Sol Plaatje writes of an era in South African history almost unknown to succeeding generations. The wars for the land – spear and shield against cannon and gun – are over and he unfolds the history of a mute and subdued black nation who had learned to call the white man ‘baas’. The population at that time is about 1¼ million whites to about 5 million blacks. The black population is domiciled and occupied in various ways – in locations and reserves, in urban areas, in public service building roads and railways, or working on farms. But in vast tracts of the rural areas of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, a kind of zamindari system is in operation. About one million black people are squatters on ‘European’ farms. Having no land of their own, they hire a farm, or grazing and ploughing rights, from the white landowner. It is this population of one million squatters on European farms who are immediately hard hit by the Natives' Land Act.
Prior to the introduction of the Natives' Land Act of 20 June 1913, the Pass Law was introduced for the first time on 28 February 1913. Its aims were to prohibit black people from wandering about without a proper pass, from squatting on farms, from sowing on the share crop system. It facilitated the introduction of the Natives' Land Act. There were two reasons for the introduction of the Natives' Land Act: black farming was proving to be too competitively successful as against white farming and there was a demand for a flow of cheap labour to the gold mines. As long as black men were engaged in farming and were independent owners of livestock, their labour was hard to acquire. An attempt had been made in 1904 to solve the labour crisis in the gold mines by the importing of Chinese labour to do unskilled work in the mines; an initial 43 000 such labourers were imported. At first gold output leapt upwards but conditions on the mines and in the compounds – low wages and flogging with many men driven to practise sodomy in their desperate need for sexual release – led to strikes, robbery and murder. All Chinese labour was deported back to China in 1910.
Thus, some parts of the Natives' Land Act were shaped by the desperate need for labour on the mines. The Act summarily demanded the eviction of one million black tenants on the farms, together with their livestock and all they might own. It was unlawful to have black tenants, but lawful to have black servants. Once a servant, the black man's cattle worked henceforth for the white landlord, free of charge. Any white landowner who failed to comply with the law faced a fine of £100 or six months' imprisonment. Rather than lose their last shred of independence, thousands of black people, tenants on the land, took to the road with their dying stock. On no part of South African soil could they graze or water their animals. Sol Plaatje was at that time editor of a newspaper, Tsala ea Batho (The People's Friend) at Kimberley and he took to the road too, compiling first-hand information on the plight of these wandering refugees. These sections, which he calls ‘that black July’ and a deliberate act of genocide, form the most moving chapters of the book.
But Native Life is wide and deep in its historical reach. A full portrait of the times emerges and we are presented with a view of history reaching back nearly five hundred years and up to a period of change and transition as it has affected the lives of black people. Plaatje acknowledges that black people have no power so his main aim is to present the black personality as deserving justice, humanity and dignity. He appeals to a higher power, in this instance Britain, and is passionately pro-British in all his arguments:
The Britishers' vocabulary includes that sacred word Home – and that, perhaps, is the reason why their colonising [‘colonizing’ in original] schemes have always allowed some tracts of country for native family life, with reasonable opportunities for their future existence and progress, in the vast South African expanses … In 1910, much against our will, the British Government surrendered its immediate sovereignty over our land to colonials and cosmopolitan aliens who know little about Home, because their dictionaries contain no such loving term …
He contrasts this eloquent plea to a more humane power with an outline of another power of stunted spiritual and intellectual growth which he fears will dominate the land – the Afrikaner Boer.
… The northward march of the Voortrekkers was a gigantic plundering raid. They swept like a desolating pestilence through the land, blasting everything in their path and pitilessly laughing at ravages from which the native races have not yet recovered …
The state of Union and indeed the passing of the Natives' Land Act represented the triumph of this gross, brute spirit. How deep this triumph has been, history itself has borne out, for South Africa is a land where history proceeds up to the present day in events of unrelieved horror, untouched by human tenderness, charm and unpredictability.
An insistent theme of the book is that black people have no representation in Parliament. They do not have the right to vote – that right is limited to white men only; therefore black people cannot accept the legislation of a parliament that bears no responsibility towards black men.
The South African Native National Congress appointed a deputation of five men, of whom Plaatje was one of those nominated, to appeal to Britain for a repeal of the Natives' Land Act. Predictably, the appeal failed. South Africa was self-governing and independent and Britain a remote power, cool and indifferent, where satisfaction at the outcome of fateful planning that had been conducted for months on end was hinted at in undertones.
Native Life does not fail as a book of flaming power and energy, astonishingly crowded with data of the day-to-day life of a busy man who assumed great sorrows and great responsibilities, who felt himself fully representative of a silent, oppressed people and by sheer grandeur of personality, honoured that obligation. Most black South Africans suffer from a very broken sense of history. Native Life provides an essential missing link. This book may have failed to appeal to human justice in its time, but there is in its tears, anguish and humility, an appeal to a day of retribution.
POETIC TRIBUTES
What is in a name? In memory of Sol T Plaatje
Violet N Plaatje
(from The Bantu World, 24 June 1933)
A question asked so frequently,
Yet seldom it receives reply.
Read carefully the lines below!
They're sure to satisfy.
A year has passed since we interred
Remains of one we least could spare.
Defender, Fighter, Champion,
Sleep, you have done your share!
The shock was felt by multitudes!
The blow severe turned hearts to ice!
For the demise of noble Sol,
Was a great sacrifice.
One who for others strived to live;
His people's rights his foremost thought;
Discouraged often in his toils,
Great battles though he fought.
A lot has he achieved. But Ah!
A lot has he left incomplete.
It is for those he left behind,
To further and complete.
His pen he wielded forcibly.
His weapon always was the Press.
Speaking from public platforms too,
The people to address.
And though his earnings were but scant,
Strife won for him fame and reward.
For here was one devoid of wealth,
But buried like a Lord.
Author, Translator, Orator,
In you we've lost a precious prize!
Your death, occurred a year ago,
Today