Lover of His People: A biography of Sol Plaatje

By Seetsele Modiri Molema

Seetsele Modiri Molema’s Sol T. Plaatje: Morata Wabo is the first biography of Solomon Plaatje written in his mother-tongue, Setswana, and the only book-length biography written by someone who actually knew him. The manuscript had long been housed in the Wits Historical Papers and was accessible only to scholars. D.S. Matjila and Karen Haire have mined the archive to produce the first English translation of Molema’s biography, Lover of His People. Molema balances Plaatje’s public and political persona – as a pioneer black politician and man of letters – with an intimate account of Plaatje, the human being: his physical features, habits, temperament, talents, personality, character, fears, struggles, dreams and aspirations. He illuminates the spirit of Plaatje, painting a personal portrait. Recognising that the biographer was an extraordinary scholar, intellectual and politician in his own right, the book includes an essay on the life and legacy of Seetsele Modiri Molema and his contribution to South Africa’s black intellectual heritage. The editors highlight some of the ways in which the book might be relevant to contemporary South African readers and, in inspiring them about a local historical figure, prompt critical thinking about pertinent issues such as gender, the future of African languages and the re-writing of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781868148226

Seetsele Modiri Molema

Seetsele Modiri Molema (1891-1965) was a surgeon by profession, studying at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He lived in Dublin from 1919, where he wrote and published the landmark history, Bantu Past and Present: An Ethnographic and History Study of the Native Races of South Africa (1920). He returned to Mafikeng later where he practised medicine.

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LOVER OF HIS PEOPLE

A biography of Sol Plaatje

SEETSELE MODIRI MOLEMA

LOVER OF HIS PEOPLE

A biography of Sol Plaatje

SEETSELE MODIRI MOLEMA

Translated and edited by DS Matjila and Karen Haire

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg

www.witspress.co.za

Copyright © in the original ‘Sol T Plaatje: Morata Wabo’: heirs of Seetsele Modiri Molema

Copyright © in the preface and the translation: the translators and editors 2012

Copyright © in the published edition: Wits University Press 2012

Permission for Seetsele Modiri Molema’s Sol T Plaatje: Morata Wabo, published in Setswana in 1965, to be translated and published in English was granted by the Molema family to the Sol Plaatje Educational Trust.

First published 2012

ISBN (print) 978-1-86814-601-7

ISBN (EPUB - IPG) 978-1-86814-822-6

ISBN (EPUB - ROW) 978-1-86814-823-3

ISBN (PDF) 978-1-86814-602-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

Project managed by Monica Seeber

Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa

Printed and bound by Creda Communications

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE by DS Matjila and Karen Haire

FOREWORD by Seetsele Modiri Molema: A star

Chapter One: FIRST ENCOUNTER AND ACQUAINTANCE

Stature

Distinctive characteristics

Difficulties and burdens

Chapter Two: EARLY DAYS AND YOUTH

Pniel

Kimberley

Chapter Three: AN UNFORGETTABLE YEAR: 1896

Incorporation of British Bechuanaland into Cape Colony

Delegation to seek British protection

Jameson Raid

Rinderpest outbreak

Death of Kushumane Plaatje

Death of Kgosi Montshiwa

Chapter Four: LIFE’S CHALENGES

Marriage

Mahikeng

‘The Essential Interpreter’

The Anglo Boer War

Chapter Five: PLAATJE, THE CAREER JOURNALIST

Koranta ea Becoana: The early years

Candid truth: ‘Our just dues’

Koranta ea Becoana: The closing years

The undesirable interim job

Chapter Six: GOVERNMENT NEWS

Union of South Africa

The Native Convention

The establishment of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC)

Tengo Jabavu

Tsala ea Becoana

Natives’ Land Act, Act Number 27 of 1913

Delegation to England 1914

Chapter Seven: CONVENTIONS AND WRITINGS

Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and Boer Rebellion

In praise of Shakespeare

Another delegation, 1919

Other writings

Chapter Eight: DELEGATIONS AND MEETINGS

Canada and the United States

The Brotherhood Movement

Native Affairs Act of 1920

Adapting Shakespeare into Setswana

Setswana orthography

Chapter Nine: LAST MEETINGS AND TRAVELS

Travels to the Congo

Our Heritage and the International Order of True Templars

Family legacy

Chapter Ten: THE LAST ENCOUNTER

Illness and death

The funeral

Memorial

Chapter Eleven: PLAATJE IN HIS OWN WORDS: ENGLISH EXTRACTS

Writings:

From Koranta ea Becoana 25 October 1902:

Whiteman’s Country

From Koranta ea Becoana November 1902:

African Native Convention

From Koranta ea Becoana May 1903:

Congratulations to Dr Booker T Washington

From Our Heritage, June 1931:

