Sol T. Plaatje: Native Life in South Africa

In this entry the established pattern of examining works of fiction is slightly sidestepped; moreover, the work discussed is a South African text, Solomon Tsekido Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (first published in 1916). This book is rightly described by the Plaatje scholar Brian Willan as “one of South Africa’s great political books”. Many issues of the text are available; this 1996 reprinting of the Ravan Press edition is neat and well bound.

Native Life in South Africa leaves an indelible impression on the mind. Its title is simultaneously somewhat misleading and utterly appropriate. It is mainly Plaatje’s record and contextualisation of the passing of the 1913 Natives Land Act, that crucial piece of legislation that made it illegal for black South Africans to own or occupy land (except as employees) in South Africa outside of the confines of the “reserves” (consisting of about 10% of the country’s land surface) that had been “set aside” for them. It is a text written to serve a polemical purpose, to help persuade international (particularly British and American) public opinion that an injustice of immense proportions was being perpetrated here. Thus many sections of the book are severely, even drily, factual. Yet it is a text in which the author’s sense of urgency, outrage and concern for his victimised people surges like a great flood of passion within the precise and eloquent tones of his Victorian, sometimes florid-seeming English. In the touching “Prologue” to this text Plaatje mentions his own lack of all but a rudimentary education and calls the book “but a sincere narrative of a melancholy situation”, referring to the Land Act as “a very strange law”. He also mentions how difficult he found it “to wield a temperate pen” — evidently because of the deep indignation aroused in him by the expulsion of black people from farms all over the country.

The opening words of the first chapter have become famous:

Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth (21).

The very debate in Parliament that preceded the adoption of the Act is documented, and recorded here are some eloquent white voices protesting against the perceived injustices of the proposed law (with well-known liberal voices like Merriman’s and Schreiner’s making themselves heard). We are given the exact wording of the Act, from which I cite a small sample:

… a person other than a native shall not enter into any agreement or transaction for the purchase, hire, or other acquisition from a native of any such land or of any right thereto, interest therein, or servitude thereover (quoted on p.62).

How meticulous, and how pernicious, does the legal English here sound to the contemporary reader! Throughout the text the ironies of the word “native” reverberate in one’s ear: the word, which then referred primarily to a black South African, implicitly acknowledges that this land is such a person’s country of birth.

Plaatje makes us see the Act as having an almost conspiratorial dimension: it makes black tenant farming illegal; tenants and their families may stay on the white-owned farms only on condition of accepting employment as servants or farm workers and of surrendering the livestock they own to the white farmers! This had been preceded by a period during which “Government [i.e. civil] servants of colour ... were swept out of the railway and postal service with a strong racial broom, in order to make room for poor whites, mainly of Dutch descent” (29). “Well, we knew,” writes Plaatje, “that this law was as harsh as its instigators were callous, and ... that it would ... render many poor people homeless, but it must be confessed that we were scarcely prepared for such a rapid and widespread crash as it caused in the lives of the natives in the [Vaal River] neighbourhood” (81).

Responding inadvertently to the sight of the sufferings of evicted families, Plaatje mentions that “a needlelike pang ... pierced our heart”, akin to the grief he had felt at his father’s death. He seems to be suggesting, perhaps unconsciously, that the idea of South Africa as a fatherland for its black occupants died at this time. An indelible image is that of a now wandering, landless black family who is forced to bury a baby who dies, “illegally” along the roadside, under cover of darkness, and who must leave the spot the next day. Plaatje contrasts the persecution of black South Africans “at this very time” with the welcome extended to “Polish, Finnish, Russian and German Jews” (123).

Reading such details, it is hard to overlook a sense of old injustices setting bitter precedents (if that is one’s perspective), or — from another point of view — to avoid acknowledging that social engineering as harsh and extensive as this Act is very mildly, if not indeed meagrely, overturned by present-day legal measures.

The power of this text arises (as most readers would concede) from its author’s ability to engage so intensely with his subject at all levels — from Parliament to the roadside, from the philosophically principled to the anecdotal, from the broadly contextualising historical sweep to the telling individual detail. It is distinctly in his encounters with people and his vivid portraiture of those engaged in this process — whether a white policeman on horseback or black Free State women imprisoned shoeless (in the harsh winter) for their protest against carrying passes — that the writer gets the text to glow with life.

Searching fruitlessly for some institution in the social landscape of the time which could effectively oppose the injustices overwhelming his people, Plaatje decides:

The predikants of the Dutch Reformed Church, who largely influence the leadership of the South African Dutch [i.e. Afrikaners], ought to know that the English colonist can be just as devilish as the Boers on questions of colour; and that some of them, with their superior means and education have almost out-Boered the Boer in this matter; but that even they have been held in check by the restraint imposed upon them by the English churches in the country. Thus, knowing the Dutchman’s obedience to the commands of his pastor, we are afraid that if ever there come a day of reckoning for the multifarious accumulation of wrongs done to the natives, the Dutch Reformed Church, owing to its silent consent to all these wrongs, will have a lot to answer for (151).

To balance this kind of charge against some South African whites of his time one could turn to Plaatje’s description of manoeuvres in certain British quarters:

... the London Committee of the Wesleyan Methodist Church asked to see Mr Harcourt and inform him how drastically the ‘Kaffir law’ was operating against their converts and other natives in South Africa, but Mr Harcourt discreetly refused to see the Committee (235).

Plaatje’s text covers a huge range of lifestyles and cultures, viewpoints and experiences in this country at the time. It is something like a map — political and moral as much as geographical — of South Africa around 1913, and one of the most vivid documentary works known to this reader. Subjective it may be, or even must be, and it is so in a moving and honourable way. As a historian Plaatje balances the good, the bad and the ugly of this terrible time in a presentation that even today could educate any South African about many aspects of our country. In addition to Plaatje’s text the Ravan edition contains a scholarly and judicious introduction by Brian Willan, as well as an eloquent and sensitive foreword written by Bessie Head in 1982.

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