Library Weekly

On 19 June 1932, South African intellectual, journalist, linguist, politician, translator and writer Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje died of pneumonia at Pimville, Johannesburg. Plaatje was a founder member and first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), which became the African National Congress (ANC). The Sol Plaatje Local Municipality, which includes the city of Kimberley, is named after him, as is the Sol Plaatje University in that city, which opened its doors in 2014.

Plaatje was born on 9 October 1876 in Doornfontein near Boshof, Orange Free State (now Free State Province, South Africa). When Solomon was four, the family moved to Pniel near Kimberley in the Cape Colony to work for a German missionary, Ernst Westphal, and his wife Wilhelmine. There he received a mission-education. When he outpaced fellow learners he was given additional private tuition by Mrs. Westpha. In February 1892, aged 15, he became a pupil-teacher, a post he held for two years.

After leaving school, he moved to Kimberley in 1894 where he became a telegraph messenger for the Post Office. He subsequently passed the clerical examination with higher marks than any other candidate in Dutch and typing. At that time, the Cape Colony had qualified franchise for all men 21 or over, the qualification being that they be able to read and write English or Dutch and earn over 50 pounds a year. Thus, when he turned 21 in 1897, he was able to vote, a right he would later lose when British rule ended. Shortly thereafter, he became a court interpreter for the British authorities during the Siege of Mafeking and kept a diary of his experiences which were published posthumously.

After the war, he was optimistic that the British would continue to grant qualified franchise to all males, but they gave political rights to whites only in the 1910 Union of South Africa. Plaatje criticised the British in an unpublished 1909 manuscript entitled "Sekgoma – the Black Dreyfus."

As an activist and politician, he spent much of his life in the struggle for the enfranchisement and liberation of African people. He was a founder member and first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), which would become the African National Congress (ANC) ten years later.

Fluent in at least seven languages, Plaatje translated works of William Shakespeare into Tswana. His talent for language would lead to a career in journalism and writing. He was editor and part-owner of Kuranta ya Becoana (Bechuana Gazette) in Mahikeng, and in Kimberley Tsala ya Becoana (Bechuana Friend) and Tsala ya Batho (The Friend of the People).

Plaatje was the first black South African to write a novel in English – Mhudi. He wrote the novel in 1919, but it was only published in 1930 (in 1928 the Zulu writer R. R. R. Dhlomo published an English-language novel, entitled An African Tragedy, at the missionary Lovedale Press, in Alice; this makes Dhlomo's novel the first published black South African novel in English, even though Plaatje's Mhudi had been written first).

(Source: Wikipedia, edited)

Selected publications

by Sol Plaatje

Mhudi / Sol T. Plaatje. - Cape Town : Strandwolf Editions, [2019]

The Mafeking diary of Sol T. Plaatje / Sol T. Plaatje. - Oxford : James Currey ; Cape Town : David Philip, 1999

Sol Plaatje : selected writings / Sol T. Plaatje. - Johannesburg : Witwatersrand University Press ; Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 1997

Native life in South Africa : before and since the European war and the Boer rebellion / Sol T. Plaatje. - Johannesburg : Ravan press, 1982

The Boer War diary of Sol. T. Plaatje : an African at Mafeking / Sol T. Plaatje. - London [etc.] : Macmillan, 1973

about Sol Plaatje

Sol Plaatje's Native life in South Africa : past and present / edited by Janet Remmington. - Johannesburg : Wits University Press, [2016]

Lover of his people : a biography of Sol Plaatje / Modiri Molema, Modiri; D.S. Matjila; Karen Haire.- Johannesburg : Wits University Press, 2012

Sol Plaatje : South African Nationalist, 1876-1932 / Brian P. Willan. - London [etc.] : Heinemann, 1984

Sol Plaatje Lecture by Brian Willan / UCT Summer School

Timeline of South African journalists via Wikidata and DBpedia