as those of their Matabele and Boer enemies and, later, their Boer allies.
Plaatje renders oral history, parables and folk tales in a form that is antithetical to them — the printed word, bound up in a book to be read, not heard.
Yet reading Mhudi is almost an oral experience, if only the reader of 2023 will hear the words as well as read them.
It’s a brilliant technical and linguistic achievement by Plaatje and one that prefigures Achebe’s identical feat in Things Fall Apart.
It’s undeniable that there are starchy passages endowed with an air of Victorian and Edwardian formality. But remember that Plaatje was writing for an English-speaking audience for whom, at the time, such a style would not have seemed either artificial or inflated. What that yields is a notably Biblical grandeur to parts of the book, especially when nature is portrayed.
Mhudi is multi-genred. It is a romance, a history chronicle (“historical novel”), an anthology of parables, an anthropological trove and a considered investigation into what provoked war between the Matabele and the Barolong in 1832.
In the preface, Plaatje writes, “In all the tales of battle I have ever read, or heard of, the cause of war is invariably ascribed to the other side ... By the merest accident, while collecting stray scraps of tribal history, later in life, the writer incidentally heard of ‘the day Mzilikazi’s tax collectors were killed’.”
It is this bloody act, against all the customs of dealing with emissaries of another power, which drives Mzilikazi to fury and to ordering the destruction of the Barolong city of Khunwana (Kunana in the novel) and the slaughter of all its inhabitants, men, women, children, the old, the blind, the lame. None shall be spared.
After a few pages sketching the settled and contented life of the Barolong in Kunana on the Setlagole River, a tributary of the Molopo, south-east of then Mafeking, Plaatje plunges the reader into the brutal attack by Matabele impis on the city and the merciless massacre.
A few months later, two survivors meet in the wilderness, Ra-thaga (the bird man — Plaatje’s gloss) and Mhudi (a harvester, pronounced Moody — Plaatje again). Mhudi is fleeing from a lion she almost stumbled on and Ra-thaga decides that the best way to protect her and himself is to kill the beast.
Lion encounters are a leitmotif of the book. Both Ra-thaga and Mhudi lead charmed lives in such meetings, as though endowed with the power of the biblical Daniel to escape relatively unharmed. Already before this, Mhudi has survived a face-toface meeting with another big cat.
Ra-thaga and Mhudi, bereft of family and friends, wander the wilderness and establish an almost Edenic existence with plentiful game, fruit and berries, and fresh water all within easy reach in their secluded hideaway, Re-nosi.
They are man and wife, and as happy as it is possible to be after what has befallen them. But a hunting party of Qoranna (Plaatje’s usage) persuades Ra-thaga to return with them to their homesteads, so he and Mhudi leave their forest home.
Eventually, the two join up with remnants of their and other branches of the Barolong under the sage leadership of Moroka and a new life begins first at Moroka’s Hoek, then in Thaba Nchu.
One day, an advance party of trekkers led by Sarel Cilliers comes to talk with the Barolong, the subject their mutual enemy Mzilikazi.
It’s here that the novel morphs seamlessly into history. Thrillingly, the reader is witness to moments of great historical import, which result in an alliance against the Matabele, partly on the grounds of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and partly because both sides have clear geopolitical and economic goals.
There is the land from which the Matabele will be displaced, as well as their herds and flocks, those live assets on the hoof.
Embodying the Barolong and Boer alliance is the unlikely but plausible comradeship between Ra-thaga and the young Boer De Villiers, though Plaatje is careful to show at many points prejudice, racism and abuse practised by many of the Trekkers.
Parallel to this, Plaatje gives us an intimate and sometimes sympathetic look at the court of Mzilikazi (the female mourner — Plaatje), the intrigues against his favourite wife Umnandi (the sweet one), and the courage and wisdom of his great commander-in-chief Gubuza.
Romance and love are here too, between Mzilikazi and Umnandi, and it is notable that Plaatje can think of and treat the man who ordered the obliteration of the writer’s own people with the novelist’s human eye and the historian’s clear head.
In the latter instance, Mhudi and Plaatje bring to mind the Ancient Greek explorer and “Father of History” Herodotus, who opens his great work The Histories with: “Herodotus of Halicarnassus, his Researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict.”
Thanks to Plaatje, readers of the novel have front row seats to this chapter of the Mfecane. (The isixhosa term for the “great disruption” or “crushing” in central South Africa caused by Mzilikazi’s northward acquisition of territory. Also: Lifaqane in Sesotho orthography
used in Lesotho and difaqane in Sesotho orthography in South Africa.)
Halley’s Comet is central at the point Mzilikazi is faced with defeat. It had appeared in real life in 1835 and been interpreted as an omen of Matabele disaster. Plaatje uses it much as Shakespeare does in Julius Caesar, where Caesar’s wife Calpurnia says to him: “When beggars die there are no comets seen;/ The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
One of Plaatje’s great set-pieces has a diviner warning Mzilikazi of what the heavens portend: “Wise men have always said that such a star is the harbinger of diseases of men and beasts, wars and the overthrow of governments as well as the death of princes.”
Mzilikazi is urged to abandon his capital, Inzwinyani (Silkaatskop, north-east of Groot Marico) and resettle far to the north. Later, he reflects ruefully, with the anguish that attends the end of all empires: “This was his dream of many years, but now he saw the Imperial structure of his super-expansionist dream shattered and blown away like so many autumn leaves at the mercy of a violent hurricane.”
The Romans believed “Ars longa, vita brevis” — “Art is long, life is short”. Mzilikazi’s empire is no more but Mhudi, and all Sol Plaatje’s works, are with us still and will be for all time.