The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

majority of South Africans ... have never heard of his name”. 107 This neglect of Plaatje
was due to
South Africa’s capacity to obscure and distort its own past,
to neglect the lives of those whose ideals and aspirations
have been in conflict with official orthodoxies, past and
present. The South African historical memory, to put it
another way, has been highly selective in its recall. 108
Relying on oral testimony, archival sources, and an exhaustive survey of little‐known
material about Plaatje, Willan’s book provided a sensitive and sympathetic account of
Plaatje’s life in a social context, offering a wealth of detail in a richly textured and finely
nuanced portrait. Willan’s book represented a recovery project of social history, seeking,
in Thompsonian terms to rescue his life and achievements from the “enormous
condescension of posterity”. 109
Willan’s study was a chronological account of Plaatje’s life from his ‘early years’ in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, through his public career and intellectual
achievements as a court interpreter, editor and journalist, writer, political leader, to his
sojourn in England in the early 1920s and his subsequent displacement from a position
of political leadership. Plaatje’s ideas, according to Willan, were a combination of
Victorian liberalism and Christian belief, joined with a “powerfully felt sense of
responsibility for the leadership of his people”. He sought the “restoration of an old
regime, not the creation of a new order”. 110
With growing disillusionment and despair at his increasing political isolation in the
1920s, Plaatje turned to the preservation of Tswana language and literature as his main
preoccupation. This he accomplished through publishing translations of Shakespeare’s
works, compiling a new Tswana dictionary and entering into disputes over Tswana
107 Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biography, p vi.
108 Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biography, p vii.
109 See the discussion of E.P. Thompson in Chapter One.
110 Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biography, p 315.
149