Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa
PAST AND PRESENT
Edited by Janet Remmington, Brian Willan and Bhekizizwe Peterson
Foreword by Njabulo S Ndebele
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
First published in South Africa in 2016
Compilation © Editors
Foreword © Njabulo S Ndebele 2016
Chapters, poems and short story © Individual contributors 2016
Foreword by Bessie Head to Native Life in South Africa (Ravan, 1982) © The Estate of Bessie Head, reproduced with permission
Images © Individual copyright holders
ISBN 978-1-86814-981-0 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-86814-983-4 (EPUB – North and South America and China)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the Publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The Publisher gratefully acknowledges the institutions and individuals referenced in the captions. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced. Please contact Wits University Press at the address above in case of any omissions or errors.
Project managed by Hazel Cuthbertson
Edited by Monica Seeber
Proofread by Judith Marsden
Indexed by Jenny de Wet
Cover designed by Hothouse South Africa
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India
Printed and bound by ABC Press
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This volume reflecting on the past and present of Sol Plaatje's pioneering book, Native Life in South Africa (P S King & Son, London, 1916), has come into being through the efforts and encouragement of so many. The centenary of Native Life in 2016 was an occasion not to be missed.
Sincere thanks are due to the Wits University Press team – Veronica Klipp, Roshan Cader, Andrew Joseph, Corina van der Spoel, and freelance editor Monica Seeber and project manager Hazel Cuthbertson – for their commitment and expertise in ushering this volume through to publication. Many thanks too to Jill Weintroub for her invaluable editing at an earlier stage.
The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation: Division for Social Sciences and Humanities towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors and are not necessarily to be attributed to the National Research Foundation.
The editors are highly appreciative of the authors' contributions to this volume, as well as the suggestions of readers, reviewers, and colleagues.
We are most grateful to the Historical Papers Research Archive of the University of the Witwatersrand, Cory Library of Rhodes University, Africana Library in Kimberley, Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives, National Library of South Africa, Cambridge University Library, California Digital Library, Great Ships Collection, Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, Imperial War Museum, Glasgow University Archives, Pan Macmillan South Africa, Robert Molteno, Tiger Kloof Educational Institution/Martin Gericke, Brian Willan, David Harrison, and Sean O'Toole for use of the items and images as credited. We thank the Bessie Head Heritage Trust and Johnson & Alcock Ltd for their help with the reproduction of Head's Foreword to the Ravan edition of Native Life in South Africa.
Janet Remmington wishes to thank Andrew Joseph for planting the seed of the project, Roshan Cader for helping to nurture it, Thando Njovane and Oscar Sibabalwe Masinyana for valued support and perspicacious inputs, Elleke Boehmer for firm foundations, the African Studies Centre of the University of Oxford for an enriching interdisciplinary arena, David Attwell and the University of York for ongoing interest and an International Seedcorn Award, the late Phaswane Mpe for his Plaatje scholarship and friendship, and her family for their assistance and understanding.
Brian Willan is grateful to the Plaatje family and his wife Jennifer for their help and support over the years he has spent researching and writing about Sol Plaatje's life and work, and to Gabriele Mohale (Wits University Historical Papers) and Bernice Nagel (Africana Library, Kimberley) for their help in this and other projects.
Bhekizizwe Peterson would like to thank Isabel Hofmeyr, Dan Ojwang, Pumla Gqola, Danai Mupotsa and Merle Govind for ensuring that the Department of African Literature at Wits continues to be a supportive and stimulating environment.
FOREWORD
Sol T Plaatje and the ‘power of all’
Njabulo S Ndebele
Few turning points in history have been expressed with such durable resonance as in the opening sentence of Sol Plaatje's classic text on the distressing effects of a parliamentary promulgation: ‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’ Few titles of books capture the impact and urgency of a moment across centuries of time: Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion. On the morning of June 16, 1976, the children of Sol Plaatje's landless descendants responded in part to the effects of distress that had been legislated sixty-three years earlier. They rose for deliverance.
In a graphic display of a conquest successfully achieved, consolidated and then brutally administered, Plaatje methodically sets out the one-sided gains of victorious English and Afrikaner ascendancy and the dismemberment and destruction of the history and culture of generations of conquered African peoples. South African capitalism flourished on such brutal, legislated foundations. One hundred years later the South African economy is being called to account by a constitutional democracy far more sensitive to the human effects of laws than was the Union parliament of 1913.
Poverty, destitution, homelessness and rootlessness were to be the lot of Africans in their millions. Held all but captive in townships or on farm lands taken away and hostilely owned by those they worked for, their movements severely limited and monitored, the legislated plight of these Africans enabled twenty-five per cent of the population to carry the competitive challenge of building a modern economy. Uncompetitive white farmers and unemployed whites were legislated into economic activity by preference. Being white assured them the edge. If capability was not an immediate factor of selection, it would take the next six decades to become one, albeit in a still overwhelmingly uncompetitive environment.
In Chapter II of Native Life, reproducing parts of the Union Hansard of 1913, Plaatje demonstrates how the Union parliament was made fully aware of the competitive ability of African farmers with respect to their white contemporaries and how they sometimes outstripped them. White parliamentarian J X Merriman of Victoria West was particularly eloquent in his witness. He pointed out that ‘the Natives, if they were well managed, were an invaluable asset to the people of this country’.1 Merriman was recorded as stating:
Let them take our trade figures and compare them with the trade figures of the other large British Dominions. Our figures were surprising when measured by the white population, but if they took the richest Dominion that there was under the British Crown outside South Africa, and took the trade value of those figures per head of the white population,