heritage
Soul searching: The story of Sol Plaatje
More than a century after the publication of Native Life in South Africa, the story of the iconic Sol Plaatje is as vivid and relevant as ever
In July 1913 — 105 years ago to the month — tens of thousands of black tenant farmers, their families and their stock took to the roads of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Thanks to the infamous Natives Land Act of 1913 they were unable to live on farms as sharecroppers, as they once had. In haste and desperation, they sought land elsewhere. The act proscribed the terms of their tenancy, under which they offered their labour in return for a share of the crop. They could, however, be servants, with their stock surrendered to the farmer whose land they occupied. Rather than submit to this deeper form of servitude, they walked away. To where, they often did not know. It was SA’s first great act of civil disobedience. By law, their animals could neither graze nor be watered on the lands through which they trampled, so their journeys were not only dominated by the vaguest sense of destination; they were death-haunted. Here was tragedy on an epic scale. The travai...
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