In the half-century since the now famed Plaatje Diary was “discovered” – disinterred, more accurately, thence re(dis)covered – both Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje and South Africa have undergone radical refiguration. Plaatje has emerged from the shadows of history, from being a bit player in a past willfully erased by the apartheid regime to becoming a major name in the pantheon of twentieth-century national heroes, indeed, one of its public intellectual giants. For its part, South Africa has seen the death of it’s ancien regime and the dawn of an altogether new one, if not in the revolutionary form envisaged in the struggle to birth it. Plaatje’s observations at Mafeking/Mahikeng offered some acute insights into colonial southern Africa at fin de siecle, and into the Siege of Mafeking, and has long been recognized for its value as a singular historical archive. But, in recent times it has also been revalorized as a literary text of distinction, at once as a vernacularized, culturally-nuanced appropriation of the diary form and as an exceptional work of literary/narrative journalism. This essay, a reflection, fifty years on, explores recent critical commentary on Sol Plaatje’s journal in light of his re- emergence as a historical figure of great heft in post apartheid South Africa.