On October 9, SA celebrates the anniversary of the birth of one of its most remarkable sons, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje.
Born in 1876, Plaatje is often remembered as the first secretary-general of the SA Native National Congress, an organisation that would later become the ANC. But he was far more than this. Fluent in at least six languages — including German, Dutch, Xhosa and English — Plaatje embodied a vast array of skills and commitments. He was a politician, a postman, a court translator, a newspaper editor, a novelist, a linguist, a translator of Shakespeare, a lay preacher, an educator, an advocate of the temperance movement and the creator of what became known as the "Plaatje bioscope".
What drove him was the irrepressible urge to communicate and to enlighten in almost every form imaginable. He also sang with a decent baritone voice and set down the first known recording of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. He even appeared on the London stage.
Along with a need to express himself came a truly remarkable capacity to move about in societies that would have seemed cut off from him by the racial prejudice of the time.
He befriended several British suffragettes, for example, who helped him publish his works, supported him in his activism and helped his attempts to educate the poor and dispossessed. And whenever he was in Cape Town, he would visit SA’s first minister of native affairs, Henry Burton. As a recent book of letters (Sol T Plaatje: A Life in Letters, edited by Brian Willan and Sabata-mpho Mokae) reveals, Plaatje shared personal details of his life with Burton that point to a genuine friendship between the two.
Plaatje would also meet David Lloyd George, the British prime minister. Lloyd George was sufficiently impressed to write to his SA counterpart, Jan Smuts, shortly after, encouraging Smuts to take seriously what the likes of Plaatje had to say.
It was advice that Smuts did not take up.
A man abroad
Another element of Plaatje’s life that comes as a surprise is just how widely travelled he was. Despite the SA government attempting to restrict his entry into the US in 1920, Plaatje somehow managed to wangle himself a Canadian passport through some important Christian friends in Toronto. So it was that passport No 79551 was issued to one "Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Esquire, of Toronto, Canada", with nationality "British subject."
Plaatje spent nearly two years travelling in North America, where he met and spoke on the same platforms as two of the most famous black activists of the day: Marcus Garvey and WEB du Bois (with whom he retained a long friendship).
While travelling in the southern states of the US, Plaatje visited the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a famous technical training college for black students. As was his way, Plaatje sparked up an immediate warm friendship with Tuskegee’s head, Robert Moton, whose portrait would later be placed in Plaatje’s living room in Kimberley.
Moton seems to have shown Plaatje Tuskegee’s accounts. And as a man always looking to have his social and educational projects funded, Plaatje was astounded by the amounts of money given to the institute by white philanthropists. It was a far cry from anything white millionaires in SA were capable of. Plaatje was flabbergasted that the institute ran on an annual a budget of $11m (more than $150m today).
Moton would also give Plaatje a film showing the work and ceremonies of Tuskegee. It would become an important part of Plaatje’s life.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing stories of his time in the US, and one we know little about, is that he met the industrialist Henry Ford (an anti-Semite and fan of Hitler), who also gave him several educational films to take back to SA.
Then, when visiting Philadelphia, all the pieces of a plan were spliced together. Plaatje was hosted by reverend JA Johnson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. According to Plaatje’s biographer, Willan, Johnson presented Plaatje "with a piece of apparatus that was to play a large part in his life in the future: a portable movie projector, worth $420, suitable for showing 35mm educational films".
The films and the projector travelled with Plaatje to Britain, and then on to SA. British customs officials held up the Tuskegee film at Dover, according to Plaatje, "and they threaten to send it back if I don’t at once pay some international nonsense". Then Ford’s films were held up by customs officials in SA.
After some months he got "the whole caboodle" of films released.
Never shy to ask for help, Plaatje seems to have appealed to De Beers mining company for assistance with his film project. And though the company didn’t come close to offering him what the white American philanthropists gave Tuskegee, it did give him a generator, which allowed him to power his projector in rural areas.
On the move — again
In 1913, Plaatje had traversed part of SA to record the catastrophic effects of the Natives Land Act — a record of which is contained in his famous Native Life in South Africa.
