‘Constant Reading after Office Hours’: Sol Plaatje and Literary Belonging

Stafford, Jane

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-38767-3_3

Jane Stafford²

219 Accesses

Abstract

Plaatje’s 1914 Native Life in South Africa, written as a protest against the South African government’s Natives’ Land Act, employs a range of literary referents – epigraphs, quotations, allusions, adaptions – to signal his ease in the literary world of empire as well as calling on the radical tradition of English literature. ‘A South African’s Homage’, Plaatje’s contribution to the tercentennial Book of Homage to Shakespeare reflects this confidence in its relaxed and personal tone as Plaatje claims an affinity between Shakespeare and his own Tswana culture. Shakespearian tropes – tyrannical kings, heavenly signs and portents, wayward lovers, forest idylls, ravening animals and characters seemingly dead who miraculously reappear – are adopted by Plaatje in his novel Mhudi, while the imperial adventure story is an important and acknowledged influence.

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Notes

1.
Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa before and since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (1916) (Johannesburg: Raven’s Press, 1982), p. 21 (Plaatje 1982). ‘Under the terms of the bill, only 7.3% of the total land surface of the Union was to be set aside for African occupation, patently inadequate to support a population that was four times the size of the white population,’ Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist 1876–1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 160. (Willan 1984)
2.
Willan, Sol Plaatje, p. 178.
3.
Willan, Sol Plaatje, pp. 175–6.
4.
Frederic Deland Leete, Christian Brotherhoods (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, 1912), p. 279. (Leete 1912)
5.
Leete, Christian Brotherhoods, p. 285.
6.
Leete, Christian Brotherhoods, p. 273, quoting William Ward, Brotherhood and Democracy (London: PSA Publishing House, 1910).
7.
Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner and Plaatje (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), p. 171. (Chrisman 2000)
8.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 272.
9.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, pp. 262–72, 387–96.
10.
Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 137. (Boehmer 2002)
11.
David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 29. (Johnson 1996)
12.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 269.
13.
Willan, Sol Plaatje, p. 39 quoting ‘Mr Sol T. Plaatje honoured’, Diamond Fields Advertiser, 1928.
14.
‘Native Teachers – the want of literature’, Imvo (29 August 1895), quoted in Willan, Sol Plaatje, p. 39.
15.
Patricia Morris, ‘The Early Black South African Newspaper and the Development of the Novel’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 15: 15 (1980): 15–29. (Morris 1980)
16.
Brian Willan, ‘An African in Kimberley’, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930, eds. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbones (New York: Longman, 1982), p. 245. (Willan 1982)
17.
Michael Wheeler, The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 23. (Wheeler 1979)
18.
John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 64. (Hollander 1981)
19.
‘The subject of quotation being introduced, Mr. Wilkes censured it as pedantry. JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir, it is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world’, James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, volume IV, ed. George Birbeck Hill, rev. ed. L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), p. 102. (Boswell 1934)
20.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). (Anderson 2006a)
21.
Martyn Lyons, ‘New Readers in the Nineteenth Century’, A History of Reading in the West, eds. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Linda Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 340–42. (Lyons 1999)
22.
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 433 (St Clair 2004). See the table 16.4, p. 337, ‘The radical canon, 1820s onwards’.
23.
Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance, p. 170.
24.
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 57. (Rose 2001)
25.
Jane Sales, Mission Stations and the Colonial Communities of the Eastern Cape, 1800–52 (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1975), p. 42.
26.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 147.
27.
Willan, Sol Plaatje, p. 110; Plaatje, Selected Writings, ed. Brian Willan (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), pp. 61–4: ‘I am Black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept’, Song of Songs, 1.5. (Plaatje 1996)
28.
Bhekizizwe Peterson, ‘Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Melancholy Narratives, Petitioning Selves and the Ethics of Suffering’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43: 1 (2008): 84; the quotation is from Isaiah 10.1. (Peterson 2008)
29.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 95.
30.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 182.
31.
Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1858) (Beecher 1858). The piece was widely reprinted in magazines such as the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle. Ward Beecher was known for his powerful preaching: ‘Oh for half-an-hour of my brother Henry’ wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe after experiencing a London sermon, J.R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 479, fn. 15. (Watson 1999)
32.
1 Kings 21ff.
33.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 295.
34.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 397.
35.
Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, p. 154.
36.
Plaatje, Selected Writings, p. 93.
37.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, pp. 387–8.
38.
Watson, The English Hymn, p. 464.
39.
Plaatje mistakenly attributes its authorship to ‘Wreford’, presumably James Reynell Wreford (1800–91), a Birmingham non-conformist minister. Plaatje may have been relying on his memory of some of his literary citations. On p. 271, James Russell Lowell’s hymn is credited to ‘F. R. Lowell’ – though this may have been a typesetting error.
40.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, pp. 397–8.
41.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 398.
42.
Watson, The English Hymn, p. 5.
43.
Watson, The English Hymn, p. 19.
44.
The Study of Liturgy, eds. Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold (London: SPCK, 1978), p. 452. (Study of Liturgy 1978)
45.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 270.
46.
Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, p. 128.
47.
‘Hollingside’ was the title of the musical setting of ‘Jesu lover of my soul’ composed by John Bacchus Dykes (1823–1876), precentor of Durham Cathedral. He often named hymn tunes after famous people or locations in the north of England. ‘Hollingside’ is a ‘lost place’ in County Durham.
48.
A.E. Voss, ‘Sol Plaatje, the Eighteenth Century, and South African Cultural Memory’, English in Africa, 21: 1, 2 (July 1994): 72–3. (Voss 1994)
49.
St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, p. 435.
50.
Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, pp. 126, 116.
51.
Voss, ‘Sol Plaatje, the Eighteenth Century, and South African Cultural Memory’: 62.
52.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 248.
53.
William Cowper, ‘The Task: Book II: The Time Piece’, lines 37–42, Poetical Works, 4th edition, ed. H.S. Milford, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 147. (Cowper 1967)
54.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 190.
55.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 191.
56.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 121. Burns continues:

