FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY PUBLICATION OF THE DIARY OF SOL T. PLAATJE
The Boer War Diary of Sol. T. Plaatje, edited by John Comaroff, was first published in 1973 by Macmillan, along with a limited leather-bound edition put out simultaneously. Comaroff came across the manuscript of the diary – now a famous publication in South Africa – when he was a doctoral student in the Mafeking District adjacent to the Botswana border in 1969. In the course of his research he looked for indigenous historical documents and came upon a tatty scrapbook in the possession of the descendants of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje; folded into that scrapbook was the diary. The Diary documents the historically notable siege of Mafeking, a critical theater in the so-called South African (or, in the past, Anglo-Boer) War of 1899-1902. It is the only published account by a Black person involved in that war; Plaatje was a court interpreter to the British authorities. It offers a memorably vivid, memorably lucid, and profoundly poignant account of the experience of the siege from the perspective of the indigenous inhabitants of Mafeking – or, in the Setswana vernacular, Mahikeng. This is especially noteworthy, since the protagonists of the conflict, Boer and Briton alike, sought to sustain the myth that this was a “White Man’s War,” a myth Plaatje exploded for once and for all, ensuring a place for his Diary in the subsequent historiography of the siege.
Plaatje was to become a figure of great note in South Africa. Despite a limited education, he rose to become one of the country’s noted black journalists, the founding General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Conference), author of the first novel to be published in the country by a Black South African, Mhudi, and Native Life in South Africa, a memorable account of the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which laid the ground for the racial geography of apartheid South Africa, translator of Shakespeare into Setswana, newspaper editor, and much besides. After his death in 1932, Plaatje came largely to be forgotten: the erasure of Black scholars and public intellectuals was itself a product of the epistemic violence of the notorious apartheid regime.
After the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, Sol Plaatje gradually assumed his rightful role in the pantheon of South African public intellectuals and historical figures. Now there is a municipality, a university, and public buildings named after him. He is recognized in innumerable ways in the country. Brian Willan has published a truly magisterial biography, Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2018), and the Diary itself has seen several revisions and new editions edited by Comaroff and Willan, one in 1999 at the centenary of the Siege of Mafeking. Each version carried more detailed annotations and historical contextualizations by the editors, amplifying the significance of the text. A recent volume, In Revisiting Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary: Reconstruction and Reconsideration, edited by Willan and Sabata-mpho Mokae (Jacana Media 2023), explores the literary merit of the text, which has been the subject of a large, diverse, and enthusiastic scholarly literature.
In late 2023 fifty years after its was first published, a new, significanly enlarged edition of the Diary was published – an event which marks the sheer longevity of interest in the volume, which is now taught in schools and colleges. Published by a Black South African press, Xarra Books, it includes a foreword by Sabata-Mpho Mokae and a large number of hitherto unpublished photo images.