It is a bright, cloudless morning, and driving the strip of asphalt that connects the city of Kimberley with South Africa’s deep, unknowable interior, I watch an oncoming Toyota swerve to avoid a truck. The car mounts the gravel shoulder and, after a terrible suspended second, flips over once, twice, a third time, sending glass and plastic and fuel across the simmering tarmac. The episode unfolds as all accidents do: in reality’s anteroom, bathed in oneiric half-light.
The Toyota lies on its flank like a wounded beast, leaking viscous fluids, whining. I leap out of my own car and run toward the wreckage, picking my way over the spilled contents of a handbag, fast food cartons, a coffee flask emblazoned with a cartoon character. A woman opens the passenger door skywards, and stands blinking in the sunlight. She is enormously overweight, but appears uninjured. “Asseblief,” she says as I approach, “asseblief kan jy my broer bel?” Please, please will you phone my brother?
The scene settles, and a South African tableau unfolds: her question, asked in a moment of shock and panic, flays open the land on which we stand. The authorities mean nothing here; kin is the law. New South Africa, new Toyota, newly paved roads: meaningless. This is the Northern Cape, the country’s far flung badlands, flat and unending, reaching up to Botswana, down into the Drakensberg In the ground: diamonds. In the sky: millennia of gods belonging to the !Xam, the Nlu, the Setswana, the Calvinist Boer. The history of the Northern Cape is one of lost deities, and of lost words. It is a place defined by absence, by extinction – a palimpsest, scoured clean (but not so clean) and inscribed upon repeatedly, not by nations with prose, but with nations by prose: entire peoples erased, at the stroke of a pen. Who, then, does this land belong to? How to define its history? And what language does it speak?
*
If we are to answer any of these questions, we must consider the life and art of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje. All roads in the Northern Cape lead to his intellectual doorstep. He was born in Doornfontein, Free State, in 1876. He died in the township of Pimville, which would eventually be swallowed up by Soweto, in 1932. He is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, but on this, the 140th anniversary of his birth, the view remains somewhat confounding.
Take, for instance, the accident scene before me – rich as it is with Plaatje-isms. Minutes earlier, I split the difference and called both the woman’s brother and the authorities. The brother arrives first, making his entrance in a pick-up truck with two black workers in the bed. They flip the destroyed Toyota onto its wheels, push it off the tarmac, dig through it for valuables. Then the cops and the paramedics arrive. The white brother is massively heavy and the black police captain painfully skinny. The brother barks orders at the captain; the captain balks. The sister sits forlornly in the ambulance, while more family arrives. The accident morphs into a sibling reunion.
They speak furiously in Afrikaans. It is hereabouts called, with grave simplicity, Die Taal. The Language.
Some think of it as a bastard dialect, rough and music-less. I prefer to think of it as an entirely South African idiom, rich with compound nouns tumbling over each other, exerting the laws of the apposite and the opposite in an attempt to describe this indescribable place. It is a poet’s plaything, Afrikaans. But, like any language, strip it down to its base and it becomes the cudgel with which some of history’s vilest laws are bashed into being.
Which brings us back to Solomon Plaatje, who wrote many millions of words in his decades as a journalist, author, orthographer, politician, linguist, intellectual, teacher, and film exhibitor, but almost none of them in Afrikaans. He only ever referred to the whites arriving from the interior to live and farm this land – the trek Boers – as “the Dutch.” By linking them so definitively to Europe, he was suggesting that their status was tentative and that the land they claimed as their own was, at best, borrowed. But he could not ignore the political force of their language. Encoded in verbs and adverbs and nouns and prepositions was a nation divided. Die Taal was a fenced-off universe, and Plaatje would never be invited in.
The argument between the brother and the police captain continues – despite the broken vehicle between them, it is about much more than just a car crash. It’s an altercation that Plaatje foresaw, and did as much as anyone in the country to head off. He was born a Setswana in rural Barolong, in what was, before the union of the four South African colonies, the Orange Free State. His family moved to a Lutheran mission in Pniel, where Plaatje was schooled by a committed missionary educator. The young Solomon – nicknamed Sol in an attempt to humanize the superhumanly gifted boy – was brilliant, serious, devout. Destined for the civil service, he found himself working as a court interpreter during the Boer War siege of the northern city of Mafeking, in 1900. His diary entries and citizen journalism rank with, if not above, the Boer War writings of Winston Churchill and Arthur Conan Doyle. He was shortly thereafter hired to edit the Setswana paper Koranta ea Bechuana.