Verse
Verse Many and sharp the num’rous ills Inwoven with our frame! More pointed still we make ourselves Regret, remorse, and shame! And Man, whose heav'n-erected face The smiles of love adorn, – Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!

‘Man was Made to Mourn: a Dirge’, Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 112. (Burns 1950)
57.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 192.
58.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 224.
59.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 110.
60.
Henry George Bohn, Dictionary of Quotations from the English Poets (London: George Bell and sons, 1902), p. 445. (Bohn 1902)
61.
Wheeler, The Art of Allusion, p. 14.
62.
Jane Starfield, ‘The Lore and the Proverbs: Sol Plaatje as Historian’, unpublished paper delivered at the African Studies Institute, University of Witwatersrand, 26 August 1991 (Starfield 1991); discussed in David Schalkwyk and Lerothodi Lapula, ‘Solomon Plaatje, William Shakespeare, and the Translations of Culture’, Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, 9, 1 (2000): 15. (Schalkwyk and Lapula 2000)
63.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 211; Sir Lewis Morris, Gycia: a Tragedy in Five Acts (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886), p. 179.
64.
Meic Stephens, ‘Morris, Sir Lewis (1833–1907)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; http://www.oxforddnb.com (Stephens 2004)
65.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 199. The full passage in Arnold reads:

Verse
Verse Then the World-honored spake: ‘Pity and need Make all flesh kin. There is no caste in blood, Which runneth of one hue, nor caste in tears, Which trickle salt with all; neither comes man To birth with tilka-mark stamped on the brow, Nor sacred thread on neck. Who doth right deed Is twice-born, and who doeth ill deeds vile. Give me to drink, my brother; when I come Unto my quest it shall be good for thee.’

Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, book 6 (London: Trübner and Co, 1888), pp. 179–80. (Arnold 1888)
66.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 91; L’Independance Belge, 21 October 1914.
67.
Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 387.
68.
The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (August 1914): 171. Otto Leland Bohanan, born in Washington DC, was a black American poet and musician who died in 1932. The Crisis gained its name from a poem by James Russell Lowell, ‘The Present Crisis’.
69.
Some day, though distant it may be – with God

Verse
Verse A thousand years are but as yesterday – The germs of hate, injustice, violence, Like an insidious canker in the blood, Shall eat that nation’s vitals. She shall see Break forth the blood-red tide of anarchy, Sweeping her plains, laying her cities low, And bearing on its seething, crimson flood The wreck of Government, of home, and all The nation’s pride, its splendour and its power. On with relentless flow, into the seas Of God’s eternal vengeance wide and deep. But, for God’s grace! Oh may it hold thee fast, My Country, until justice shall prevail O'er wrong and o’er oppression’s cruel power, And all that makes humanity to mourn. Ida B Luckie, ‘Retribution’,

