Reading Sol Plaatje’s native life in South Africa in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

While Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (hereafter Native Life) has long been criticised because it crosses genres and defies classification, this very defect, as some see it, allows at last for a trans-disciplinary book that opens many windows into his scathing attack on the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, a law that uprooted and impoverished countless Free State black farming families, forcing them, directly or indirectly, into servitude in the employ of whites. While Native Life, a work of ‘investigative journalism’ (p. 38), was unsuccessful in its appeal to the conscience of the imperial government and the British public in the period 1914-16, it retrospectively carved out a place for ‘black protest’ and pioneered a ‘new historiography’ (p. 48), centring Africans in their own history and politics.