Plaatje was resolutely a member of the educated native class (a cohort Jan Smuts, two-time South African Prime Minister, described – and he meant this as a compliment – as “pseudo-Europeans”). His political career kicked off with his founding of the South African Native Press Association; this led to his later appointment as the first secretary – general of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), forerunner of the African National Congress (ANC). Last of the great wide-eyed African Anglophiles, first of the great anguished African Anglophiles, Plaatje worshipped Shakespeare more so, perhaps, than he did Christ, infusing the SANNC with the mélange of Christian fellowship and liberal humanism that would take nearly a century to dissipate.
He believed that Union in 1910 would provide franchise to all educated, propertied South African men; he held that the British who (nominally) controlled Parliament would do the right thing by the black majority. He was mistaken. A new breed of soulless late-Victorians – led by the especially soulless Cecil John Rhodes – had come to own Kimberley (and swathes of Africa along with it) shortly after the discovery of diamonds in 1866. By their urging, the British colonial establishment ditched the vestiges of its missionary and civilizing impetus for an unbending social Darwinism. The Boers – Plaatje’s Dutch – would never so much as consider universal franchise. Blacks were thus cut out of political life, as surely as if they had been murdered wholesale. It was a betrayal that would define the rest of Plaatje’s life.
*
Those hundred-year-old decisions help explain the scene before me on the strip of road leading from Kimberley to nowhere. They are the forces of history positioning brother against police captain, one fat and white and prosperous, the other thin and black and poor. Language? Skin colour? Tribe? Class? All cast members in the South African pageant, certainly. But what divides our protagonists also unites them: their existence is defined by laws passed before their grandparents were born. And one law in particular defines them all. “A policy more foredoomed to failure could not be initiated,” wrote Plaatje at the time. “It was a policy that would keep South Africa back, perhaps forever. They were going into a thing that would stir South Africa end to end, and which affected hundreds of thousands of both races.”
That “thing” – the massively influential Native Land Act of 1913 – would provide legislated racial segregation in South Africa with its bedrock foundation. It forbade individual blacks from owning property and confined communal black ownership to about 17 per cent of the country’s poorest land. This was the zygote that, after fifty years of gestation, would finally be whelped in 1962 as apartheid. Plaatje grasped the sweeping implications of the Land Act, sneered at the pre Orwellian doublespeak describing it as “separate equality,” and set out for Britain in 1914 to argue his case before the colonial commission. He was already an experienced writer of polemical texts – the title of his 1910 pamphlet, The Black Dreyfus, says it all – and during passage to England wrote one of the foundational tomes of the African struggle movement. Native Life in South Africa, the result of a year touring the Free State and Eastern Cape investigating the effect of the Land Act on local blacks, boasts, among other things, the most affecting opening line in South African literature:
Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.
It is the fourth comma that lends the sentence its dreadful power – “the South African native found himself ” – because Plaatje understood that on a winter’s day in 1913 black political agency had ceased to exist. What’s more, Native Life in South Africa depicted a country that did not need sweeping racial legislation, a country that wasn’t moving backward because of miscegenation, but creeping forward based on the very British notions of class and individual vigour. Plaatje’s views would not be especially salutary now, but they were representative of liberalism at the time – the educated of all races would advance, with the “barbarian native” accorded his rightful lower rung in the hierarchy. (Which wasn’t, to Plaatje’s way of thinking, the same thing as disenfranchisement.) He saw the Land Act, and other draconian measures ushered in with Union, as a disruption to the natural development of a society built along Protestant, meritocratic lines. He wrote Native Life in strident, sparkling English because it was meant for the British intelligentsia. Its rhetorical construction snared colonial hypocrisy in trap after tightly conceived trap, and its notions of the civilizing effects of franchise had an encompassing, wide-angle aperture; the future was not an abstraction, but a field of being in which black South Africans would be forced to live with whites who now held all the power. Plaatje’s work cries out at the betrayal of the real South African experience for the narrow expediency of empire. He foresaw, with mantic clarity, the African tragedy to come.
