Re-visiting Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary
Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876-1932) is one of South Africa’s best known political and literary figures. His accomplishments include editing a series of Setswana/English newspapers, being one of the co-founders of the South African Native National Congress (forerunner of today’s African National Congress), campaigning against the Natives Land Act of 1913, and translating Shakespeare into Setswana. Caught up in the siege of Mafeking during the South African War of 1899-1902 he also kept a diary, which he wrote in English. It came to light only in the 1960s and was published for the first time in 1973.Well known to historians, it is often cited to demonstrate that the South African War was not the white man’s war that had been previously portrayed, and has been viewed primarily as a source of evidence for what happened, and a rare surviving example of a black voice.
However, Plaatje’s Diary has been curiously neglected by literary scholars – unlike, for example, his novel Mhudi (1930) and his earlier. book, Native Life in South Africa (1916). I explore the reasons for this, suggesting that this may have been influenced by the uncertainties posed by the genre (fiction or non-fiction?); by the challenges many of the sentiments he expressed have posed to a nationalist narrative; by the privileging of the political in much postcolonial literary criticism, along with a disconnect with the specifics of history and context that are vital to the understanding of any diary.
I argue for drawing upon both historical and literary approaches. I look at the social and intellectual influences that helped form Plaatje’s world view as reflected in the diary; the circumstances in which he wrote it; his reasons for writing it; who he envisaged would read it; how its nature and form were affected by the events that went on around him; the choices he made about what to include and what to omit; the literary models upon which he drew; the linguistic choices he made; the opportunities the diary provided to develop not only his literary skills but a wider sense of self.
Plaatje’s diary should be seen not just as a stepping stone to his later journalistic and literary achievements, as an opportunity to practise his skills as a writer, but as a literary artefact in his own right, product of its own time and place – and tribute to that optimistic, self-improving world so characteristic of mission-educated Africans in the late nineteenth century Cape Colony.