Eleven years later, he again prepared himself to tour the country. But while he had travelled lightly in 1913, riding his famous bicycle across the farmlands of the Orange Free State and the Cape Province, the film project needed trains and, quite often, a horse and cart.
Plaatje quite literally took his films across the length and breadth of SA, even travelling with them into Bechuanaland (now Botswana).
His first biographer and friend, Seetsele Molema, suggested that seeing Plaatje pack for one of these journeys was like watching a seaman pack for a voyage. The projector, the generator and his "essential" aids to travel — Plaatje’s dictionaries, books and newspapers were intellectual food he referred to as his "padkos" — were all packed up in suitcases.
Armed with the educational films from Morton and Ford as well as some donated by De Beers, Plaatje would establish the Plaatje bioscope. His eldest son, St Leger (named after the famous liberal editor of the Cape Times), accompanied him. Sainty, as he was known in the Plaatje family, was there to help his father with the functioning of the projector and to provide musical accompaniment, both singing and playing the piano.
As Willan discovered, Plaatje was met with large and enthusiastic crowds in many of the smaller country towns and dorps.
"I have been round a good deal with my films," Plaatje wrote to Moton. "With the poverty of the natives it is a profitless job: but when I see the joy, especially of the native kiddies, at the sight of the thrilling drills of Tuskegee and my explanatory remarks enabling them to enjoy that which I have witnessed and they cannot, it turns the whole thing into a labour of love."
He would go on to tell Moton that on three separate occasions white people paid him to lecture them and to show them the film of Tuskegee. But, he would write, "unfortunately the white engagements are as scarce as diamonds; but believe me, Dr Moton, the moral effect of the Tuskegee films on white and black alike is incalculable".
At the centre of much of this was Plaatje’s desire to breathe confidence and hope into the black youth of SA — to show them that a world of training, education and advancement could and did exist for black people. He discovered, however, that in the larger cities people were less in awe of his makeshift silver screen; they seemed to prefer the escapism of Charlie Chaplin to his didacticism.
This is not to say that Plaatje was not attempting to entertain as well as instruct. His son’s singing and piano playing were an integral part of the show. And Plaatje, who had once been enthralled by the famous African-American Jubilee Singers who visited Kimberley in 1895, saw his bioscope as a substitute for this entertainment.
As a poster advertising one of his shows in 1924 reveals: "The immigration department will not permit any foreign negroes — not even the Jubilee Singers, beloved of our forefathers — to land in the Union."
Instead, Plaatje urged the people of Bloemfontein to be entertained by the "school, Tuskegee, and her thousands of young men and women students at drill and manoeuvres".
A labour of love
Plaatje knew well the power and influence of film — he also had seen its potentially negative influences on society. While living in the UK in 1915, he had watched the racist The Birth of a Nation, which glorified and mythologised the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. So shocked was he of its depiction of black people that he, with his suffragette friends, attempted to have the film withdrawn.
He spoke to SA high commissioner in the UK, WP Schreiner, about having it banned in SA. Schreiner took steps to this effect — but the film was eventually viewed in SA in 1931, the year before Plaatje’s death.
It might come as a surprise to many who cast an eye over the current ANC’s lacklustre and unpardonable record in the field of education, to realise one of its founders tirelessly attempted to educate the poor and promote technological advancement and training. Plaatje was always searching, always appealing to people for help, to educate and advance the downtrodden.
It was a task that he took on almost single-handedly. And this exhaustive and exhausting fight almost certainly led to his death.
Plaatje’s health had been badly affected after a bout of the Spanish flu in 1918, and in 1932, run down by his tireless creative drive and activism, he fell ill with flu. It would lead to double pneumonia.
As Willan puts it, "considering the way he drove himself, the wonder was that [he] had lasted so long".
Plaatje died of heart failure at the age of 54.
As Molema wrote of his funeral: "Together, Africans, coloureds, Indians and Europeans in their thousands followed the hearse to the cemetery. Men and women alike could not restrain their tears and their grief."
In questions that are now more important to us than ever, Momela asked: "Who can be compared to him? Who can stand shoulder to shoulder with Plaatje?"
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