*
Pictures of Solomon Plaatje depict a stiff Victorian gentleman in high collar, unsmiling, eyes creased with laugh lines. A contradiction. In England he must have conjured up Conrad’s vicious image of the educated native as “a parody of a dog in britches.” But to dismiss Plaatje was to sacrifice morality, rigour, reason. And so I wonder what Plaatje would have made of this spat between brother and policeman. More accurately, I wonder if he divined this little affair, wrote it somewhere, preached its possibility in a classroom or church hall.
The angry brother is now fixated on chasing down the truck driver who caused his sister’s fateful swerve. The argument has entered a new phase; there are other legacies at work here. While Act I took place entirely in Die Taal, Act II is peppered with Setswana. If the Northern Cape is a place of lost words, Plaatje endeavoured to gather the seedlings of language and plant them in the dust, watering them, nurturing them. He wanted to make sure that Setswana words would not disappear with Setswana rights. And so the police captain speaks a language that the brother’s ancestors tried to erase.
Plaatje wrote Native Life in English, as he did his next major literary achievement, the first novel by a black African, titled Mhudi: A Historical Novel. Those were, of course, conscious choices – Plaatje meant to insinuate the black South African into the British intellectual and literary continuum. He was also serious about bringing Setswana into that conversation, offering a bridge between the genius of a predominantly oral culture and a largely literary one.
Setswana is particularly rich with the moralistic parables that found easy corollary in Victorian and Edwardian Protestantism; while in England he compiled Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and Their European Equivalents, published by Kegan Paul.
Plaatje never intended this to be a one-way intellectual conversation – he was uninterested in serving canapés of African primitivism to a European public gorging on Henri Rousseau and freakshow Zulu chieftains. Time and again, he articulated the relationship between printing and culture (he named one son Johannes Gutenberg), and he knew that Setswana would not survive were it not nailed to the page. Yet he battled the imposition of a Setswana orthography he insisted did not match the rhythm, the African ness, of the language. (And lost.) He spent years of his life translating Shakespeare into Setswana; first Julius Caesar, then The Comedy of Errors, and The Merchant of Venice. He refused the role of the modest translingual courier, would not pantomime invisibility. He saw in Shakespeare’s makeshift biography his own: bumpkin who makes good, brings renown to his rural land (Stratford upon-Avon as Barolong), speaks uncomfortable truth to power, enters the canon. He became Shakespeare, took on his mantle.
Plaatje was preternaturally aware of something Walter Benjamin would observe years later: “Translation exposes the kinship between languages, not necessarily their resemblance.” In this, translation becomes a moral endeavour, a great civilizing project that forms a web of knowledge linking people, disassembling Babel one brick at a time. And what of Benjamin’s further assertion that translation and exile go hand in hand? Did this mean that Plaatje saw himself as an exile – “a pariah in the land of his birth”? Or did he see Shakespeare as exiled from a culture that had forfeited the liberal humanism at the heart of his work for something altogether cruder? The answer lies in the honorific Plaatje afforded the Bard: Tshinkinya-Chaka. Man above men. This was no mere sobriquet. It was a means of making Shakespeare indigenous, of weaving him into the eons-old fabric of Setswana culture. And of distancing him from the England of the Native Land Act.
*
The medium Plaatje used was the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, a result of the late nineteenth century’s obsession with taxonomy, classification, the flattening of knowledge. Along with the renowned linguistics master Daniel Jones – the real-life inspiration for Shaw’s Henry Higgins – Plaatje compiled A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography (with English Translations), published by London University Press.
