The novelist Olive Schreiner, now living in London, had other objections. A friend of Georgiana Solomon's, she sympathised with his cause but disapproved – on pacifist grounds – of what she had heard about the book: ‘You know, I am a pacifist,’ she wrote to Mrs Solomon, ‘and from what I hear he advocates the natives coming over here to help kill.’ She had evidently not (at least when she wrote this) read the book, but was now prompted to do so.12
By far the strongest critic of Native Life in South Africa was John Harris, whom Plaatje now considered ‘the South African government's most sturdy defender’. Having failed to prevent the publication of Native Life, Harris did all he could to discredit the book and its author, believing it his duty to give General Botha ‘a helping hand’ in carrying out his ‘great policy’. He sent a stream of articles to the daily and periodical press in England in support of the policies of the South African government, comparing General Botha variously to Moses and Abraham Lincoln and denouncing Native Life for its ‘grotesque misrepresentations' and ‘almost deliberate untruths’. In one of these articles, in the influential Journal of the Royal African Society, he argued that ‘the attitude adopted at the moment by the natives’ constituted ‘by far the most formidable difficulty in relation to General Botha's native policies’, and that such attitudes had ‘just received most unfortunate emphasis by the publication of a book which shows that even now there is an intelligent, well-educated native who either cannot, or will not, grasp plain facts’.13
Despite his antipathy, Harris was nevertheless obliged to admit that it was not just Plaatje who constituted the problem: ‘It cannot be overlooked,’ he acknowledged, ‘that at the present time the natives as a whole are against General Botha's policy.’ It was an extraordinary position for the organising secretary of the ‘so-called Aborigines' Protection Society’ to have arrived at.14
Plaatje's differences with John Harris were intensified by the publication of the report of the South African Land Commission (the Beaumont Commission) shortly after the first edition of Native Life came out. This was the commission that had been set up under the provisions of the Natives' Land Act in order to find further areas of land for African occupation. As Plaatje and other African leaders had predicted, the commission had been unable to find any substantial areas of land for this purpose, and its recommendations were soon rejected by the South African Parliament. While Harris preferred to find reason for encouragement in the report on the grounds that it offered further guarantees on the principle of segregation, Plaatje was fiercely critical, and took its findings as vindication of what he had been saying over the past three years, and exactly what he had predicted. ‘Surely, Miss Werner,’ he wrote, ‘you never expected that a commission of five interested white men could pass a fair segregation measure between themselves and the blacks.’15
Thanks to a generous subvention from Mrs Solomon, Plaatje managed to have his thirty-page analysis of the report bound in with the 500 copies that remained from the initial print run. This second edition was published in November 1916 and included an additional page, inserted at the beginning of the book, with extracts from eight reviews extolling its virtues. All but one were from British journals or newspapers, the exception being a review in the Lahore Tribune that appeared within days of Native Life's publication.16
Plaatje's analysis subjected the Beaumont Commission's report and its recommendations to detailed scrutiny, and left his readers in no doubt as to the depth of the deceit he believed had been perpetrated: ‘I must say,’ he wrote, ‘that until this Report reached me, I never would have believed my white fellow countrymen capable of conceiving the all but diabolical schemes propounded between the covers of Volume I of the Report of the South African Land Commission, 1916, and clothing them in such plausible form as to mislead even sincere and well-informed friends of the Natives.’ Fearful of the ultimate consequences for the future of South Africa if such policies were not altered, Plaatje again appealed to British public opinion to ‘stay the hand of the South African Government, veto this iniquity and avert the Nemesis that would surely follow its perpetration’.
Harris, by contrast, sought to align his society ever more closely with the policies of the South African government, and a resolution to this effect, welcoming the report of the Beaumont Commission, was passed in August 1916. It was opposed vociferously by Mrs Solomon and Mrs Cobden Unwin, but they were in a minority and unable to prevent it from being adopted. He then stepped up his efforts to blacken Plaatje's reputation, discouraging newspaper and journal editors from giving him a hearing and complaining when they did. ‘Months ago some of us were compelled to terminate relationships with him,’ Harris told the editor of the New Statesman, and assured him of ‘how unsafe a guide is this man whose activities are guided almost exclusively by sentiment’. He wrote similarly to Sir Harry Wilson, editor of the journal of the Royal Colonial Institute, expressing surprise that it should have carried so favourable a review of Native Life.17 Such actions, ‘by means of confidential letters from behind closed doors’, so Plaatje told Mrs Solomon, were typical of the way Harris operated.18
Matters came to a head at a conference the society convened in October 1916. Jane Cobden Unwin tried at the last minute to secure an invitation for Plaatje to attend so that he could present his case in person, only to be met with a point blank refusal. Undeterred, the two ladies argued as powerfully and as emotionally as ever against the direction in which their society was being taken, and personal relations with the two secretaries reached a new low. Jane Cobden Unwin accused Harris of pretending to be ‘a friend of the natives … while all the time he was secretly working against them’. In response, Harris demanded an apology and threatened to resign if he did not get it, confident that the society's committee would not countenance such a possibility. One committee member, the journalist and writer Henry Nevinson, thought the very future of the society was at stake, and sought unsuccessfully to broker a compromise. The crisis rumbled on until the two ladies, unrepentant to the last, were finally removed from the society's committee, by a single vote, in April 1917. ‘This Land Act is, as it has been all along,’ said Jane Cobden Unwin in her final appeal to the committee, ‘a tyrannous law: and a Society like ours can only bring misfortune down upon our great cause by supporting in any way so un-British a return to oppression in South Africa.’19
Impact in South Africa
Plaatje returned to South Africa in February 1917 to something of a hero's welcome from his own people, the publication of Native Life in South Africa widely regarded as a triumph in the face of great odds. Such was his reputation that he was offered the presidency of the South African Native National Congress soon after his return. He declined the offer, however, saying that ‘the deterioration of my business during my enforced absence made the idea utterly impossible’. Debts accumulated during his time in England added to his problems.
Few copies of the book had as yet found their way to South Africa but the South African prime minister, General Louis Botha, is known to have read it. He was sent a copy by Georgiana Solomon, an old family friend, and he wrote back to her to tell her what he thought of it. Compared to John Harris's, his reaction was restrained. He acknowledged that ‘an opinion held by any man and constitutionally expressed is entitled to respect, however much one personally may differ from it’, and that it would ‘certainly not in any way adversely influence my Government in its dealing with the Natives of the Union’. Indeed, he went on: ‘I welcome any criticism honestly given and the book may be of value in giving publicity to views, possibly held by a section of the Native community, which may perhaps be in conflict with those held by other sections of the Union's inhabitants; and where differences of opinion exist, full and free discussion is most desirable.’
Not surprisingly, however, he disagreed with the substance of the book. ‘Mr Plaatje,’ he said, ‘is a special pleader, and, consciously or unconsciously, in his book he has in my opinion been somewhat biased in his strictures on the Government in regard to the Natives' Land Act: he has exaggerated incidents which tell in his favour and suppressed facts that