General Botha expressed his views on Native Life in a letter to Mrs Solomon in August 1916. It was not until the following year, however, when copies of the book began to circulate in South Africa, that it had a wider impact. There were several reviews and they recognised, like those in England, that Plaatje had presented a very strong case. The Johannesburg Star, for example, thought the book was ‘of unusual importance’, warning that ‘the scandalous way in which natives were treated under the Land Act’, could well lead to wider disaffection and the danger that ‘the natives might eventually combine against us’.
What really generated interest in Native Life, however, were the references to it during debates in the South African House of Assembly. ‘Last month,’ Plaatje wrote in June 1917, ‘a Boer member – Colonel Mentz, Minister of Lands' – referred to it as “a scurrilous attack on the Boers”.’ ‘A chorus of English members,’ he added, ‘promptly defended it so vehemently that even in subsequent days when the book was quoted by English members during the debates not one had the nerve to attack it again.’ It was noticeable, too, thought The Star, that none of those who criticised the book ‘ever denied the accuracy of its statements or questioned the authenticity of the details’.
Reports of these exchanges in Parliament brought forth orders from all over South Africa. Unfortunately, for a while no stock was available and Plaatje had a frustrating wait for copies of the third edition of the book, printed in England in February 1917. This differed from the second edition in having his analysis of the report of the Beaumont Commission at the back rather than the front of the book, and in including a map to show the distribution of African and European landholding in South Africa.
The consignment eventually arrived in South Africa in July and soon sold out. Having heard from his friend William Cross that copies were on their way, Plaatje telephoned the Johannesburg branch of CNA (the leading chain of booksellers and stationers) to see if they had arrived so that he could obtain some copies for himself, only to discover that their consignment of 100 copies were all sold within two days. Consequently, no provincial branches of CNA received any copies at all (but presumably some further copies did at some point reach them).
Native Life in North America
After Britain and South Africa, Native Life made its biggest impact in the United States of America. Like many of his contemporaries Plaatje had long been fascinated with the situation of African Americans, and its relevance to the lives of his own people, and he had planned a visit to the US in 1914. The outbreak of war put an end to this but he did make contact with W E B Du Bois, the African American leader and editor of The Crisis, organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Crisis sold and distributed books relating to Africa as well as African Americans and so Plaatje had a shipment sent over. Native Life's publication was announced in The Crisis in August 1916, which described it as ‘a detailed explanation of the disabilities suffered by natives under the Union of South Africa’ and ‘a most stirring narration’. In December it first appeared in the regular list of books for sale via The Crisis, priced at $1.50 a copy.
It was not until Plaatje himself was able to travel to the United States five years later, however, that Native Life began to make the kind of impact he had hoped for. This visit followed a second SANNC deputation to Great Britain in 1919. He planned a follow-up volume to Native Life, and worked on this in 1919 and 1920, but it never materialised. He moved on to the US in January 1921, spending three months in Canada immediately prior to this.21
By this time Native Life was into its fourth edition, 600 copies having accompanied Plaatje on his voyage across the Atlantic. Remarkably, he managed to sell, so he reported, 400 copies of the book in Canada alone, ‘around two-thirds of them,’ he noted, being ‘sold to Coloured People’, and its price now increased to $2.22 He continued to sell substantial numbers during his first few months in the United States, and it is clear that it made an impression on several prominent African American figures. John E Bruce, for example, a journalist and long-standing correspondent of Plaatje's, thought that if Native Life ‘doesn't make your blood boil you are not of African descent’. John W Cromwell, even more fulsome, wrote that the book and its author ‘have impressed me to no little degree’. ‘It is a very sad story indeed which is told in this wonderful book by this very talented man, who comes here at a most auspicious moment to let the American people know of the conditions under which the Natives are now laboring in South Africa.’23
For a while, sales of Native Life continued to go well. Plaatje himself spoke at meetings of the NAACP, at Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and at a variety of church gatherings, which provided the opportunity to make sales, the proceeds being used to support himself and his family back home in South Africa. His publications were also stocked by Young's Book Exchange, ‘The Mecca of Literature pertaining to Colored People’, as it called itself, the first African American bookshop in Harlem, New York. A fifth and final edition of Native Life was printed in 1921 but, as time went on, sales were harder to come by. Ill health restricted the number of meetings Plaatje was able to address, economic conditions in the USA deteriorated and inevitably the novelty of his message began to wear off. Whereas in 1921, he wrote, he could get forty or fifty dollars from sales, by the time he left the USA in July 1922 he could ‘hardly get eight or ten, and when I previously sold books like ice cream in August I could now scarcely sell a pamphlet’.24
Later editions of Native Life
Plaatje returned to South Africa in 1923, never to return to Europe or North America. The Natives' Land Act remained on the statute book and Plaatje moved on, still virulent in his criticism of it but forced to accept that there was no longer any prospect of external intervention in the affairs of his country. Native Life in South Africa, once central to his campaigning, largely disappeared from view. For T D Mweli Skota, writing about Plaatje in his African Yearly Register (1930), Native Life was ‘a famous book’, but there is little evidence that it was much read.25 Occasionally it would be referenced in scholarly surveys but it mostly remained in the shadows, the forgotten record of a forgotten protest.
Only with the advancing political struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, and in response to a growing interest in black South African history and literature, did the book re-emerge. In 1982, Ravan Press, a radical Johannesburg-based publisher, published a new edition with a preface by Bessie Head and an introduction by Brian Willan, re-issuing it a decade later. The British publisher Longman published an abbreviated edition of the book for its African Classics Series, recognising its place alongside works from other parts of the African continent. Two decades later, in 2007, there was another South African edition, this time from Picador Africa, an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa, with a Foreword by Kader Asmal, formerly a minister of education in the ANC government. Native Life, he wrote, ‘resonates with ideas which have relevance to our political and cultural life and which should inspire us’. Native Life had moved from the margins of protest to the mainstream.
Conclusion
The writing and dissemination of Native Life in South Africa was above all an extraordinary individual achievement. Although the book had its origins in the South African Native National Congress's campaign against the Natives' Land Act, Plaatje alone was its author and it would probably not have seen the light of day had he heeded its instructions to return home on the outbreak of war in August 1914. Only in the imperial capital was it possible to draw together the threads that made its publication possible. Displaying ingenuity and determination, Plaatje gathered around him a group of friends and supporters to support his campaign and to help raise the money needed – and to overcome the opposition of the one organisation he might have expected to