The choice of IPA seems essentially Plaatje-esque: elitist, pragmatic – phlegmatic, even – with nary a nod to the gallery. Parsing its intricacies required an educated mind. The phonetic alphabet, the result of a collaboration between French and English linguistics professionals, was formally instituted in 1886 (incidentally the same year that gold was discovered in Johannesburg, consolidating South Africa’s status as the richest, most important country in Africa). The IPA employs the Latin alphabet – with some subbing from the Greeks – to create a sort of typesetting gymnastics: letters perform handstands, dangle between parentheses, do push-ups and sit-ups, all in an effort to render glottal stops and pharyngeal fricatives and affricates and the drenched articulations of the cleft palate: the great sweep of spoken human expression, standardized. How could Plaatje not want Setswana to join this massive family? How could he not posit it against Die Taal, a tongue that refused company like a muttering hermit? The IPA was, however, a final dalliance in his love affair with European culture. He visited Canada as an intellectual sorbet between courses, and then in 1921 made for the United States, where he spent time with Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute. Nineteenth-century liberal humanism had betrayed Plaatje’s cause; he saw in Washington’s mélange of free-market capitalism and evangelicalism a way forward for the South African native. The break was complete, except that Plaatje never could get Shakespeare out of his soul. He translated Othello on the passage back home.
South Africa continued on the path Plaatje foretold. Not twenty kilometres from his Kimberley home, the remaining Khoisan people, the Nlu, were forcibly moved from their makeshift housing to the Namibian desert, an act of cruelty repeated endlessly over the course of the twentieth century. Plaatje watched as history was bowdlerized, his people written out of its narrative:
School books are now being changed and . . . white and black children are being taught that the extinct Bushmen and Hottentots alone were indigenous to South Africa; that the Bantu are interlopers from across the Zambesi and that they only landed here at the same time, if not later than, Van Riebeck [South Africa’s “founding father,” who arrived at the behest of the Dutch East India Company in 1642].
Everything Plaatje had worked for was being disemboweled. The SANNC, now the ANC, had adopted a Bolshevism at odds with the organisation’s founding principles. Native education was worse than a joke; there were few Setswana able to read anything, let alone the gloriously named Diphosho-phoso – The Comedy of Errors – in IPA.
Plaatje was a leader without a people; he had lost almost every battle he’d fought. He described the black South African status quo as one of “blank gloom,” and tried to pray his way out of it. He joined the Christian Brotherhood, he joined the Independent Order of True Templars. He toured rural areas with educational films he schlepped back from America. He wrote for the black press and the white press, decrying legislation after legislation that pushed South Africa not so much backward as inward. He died in winter in the mess of Pimville from endemic township diseases – bronchitis, pneumonia. One thousand people came to his funeral. They were celebrating a Renaissance man who would not live to see his renaissance.
Astonishingly, considering the era, Plaatje’s voice has survived. In 1923 he was asked to do some recordings for Zonophone Records. At the end of one record, in a powerful, melodious preacher’s voice, he sings “N’kosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” the first time the song had ever been immortalized in such a way. It is now South Africa’s national anthem. It is the song millions sang when Nelson Mandela walked free from prison seventy long, bitter years later.
*
The brother and his black henchmen are gone, leaving behind a cloud of slow-settling dust. The police captain pisses into the tall grass on the gravel shoulder. I have no idea what will become of the Toyota. Perhaps the brother will come back for it after he has indiscriminately shot a truck driver. “Oh, we’ll find him,” one of the family members assures me.
No doubt.
I look northeast, where Kimberley’s township crumbles into shacks and meets the Platteland. The Setswana have settled most of their land claims here, but in the late nineties the ANC attempted to redress the horrible wrongs visited upon the Nlu during apartheid. They were ceded several hundred hectares of land on the Platteland, given money to build some infrastructure and institutions, and left to make a go of it. Theirs is a culture that was thoroughly destroyed – so much so that Plaatje himself considered them extinct – and now a few thousand eke out an existence for themselves on an atom of the Africa they used to wander before their time ran out.
Their language is a dizzying compendium of clicks and grunts reaching so far back into human existence that it becomes a vital document of what we are and how we became so. But for a few individual efforts, it would have evaporated.
There is a young woman at Cornell who is compiling the !Xam and Nlu lexicon using, of course, the IPA. A page of Nlu prose is gloriously indecipherable, an orgy of dexterous typography: southern Africa in code. It is a précis of the Northern Cape: land of aphasics, constantly looking for words amidst all the confusion, occasionally finding them. ▪