The Crisis (August 1916): 173.
70.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: AC McClurg, 1903), p. 3. (Du Bois 1903)
71.
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 109.
72.
Shakespeare’s speech is as follows:

Verse
Verse Montague: Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach? Speak, nephew, were you by when it began? Benvolio: Here were the servants of your adversary, And yours, close fighting ere I did approach: I drew to part them: in the instant came The fiery Tybalt, with his sword prepared, Which, as he breathed defiance to my ears, He swung about his head and cut the winds, Who, nothing hurt withal, hiss'd him in scorn; While we were interchanging thrusts and blows, Came more and more, and fought on part and part, Till the prince came, who parted either part. Romeo and Juliet, I, 1, lines 95–106.
73.
Shakespeare’s speech is as follows:

Verse
Verse Aemilius: Arm, arm, my lords! Rome never had more cause. The Goths have gathered head; and with a power Of high-resolved men, bent to the spoil, They hither march amain, under conduct Of Lucius, son to old Andronicus, Who threats, in course of this revenge, to do As much as ever Coriolanus did. Titus Andronicus, IV, 4, lines 61–7.
74.
The campaign was of such unequal match that Mahatma Gandhi, whose ambulance corps cared for wounded and dying Zulu, described it as ‘no war but a man hunt’, Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing, 1927), p. 290. (Gandhi 1927)
75.
A Book of Homage to Shakespeare: To Commemorate the Three Hundredth Anniversary of Shakespeare’s Death, ed. Israel Gollancz (Oxford: Humphrey Milford; Oxford University Press, 1916), p. 52. (Book of Homage to Shakespeare 1916)
76.
Preface, Book of Homage, p. vii.
77.
F.R. Benson, ‘A Stratfordian’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 39.
78.
Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, ‘The Making of Shakespeare’, Book of Homage, p. 118.
79.
For a discussion of this, see Coppélia Kahn, ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52: 4 (Winter 2001): 456–47. (Kahn 2001)
80.
Israel Zangwill, ‘The Two Empires’, Book of Homage, p. 248.
81.
William Pember Reeves, ‘The Dream Imperial’, Book of Homage, p. 312.
82.
Lionel Cust, ‘Shakespeare’, Book of Homage, p. 102.
83.
Sydney Lee, ‘Shakespeare: Inventor of Language’, Book of Homage, p. 114.
84.
Charles Mills Gayley, ‘Heart of the Race’, Book of Homage, p. 341.
85.
F.R. Benson, ‘A Stratfordian’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 39.
86.
Schalkwyk and Lapula, ‘Solomon Plaatje, William Shakespeare, and the Translations of Culture’: 10.
87.
‘A South African’s Homage: William Tsikinya-Chaka’, Book of Homage, pp. 336–9. Plaatje’s is not the only chapter in a language other than English. There are chapters in Romanian, French (several), German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Serbian, Finnish, Chinese, Persian, Armenian (entitled ‘Armenia’s Love to Shakespeare’), Spanish, Italian (several), Greek ancient and modern, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Irish/ Gaelic, Hindi, Persian, and Burmese. Some are in the original language, some are translated and some have a parenthetical gloss. Others are by foreign scholars but in English.
88.
Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 336.
89.
Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, pp. 122–5.
90.
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), pp. 194–6. (Taylor 1990)
91.
Otto Jespersen, ‘A Marginal Note on Shakespeare’s Language and a Textual Crux in King Lear’, Book of Homage, pp. 481–3.
92.
Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 336.
93.
Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 338.
94.
Schalkwyk and Lapula, ‘Solomon Plaatje, William Shakespeare, and the Translations of Culture’: 16.
95.
Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 337.
96.
Ronald Ross, ‘Shakespeare, 1916’, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, p. 104.
97.
G C Moore Smith, ‘Sonnets, 1616: 1916’, Book of Homage, p. 237.
98.
Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), p. 91. (Ngūgī wa Thiong’o 1986)
99.
Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 339. Plaatje may be referring to The Life and Passion of Jesus (1905) or to From the Manger to the Cross (otherwise known as Jesus of Nazareth) which first appeared in 1912 and was reissued in 1916. In both films, Judas is significantly darker skinned than the other disciples, though this might be a function of his being pictured as stereotypically Jewish rather than as black. The actor who played Judas in From the Manger to the Cross was an Italian.
100.
Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, Book of Homage, p. 339.
101.
Willan, Sol Plaatje, p. 194.
