Many of the sociopolitical and economic conditions that hindered Plaatje's creative and intellectual life continue to lie behind the conflicts that affect the tertiary education sector today, and the calls for its transformation. Important institutional challenges include racial imbalances in the composition of academic staff, and curricula with content overwhelmingly skewed towards canonical texts drawn from Europe and North America. Exclusionary practices and inhospitable surroundings have typified many campuses, where the institutional culture has led to the alienation, conflict and subsequent departure of black academics and professionals.38 Improvement of the lived experiences of black staff and students is a key part of the changes that are being called for. There is also what may be termed the monolingual nature of teaching and knowledge production. The dominance of English across disciplines and the inability or limited abilities to speak or write in African languages by scholars across the racial divides means that the experiences, views and insights of the majority of citizens have not been meaningfully engaged with and brought into the orbit of education and pedagogy.
Past, present and future
‘If Plaatje were alive in current day South Africa, what would he do?’ This was the question posed by Athambile Masola in the Mail & Guardian against a backdrop of the country's varied, deeply felt, sometimes problematic centennial reflections on the Land Act in 2013.39 In writing of the intense vulnerabilities of those living in informal settlements and of ‘the poverty continuing unashamedly today’, she makes connections between her reading of Native Life and the contemporary situation to interrogate the relentless persistence of the past in the present, and to insist upon a new reality from current government.40
While there is an understandable focus on apartheid's bitter inheritance, South Africa's socioeconomic legacies have deeper roots too of course, as has been highlighted in energised student activism in 2015 and beyond. Looking to South Africa's colonial past, as well as to the phenomenon of apartheid, the #RhodesMustFall decolonisation initiative and its ripple effects across South African institutions – and to others abroad such as #RhodesMustFallOxford – have heightened the public discourse about the normalisations and continuities of history's inequities and the erasures of violence. Solidarities have been expressed with protest movements such as #BlackLivesMatter in the United States in confronting racism's sometimes ‘whitewashed’ historical underpinnings that inform contemporary manifestations.
To some extent, Plaatje has been invoked in revisiting South Africa's colonial past and African resistance. For example, Duncan Buwalda's play Hinterland imagines a Kimberley setting at the turn of the twentieth century that brings Rhodes and Plaatje into the same discursive space, creating ‘a situation where art and life segue and become a cipher for reflection’.41 In a milieu of historical interrogation, a re-revaluation and commemoration of Plaatje's Native Life seems particularly fitting. While some attention has been given to ‘recover[ing] the roots of debate and engagement’ through research and heritage endeavours, many pre-apartheid black leaders from South Africa and other parts of Africa are less well covered and less well known than figures of the mid-to-late twentieth century, in spite of the ANC's centenary celebrations in 2012.42 Hlonipha Mokoena argues that encountering the ‘blank spaces' of South Africa's past and filling in the gaps of black history is the undertaking of new generations.43 In this light, contemporary South Africans negotiate their subjectivities to some degree in relation to the claims and impacts of pioneering figures such as Plaatje whose words live on. In the struggle for equal rights and opportunities for the black majority, Native Life makes no insignificant contribution. It was a book of its time, but arguably is also for all time, in attempting to understand South Africa's past, weigh up its present and imagine its future.
NOTES
1 Kader Asmal, ‘Foreword: A Second Look at Native Life’ in Sol T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2007), xi.
2 Plaatje, Native Life, xi.
3 Nick Shepherd and Steven Robins, ‘Introduction’ in Shepherd and Robins, eds, New South African Keywords (Johannesburg: Jacana/Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 11. See also Moeletsi Mbeki and Nobantu Mbeki, A Manifesto for Social Change: How to Save South Africa (Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan, 2016).
4 Jason Robinson, Jonny Steinberg and David Simon, ‘South Africa in Transition: Introduction’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42/1 (2016), 1, citing Jo Beall, Stephen Gelb and Shireen Hassim, ‘Fragile Stability: State and Society in Democratic South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 31/4 (2005), 685. See also Sarah Jane Cooper-Knock, ‘Continuity, Change and Crisis: Mapping South Africa's Political Terrain’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42/1 (2016), 149–61.
5 Richard Pithouse, ‘Introduction’, Writing the Decline: On the Struggle for South Africa's Democracy (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2016).
6 Founded in 1932, the year of Plaatje's death, The Bantu World became the leading black newspaper of the 1930s, filling the gap left by the ANC's Abantu Batho (The People's Paper). See Les Switzer, ‘Bantu World and the Origins of a Captive African Commercial Press in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 14/3 (1988), 351–370; Bhekizizwe Peterson, ‘The Bantu World and the World of the Book: Reading, Writing, and Enlightenment’ in Karin Barber, ed., Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making of the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 236–257.
7 Violet Plaatje's poem was published in two landmark, late apartheid anthologies: Mothobi Mutloatse, ed., Black Reconstruction: 90 Years of Black Historical Literature (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981) and Tim Couzens and Essop Patel, eds, The Return of the Amasi Bird: Black South African Poetry 1891–1981 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982). James Molebaloa worked closely with Plaatje and others in attempting to protect Barolong land rights; Khumisho Moguerane, ‘Black Landlords, their Tenants, and the Natives' Land Act of 1913’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42/2 (2016), 257.
8 Originally published as John L Comaroff, ed., The Boer War Diary of Sol T Plaatje: An African at Mafeking (London: Macmillan, 1973); the latest edition is John Comaroff and Brian Willan, eds, The Mafeking Diary of Sol T Plaatje: Centenary Edition (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999).
9 For more on this, and a record of the interview with Lloyd George, see Brian Willan, ed., Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1996), 131 and 257–264.
10 S T Plaatje, Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, 1916).
11 S T Plaatje [transl.], Diphosho-phosho (The Comedy of Errors) (Morija: Morija Printing Works, 1930). A second Shakespeare translation was translated posthumously: Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara (Julius Caesar) (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1937).
12 S T Plaatje, Mhudi: An Epic of Native Life a Hundred Years Ago (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1930). A number of editions have been published since then. For a review of the circumstances surrounding its publication, see Brian Willan, ‘What “Other Devils”?