Plaatje's supporters believed Harris was perfectly capable of resorting to underhand methods in sabotaging the publication of Native Life in South Africa: ‘… were Mr H to get on the track of the printer,’ Alice Werner thought, he could ‘do something to complicate matters’ – a distinct possibility since P S King & Son printed pamphlets for the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society as well, and appeared to have kept Harris informed of the book's progress. Outraged by Harris's attacks on Plaatje's personal integrity, she soon concluded that ‘Mr H has his knife into P’.5
Plaatje's relationship with P S King & Son remained in a delicate state for the remaining months of 1915, but by the end of the year – Harris's efforts notwithstanding – he had managed to raise more money, no easy task in a country in which the war with Germany was the overwhelming public preoccupation. A week's employment in London just before Christmas had helped. He was engaged as a ‘manager’ to help with the ‘Cape to Cairo Fair and Red Cross Fete’, a charitable jamboree organised by the African World. Here he had a particular responsibility for the South West Africa stall where he found himself working alongside Mrs R C Hawkin, a sister of General Botha. Clicko, the ‘dancing bushman’, one of the leading attractions at the fete, was at a stall close by.6
By the end of the following month, January 1916, there was further progress. ‘My troubles here have considerably abated since the New Year,’ he informed Mrs Solomon. ‘I have already paid the printer £27, only £5 of which is borrowed and the binding of the book is now in progress.’ At the same time, writing from Stockton-on-Tees, he was delighted to be able to report that his message was being enthusiastically received in the north of England, and that he had taken forty-two advance orders for the book. All he needed was printed copies to sell.7
Native Life in South Africa was finally published on 16 May 1916. It was reward at last for Plaatje's untiring struggles since his arrival in England two years previously, and a notable victory, so he wrote later, after ‘eleven months fighting Harris who was battling to suppress Native Life in the press’. The waiting, he said, had been ‘unbearable’. He had also to overcome the increasingly difficult conditions being faced by publishers and printers. The costs of book production, P S King & Son informed another of their authors, had risen ‘enormously during the past year or so and are still rising’, so it was as well that there were no further delays. Native Life could have suffered the same fate as his newspaper Tsala ea Batho in South Africa, sunk by the massive wartime increase in paper costs.8
Reception in the UK
Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion was the full title Plaatje had settled on, possibly taking his cue from a book of Alice Werner's called Native Life in East Africa published a few years previously. Native Life ran to 352 pages and was bound in a solid wine-coloured hardback cover, good value for 3s 6d. It described the events leading up to the passage of the Natives' Land Act, the effects of its implementation, the campaign mounted by the South African Native National Congress to secure its repeal, the story of the deputation to England and the reception it received, and an account of several historical episodes illustrating the loyalty of African people in South Africa to the cause of the imperial government. Without doubt the most striking chapters of the book are those in which Plaatje described his own observations of the effects of the Land Act during the journeys he made in South Africa in 1913 and 1914.
Native Life in South Africa was formulated as a direct and often emotional appeal to the British public to right the wrongs being done to the African people of South Africa and to secure, above all, the repeal of the Natives' Land Act. ‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913,’ so Plaatje began, in words that would become famous, ‘the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth’. He justified his appeal not simply by reference to the constitutional responsibilities that Britain retained for South Africa, but upon the conviction that his people shared with the British public a common humanity: natural justice and Christian belief alike demanded their intervention.
Throughout Native Life Plaatje was at pains to present his case in terms that were meaningful to an English audience. In trying to convey what the Natives' Land Act meant, for example, he likened its operation to an imaginary decree of the London County Council; he evoked memories of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year by comparing the effects of the Land Act to those of the plague; he quoted Oliver Goldsmith's poem ‘The Deserted Village’ to emphasise the parallels between the evictions that followed the Natives' Land Act with those same consequences that had followed the enclosures in England more than a century earlier.
The war and its relevance to his arguments was a central theme. In the circumstances this was hardly something that he could have avoided. What he did, though, with considerable skill, was to turn a potential obstacle to any consideration of his case into a powerful argument in his favour: he emphasised the loyalty of his people to the cause of the imperial government in both past and present conflicts, arguing that this entitled them to ‘fair play and justice’, and relief from the ‘tyrannical enactment’ of 1913. Against this stood the behaviour of the Boers, the instigators, he argued, of the Land Act itself – some of whom rose in rebellion at the outbreak of the First World War. His own people, by contrast, remained loyal to the imperial cause, their representatives – the South African Native National Congress – resolving at their meeting in August 1914 to ‘hang up their grievances' for the duration of the war.
Overall, Native Life in South Africa was a powerful and sustained polemic, shrewdly cast in the terms and language most likely to appeal to the conscience of a nation at war, and the first book-length statement of the grievances of the African people of South Africa by one of their own leaders. It certainly struck a chord with the British press and public, its significance appreciated by the reviews that soon appeared. The liberal Daily News and Leader, for example, thought the book, ‘though possibly open to criticism on points of detail’, nevertheless ‘a very lucid and forcible – and, all things considered, not intemperate – statement of some very real and galling native grievances’. The Birmingham Post was likewise impressed by the strength of Plaatje's argument. ‘It is a serious case, well and ably put,’ it said, ‘and the evidence embodied in it is very disquieting. Here at any rate is a book which makes the native agitation intelligible and may conceivably have an influence on future events in South Africa – and at home, for by no legal fiction can the Imperial power dissociate itself from responsibility for Native affairs.’9
Other reviews took a similar line, several of them commenting on how remarkable it was that such a book could have been written by an African. Even the journal South Africa, so scathing of the Congress deputation in 1914, thought that ‘there is the spice if not the charm of novelty about this book’, that ‘its author occasionally expresses himself well and forcibly’, and that it was ‘all to the good that South African publicists should have the advantage of reading the opinions of a native observer when dealing with legislation affecting his race’. Just as surprising was the apparent approval of United Empire, the journal of the Royal Colonial Institute. ‘Mr Plaatje,’ it thought, ‘has marshalled his facts with considerable skill. He sets forth the case of his countrymen with energy and moderation. His conclusions seem to be warranted by the information at his disposal, and the facts he adduces seem to bear but one interpretation. And lastly, in the existing circumstances, he is fully justified in appealing to the court of public opinion.’10
The response was not uniformly favourable, however. A reviewer in New Age thought Native Life was ‘quite good journalism’, but that its author ‘does not make it easy for us to understand the real dimensions of his grievance’. ‘Delta’, in the African World, complained that the title of