102.
Willan, Sol Plaatje, p. 410, note 72.
103.
Herbert Aptheker, The Literary Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Kraus, 1989), pp. 214–5. (Aptheker 1989)
104.
Certainly Mhudi in some form or another was read in United States after 1920 and modifications were suggested. It is unclear whether Lovedale Press version is a revised form of the 1920 version or an earlier version. See Brian Willan, Plaatje, p. 349.
105.
Tim Couzens, Introduction, Mhudi (Oxford: Heinemann, 1978), p. 9. (Couzens 1978)
106.
See Stephen Gray, ‘Plaatje’s Shakespeare’, English in Africa, 4, 1 (March 1977): 1–6. (Gray 1977)
107.
Letter, probably to Silas Molema, 25 August 1920, quoted in Tim Couzens and Stephen Gray, ‘Printers’ and other Devils: the Texts of Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi’, Research in African Literatures, 9: 2 (Autumn 1978): 201. (Couzens and Gray 1978)
108.
H. Rider Haggard, Nada the Lily (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), p. 5. (Haggard 1892)
109.
Haggard, Nada, p. x.
110.
Plaatje, ‘Preface to the Original Edition’, Mhudi, p. 21.
111.
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi, ‘“A Native Venture”: Sol (Solomon Tshekisho) Plaatje Defining South African Literature’, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Special Issue: South Africa: Literature and Social Movements, 21–22 (2009): 120. (Collis-Buthelezi 2009)
112.
Haggard, Nada, p. x.
113.
Haggard, Nada, p. 4.
114.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York Routledge, 1995), p. 30. (McClintock 1995)
115.
George E. Marcus, ‘Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System’, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnology, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 165, note 1. (Marcus 1986)
116.
Haggard wrote that Mr F.B. Fynney, late Zulu border agent who was the chief interpreter for the colony…utilized his fluent Zulu to write ethnographical pieces on the nation…which in subsequent days I made use of in Nada the Lily and other books’, Peter Berresford Ellis, H Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 36. (Ellis 1987)
117.
Haggard cites titles such as ‘Among the Zulus and the Amatongas’ by ‘the late Mr Leslie’, Bishop Callaway’s ‘Religious Systems of the Amazulu’, Haggard, Nada, p. x.
118.
Couzens, Introduction, Mhudi, p. 13.
119.
Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). (Richards 1993)
120.
Willan, Plaatje, p. 352.
121.
Haggard, Nada, p. 4.
122.
Haggard, Nada, p. xi.
123.
Gail Ching-Liang Low, Black Skins, White Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 39. (Low 1996)
124.
Haggard, Nada, p. 178.
125.
Couzens and Gray, ‘Printers’ and Other Devils’: 202. This account comes from an interview of Michael van Reenen, a neighbour and friend of Plaatje’s in the 1930s, given to Brian Willan in 1977.
126.
Haggard, Nada, p. 267.
127.
A Lovedale Press reissue in 1957 made no change, and an edition in the United States followed this version.
128.
Couzens and Gray describe how the ‘typescript-with-corrections’ of Mhudi was found when the 1976 Soweto Uprising necessitated the archives of the Lovedale Mission be moved to Rhodes University, Grahamtown. Its status is uncertain. Couzens and Gray write: ‘It could be the first version of the novel, the 1920 version; it could be the second version, the “American version” [written in response to an American reader who told Plaatje to enlarge Mhudi’s role]; or it could be a third version, with changes made to both or either of the two earlier versions…Unfortunately there is not sufficient evidence to be certain of the truth’, Couzens and Gray, ‘Printers’ and other Devils’: 198–215.
129.
Couzens and Gray, ‘Printers’ and Other Devils’: 206.
130.
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 6. (Trumpener 1997)
131.
Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance, p. 166.
132.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 197. (Pratt 1992)
133.
Haggard, Nada, p. xii.
134.
Couzens and Gray, ‘Printers’ and Other Devils’: 210.

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School of English, Film, Theatre and Med, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Jane Stafford

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Stafford, J. (2016). ‘Constant Reading after Office Hours’: Sol Plaatje and Literary Belonging. In: Colonial Literature and the Native Author. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38767-3_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38767-3_3
Published: 20 September 2016
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-38766-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-38767-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

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