Native Life in South Africa | Page 4

as a surname) joined the Post Office as a mail-carrier in Kimberley, the
diamond city in the north of Cape Colony. He subsequently passed the
highest clerical examination in the colony, beating every white
candidate in both Dutch and typing.
From Kimberley the young Plaatje went on to Mafeking, where he was
one of the key players in the great siege of 1899-1900. As magistrate's
interpreter he was the vital link between the British civil authorities and
the African majority beleaguered inside the town's military perimeter.
Plaatje's diaries from this period, published long after his death, are a
remarkable record both of the siege and of his early prose
experimentation -- mixing languages and idioms, and full of bright
humour.
After the war Plaatje became a journalist, editor first of one Tswana
language newspaper at Mafeking and then of another at Kimberley.
Like other educated Africans he came out of the war optimistic that the
British would enfranchise all educated and propertied males in the
defeated Boer colonies (Transvaal and Orange Free State) without
regard to race. But in this he, and the others, were soon sorely
disappointed. The British gave a whites-only franchise to the defeated

Boers and thus conceded power to a Boer or white Afrikaner
parliamentary majority in the 1910 Union of South Africa which
brought together the two Boer colonies with Cape Colony and Natal.
Clinging to the old but diminished "colour blind" franchise of the Cape,
Plaatje remained one of the few Africans in South Africa with a
parliamentary vote.
Plaatje's aggravation with the British government can be seen in an
unpublished manuscript of 1908-09 titled "Sekgoma -- the Black
Dreyfus". In this booklet he castigated the British for denying legal
rights (specifically habeas corpus) to their African subjects outside the
Cape Colony.
Plaatje became politically active in the "native congress" movement
which represented the interests of educated and propertied Africans all
over South Africa. He was the first secretary-general of the "South
African Native National Congress", founded in 1912 (which renamed
itself as the African National Congress or ANC ten years later).
The first piece of major legislation presented to the whites-only
parliament of South Africa was the Natives' Land Act, eventually
passed in 1913, which was designed to entrench white power and
property rights in the countryside -- as well as to solve the "native
problem" of African peasant farmers working for themselves and
denying their labour power to white employers.
The main battle ground for the implementation of the new legislation
was the Orange Free State. White farmers took the cue from the Land
Act to begin expelling black peasants from their land as "squatters",
while the police began to rigorously enforce the pass-laws which
registered the employment of Africans and prescribed their residence
and movement rights.
The Free State became the cockpit of resistance by the newly formed
SANNC. Its womens' league demonstrated against pass law
enforcement in Free State towns. Its national executive sent a
delegation to England, icluding Plaatje, who set sail in mid-1914. The
British crown retained ultimate rights of sovereignty over the
parliament and government of South Africa, with an as yet unexercised
power of veto over South African legislation in the area of "native
affairs".
The delegation received short shrift from the government in London

which was, after all, more than preoccupied with the coming of the
Great War -- in which it feared for the loyalty of the recently defeated
Afrikaners and wished in no way to offend them. But, rather than return
empty-handed like the rest of the SANNC delegation, Plaatje decided
to stay in England to carry on the fight. He was determined to recuit,
through writing and lecturing, the liberal and humanitarian
establishment to his side -- so that it in turn might pressure the British
government.
Thus it was that Plaatje resumed work on a manuscript he had begun on
the ship to England. "Native Life in South Africa". The book was
published in 1916 by P. S. King in London. It was dedicated to
Harriette Colenso, doughty woman camnpaigner who had inherited
from her father, Bishop Colenso, the mantle of advocate to the British
establishment of the rights of the Zulu nation in South Africa.
While in England Plaatje pursued his interests in language and
linguistics by collaborating with Professor Daniel Jones of the
University of London -- inventor of the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) and prototype for Professor Higgins in Shaw's "Pygmalion" and
thus the musical "My Fair Lady". In the same year as Native Life was
published, 1916, Plaatje published two other shorter books which
brought together the European languages (English, Dutch and German)
he loved with the Tswana language. "Sechuana Proverbs" was a listing
of Tswana proverbs with their European equivalents. "A Sechuana
Reader" was co-authored with Jones, using