Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings (review)

Sol Plaatje was a busy man. Fortunately, he was never too busy to stop writing. Variously employed, during the first three decades of this century, as a clerk and court interpreter in Mafeking, the editor of two Tswana newspapers, a contributing journalist to a variety of other South African journals, the General Secretary and traveling spokesperson of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress), and even operator of a bioscope, Plaatje nevertheless found time not only to write his now famous diary of the siege of Mafeking, a pioneering sociological account of South African life (Native Life in South Africa), scores of editorials, and Mhudi, the first English novel written by a black South African, but to publish an anthology of Setswana proverbs and a Setswana reader, to compile (though not to publish) a Setswana dictionary and a collection of folk tales, and to translate four of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana (The Comedy of Errors, Julius Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Merchant of Venice). While the Mafeking diary, Native Life in South Africa, and Mhudi have been available to readers for some time, Plaatje’s many other writings have been as scattered as Plaatje’s interests were varied. Brian Willan’s selection of Plaatje’s prose—which contains the bulk of his journalistic pieces, a large sampling of his correspondence, the prefaces and introductions to his Setswana anthology and reader, a meditation on Shakespeare, and a previously unpublished manuscript analyzing the role of the colonial court interpreter and the British Government’s unlawful incarceration of Sekgoma Letsholathebe, the chief of the Batawana in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, together with excerpts from the Mafeking Diary and Native Life—is thus a welcome and a rich volume.

The volume is organized chronologically and contains a minimum of editorial commentary, though Willan has preceded each of the text’s three sections (which correspond, roughly, to Plaatje’s early career as a court interpreter and editor, his subsequent travels to Britain and the United States as a spokesperson for the SANNC, and his work, in the final decade of his life, on the Setswana language) with brief and lucid biographical sketches. Read from beginning to end, the volume thus permits the reader both to follow Plaatje’s responses to the many topical issues of South African social, political, and cultural life in the first thirty years of this century (Plaatje’s testimony before the 1904 South African Native Affairs Commission in which he manages to combine a deft defense of cultural particularity with an understated critique of segregationist law is one of the text’s more compelling entries), and to trace his sustained development of a coherent philosophy of culture.

It is that philosophy of culture which lends these writings a markedly timely quality. For across the course of his varied career, and across the genres of his writing, Plaatje can be seen to be struggling with an issue that remains central to contemporary debates on the colonial and postcolonial conditions. In a recent essay in Critical Inquiry, Anthony Appiah has asked whether it is possible to conceive of oneself both as a cosmopolitan subject and as a cultural patriot, whether, that is, one can be devoted both to forms of belief, habits of language, and knowledges of value which are in some fashion native, or ethnic, or culturally particular, and to express loyalty to a departicularized system of beliefs, languages, and values, whether, in brief, one can be a citizen both of the local and the global (see Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23 [1997]: 617–39). Appiah’s answer is yes, that of course this is possible—an answer that has raised some ire among those who understand the promise of our moment, whether understood as a postcolonial or a postmodern moment, to reside in the liberation and the defense of cultural difference. Appiah can give that answer, he can argue that cosmopolitan commitments are not inimical to particularist loyalties, because he...