Sol Plaatje
writer · activist · South Africa · 1876–1932
A South African journalist and writer. A Tswana, he worked as a court interpreter and then ran newspapers. When the Natives' Land Act was passed in 1913 he went round the countryside by bicycle, meeting and recording people driven off the land, and took the record to Britain, where it was published as a book.
Posts
1916 · The opening sentence of the book proper, on the day the Natives' Land Act came into force. Under the Act black South Africans could no longer buy or rent land in almost the whole of the country.
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.
Native Life in South Africa (1916), first sentence of Chapter I
1916 · From the winter of 1913, when he watched families turned off the farms spend the night in the open with their livestock. Plaatje was travelling these roads by bicycle.
When we saw on that night the teeth of the little children clattering through the cold, we thought of our own little ones in their Kimberley home of an evening after gambolling in their winter frocks with their schoolmates, and we wondered what these little mites had done that a home should suddenly become to them a thing of the past.
Native Life in South Africa (1916), Chapter IV
1916 · Written after telling how the Kgobadis, evicted and wandering the roads, had to bury the baby who died on the way secretly, at night, in someone else's land.
Even criminals dropping straight from the gallows have an undisputed claim to six feet of ground on which to rest their criminal remains, but under the cruel operation of the Natives' Land Act little children, whose only crime is that God did not make them white, are sometimes denied that right in their ancestral home.
Native Life in South Africa (1916), Chapter IV
1 in 100 Billion · The social network of those who came before us