Native law and custom

Addresses:

Welcome to Bishop Levi Coppin MA, DD:

Mafeking

Kimberley, June 1931:

Whither bound

Chapter Twelve: PLAATJE IN HIS OWN WORDS: SETSWANA EXTRACTS

Writings:

From Koranta ea Becoana, October 1902:

A double blow

From Our Heritage, March 1931:

The condition of natives under Union

Addresses:

Mahikeng, February 1903:

The education of children

Kimberley, February 1931:

Every fool will trample him who is mired in the mud

SEETSELE MODIRI MOLEMA OF THE MAHIKENG MOLEMAS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As editors, compilers and translators we should like to thank the Sol Plaatje Educational Trust for facilitating the funding received from the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund for the translation and editing of the manuscript made available by the Molema family of Mahikeng for publication. Johan Cronje, director of the Trust – whose logo appears below – has been immensely helpful and supportive, and we thank him especially.

We thank archivist, Gabriele Mohale, and curator of manuscripts, Michelle Pickover, at the Wits Historical Papers, for assistance given during the course of our research for this publication; and the information librarian at University of Johannesburg (Soweto Campus), Fikiswe Mgengo, who assisted with sourcing books and documents.

We are grateful to Deirdre Pretorius from the department of Graphic Design at the University of Johannesburg who generously assisted with selecting, placing and preparing the photographs; and to Dr Deborah Seddon at Rhodes University for her contribution to the editing; and Rose Holloway from Kimberley who was responsible for the first round of editing.

PREFACE

Seetsele Modiri Molema’s Sol T Plaatje: Morata Wabo is the earliest book-length biography of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje. A manuscript long housed in the archives of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, it is the sole biography written in Plaatje’s own language, Setswana. One other eighteen-page tribute with a reflection on Plaatje’s life, written by his brother-in-law, Isaiah Bud M’belle, is the only other account written by someone who actually knew him.¹ There are by now a number of published Plaatje biographies. These accounts all present him as a pioneer black politician and African man of letters. Seetsele brings a distinctive and quite unique perspective, presenting Plaatje as a man with a destiny in space and time, announced by the cosmos. To Seetsele, Plaatje the human being is felt as integral to, and pulsating through, his identities as politician and man of letters.

Brian Willan’s 1984 deeply researched and informative Sol Plaatje: A Biography was the first to be published and is widely used by academics.² Peter Midgley’s entry in the 2000 Dictionary of Literary Biography on ‘Sol T Plaatje’ draws primarily on Willan. Subsequently, there has been a trend to make Plaatje biographies more accessible to the general reader. Maureen Rall’s Peaceable Warrior (2003) was written for the library-using and museum-going public and The Story of Sol T Plaatje (2010) by Sabata-Mpho Mokae, written in a very accessible style, aims to reach an even broader public readership.³ The trend shows that knowledge need not, and indeed should not, remain the preserve of an elite few. The time is long overdue for Plaatje to be known to his people and to the broader South African public. Two short biographies intended for young readers and learners have also appeared in recent years: in 1992, John Pampallis’s They Fought For Freedom: Sol Plaatje and in 2001, GE de Villiers’s Servant of Africa: The Life and Times of Sol T Plaatje.

Willan argues that Plaatje drew on the best of both European and African traditions but, and by his own admission, lack of access to Plaatje in languages other than English means that his biography lacks equal evidence regarding African and Batswana influences on Plaatje. Seetsele’s biography, on the other hand, gives equal emphasis to Plaatje’s ancestry, Barolong history and Plaatje’s socialisation in the Setswana tradition alongside his missionary education and other European influences. Seetsele’s is frequently an eyewitness account. When he relates the highs and lows of Koranta ea Becoana, for example, he recalls Plaatje, of an evening, reading the white newspapers aloud to his father. He further recalls how his uncles pitched in to pay the debts when the newspaper folded and creditors descended like vultures. Seetsele occasionally inserts himself unobtrusively in the narrative: ‘I was at that meeting’. Thus, when he describes the talks given by the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) delegates in England and Scotland, and when he mentions Plaatje’s last illness, the reader is party to the intimacy of one who was present and felt the atmosphere.

Opening a window on the life and times of Sol Plaatje, Seetsele paints a portrait of a very ordinary extraordinary man. Extraordinary because he was, without a shadow of doubt, a man ‘of unrivalled stature’ who ‘outshone those of his generation’, ordinary because of the intimate human details Seetsele recalls, such as his likes – he loved to suck the marrow from the bones after eating meat – and other idiosyncrasies. When he saw or heard something amazing, he would exclaim loudly ‘mogalammakapa’ as the Batswana elders do, stretching it out for emphasis.

Seetsele’s first encounter with this man some fifteen years his senior was unforgettable – Plaatje carved a place in the young boy’s heart, mind and soul that was to last a lifetime. Seetsele is the only biographer who balances his account of Plaatje’s public and political life with an account of his physical features, habits, temperament, talents, personality, character, fears, struggles, dreams and aspirations. Seetsele, in short, illuminates the spirit of Plaatje.

Among his physical features, Seetsele highlights Plaatje’s ‘large head, made bigger by a thick head of hair, thus refuting the white myth that no hair grows on the head of a genius’. Among his habits, Seetsele mentions that he would become engrossed at the window of a bookstore and spend his last money there, even if there was no food at home. Of his temperament, Seetsele notes Plaatje’s dogged persistence – he would untie a rope knot by knot rather than cut it with a knife. He was also forgiving: ‘If he didn’t like something, or was offended, he spoke his feelings angrily, at the time, then, like a flame doused with soil or water and immediately extinguished, he calmly carried on. When you saw him again, he had forgotten the anger and the incident.’

Among his exceptional talents, Seetsele describes Plaatje’s photographic memory, his ability to recite Acts of Parliament and further to ‘elucidate, construe, decipher or unravel the hidden intentions of legislators, untangle the malevolence and obnoxious purpose of legislation with eloquence’, such as the veiled intention of segregation embedded in the 1913 Natives’ Land Act. Plaatje possessed a rare gift for languages, and was the most desirable court interpreter, but this was often gruelling work in a country where blacks typically received unreasonable and brutal sentences. An outstanding orator, speaking to packed audiences in England, he ‘… appealed to the humanity of his audiences. He struck chords in the heart, such that listeners felt the pain of black South Africans.’ Industrious, productive and prolific are words that fall short when speaking of Plaatje. In England, for instance, while Plaatje addressed fifty gatherings in three months, his three fellow delegates together delivered only thirty talks.

Of his personality, Seetsele recalls, ‘Plaatje had that gift of making you feel special and of drawing out your feelings so that you would wish the encounter might not end too soon. Such was his empathy and humility that people felt honoured if he asked them to do an errand or task for him.’ Plaatje had an independent mind and character, and no respect for educated people who allowed themselves to be a mouthpiece for whites. Though he struggled to put bread on the table, Plaatje turned down the offer of editorship of the Chamber of Mines paper, Umteteli wa Bantu, because he knew he would be required to voice the opinion of the white owner of the paper. This kind of integrity and resolve was astounding, considering the times in which he lived.

Seetsele tells us that the choice of politics made Plaatje poor. It would take another sixty years after his lifetime (in 1994) before political rights would eventually come for his people, and things would get much worse before they got better, but Plaatje worked selflessly for the emancipation of his people from brutal racial oppression. Plaatje struggled financially all his life. In the end, worry over finances, and overwork, Seetsele believes, were probably the real causes of his untimely early death. Even in his final illness, Plaatje exerted himself, walking ten miles on a winter’s morning to the train station in order to meet with his publisher. When he died in 1932 at the age of fifty-five, he left much important but unfinished political work as well as incomplete research, books and translations intended for the education of his people.

Plaatje’s aspirations for the education of his people were early kindled and nurtured by Seetsele’s father, Silas Molema, a man some twenty-four years his senior. Like the grandfather, Tawana Molema, before him, Silas Molema shared a vision for, and devotion to, the progress and enlightenment of the Batswana. To this end, he invested his money in Plaatje and entrusted him with the editorship of one of the first independently-owned black newspapers in South Africa: Koranta ea Becoana. Plaatje poured passion and skill into this work, laying a foundation and growing the black South African language press. Soon Plaatje, in turn, became a mentor to Silas’s son, the young Seetsele, encouraging him in his writing and becoming one of the greatest influences on his development as a historian, writer and educator.⁴ The Molemas were Barolong Batswana from the Tshidi branch. Plaatje was descended from the royal Barolong Boo-Madiboa dynasty, believed to have been deposed in the sixteenth century. Seetsele’s biography conveys Plaatje’s deep knowledge of, and attachment to, the culture, tradition, history and values of the Batswana and the Barolong. It also displays Seetsele’s unparalleled grasp of South African history and Plaatje’s political activism, especially the founding and early activities of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), precursor of the African National Congress (ANC), of which Plaatje was first secretary general.

Whereas Plaatje was self-taught beyond Standard Four, Seetsele was more privileged, having had the opportunity to study abroad at Glasgow University in Scotland after graduating from Lovedale in South Africa. Both produced books that were, and continue to be, enormously important. Plaatje’s 1916 Native Life in South Africa, on the loss of lands and liberty owing to the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, was widely read at home and abroad and made him famous as an astute and outspoken political critic in his lifetime and beyond.⁵ Seetsele’s 1920 The Bantu Past and Present,