Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword: Sol T Plaatje and the ‘power of all’
- Introduction: Native Life in South Africa – then and now
- Editions of Native Life in South Africa: 1916 to the present
- Looking Back: Foreword to Ravan Press edition of Native Life in South Africa, 1982
- Poetic Tributes
- What is in a name? In memory of Sol T Plaatje
- Segopoco Sa Moshui Sol T Plaatje
- In memory of the late Sol T Plaatje
- Lefatshe, nkometse
- Earth, swallow me
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Chapter 1 Native Life in South Africa: Writing, publication, reception
- Chapter 2 Modernist at large: The aesthetics of Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 3 The print world of the press and Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 4 Going places: Native Life in South Africa and the politics of mobility
- Chapter 5 Native Life in South Africa and the world at war
- Chapter 6 African intellectual history, black cosmopolitanism and Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 7 ‘Native Lives’ behind Native Life: Intellectual and political influences on the ANC and democratic South Africa
- Chapter 8 Whose past? Native Life in South Africa and historical writing
- Chapter 9 Women and society in Native Life in South Africa: Roles and ruptures
- Chapter 10 African progressivism, land and law: Re-reading Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 11 Land and belonging: On the tomb ya ga Solomon Plaatje
- Chapter 12 Revisiting the landscapes of Native Life
- A Contemporary Reimagining: The Road to Dikhudung
- Contributors
- Plaatje Resources
- List of Figures
- Index
Chapter 2 - Modernist at large: The aesthetics of Native Life in South Africa
from Poetic Tributes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword: Sol T Plaatje and the ‘power of all’
- Introduction: Native Life in South Africa – then and now
- Editions of Native Life in South Africa: 1916 to the present
- Looking Back: Foreword to Ravan Press edition of Native Life in South Africa, 1982
- Poetic Tributes
- What is in a name? In memory of Sol T Plaatje
- Segopoco Sa Moshui Sol T Plaatje
- In memory of the late Sol T Plaatje
- Lefatshe, nkometse
- Earth, swallow me
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Chapter 1 Native Life in South Africa: Writing, publication, reception
- Chapter 2 Modernist at large: The aesthetics of Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 3 The print world of the press and Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 4 Going places: Native Life in South Africa and the politics of mobility
- Chapter 5 Native Life in South Africa and the world at war
- Chapter 6 African intellectual history, black cosmopolitanism and Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 7 ‘Native Lives’ behind Native Life: Intellectual and political influences on the ANC and democratic South Africa
- Chapter 8 Whose past? Native Life in South Africa and historical writing
- Chapter 9 Women and society in Native Life in South Africa: Roles and ruptures
- Chapter 10 African progressivism, land and law: Re-reading Native Life in South Africa
- Chapter 11 Land and belonging: On the tomb ya ga Solomon Plaatje
- Chapter 12 Revisiting the landscapes of Native Life
- A Contemporary Reimagining: The Road to Dikhudung
- Contributors
- Plaatje Resources
- List of Figures
- Index
Summary
Native Life in South Africa is an eloquent example of how generations of mission- educated African intelligentsia drew on orature and literacy to assert the integrity of African polities and their identities, as well as claim and defend their rights as modern citizens. It is evident in the book that Plaatje is aware of the intricate politics of reading, writing, narrative and performance, and that he marshals a range of literary, linguistic, stylistic and performative strategies. Plaatje uses aesthetics to negotiate the complexities, ambiguities, paradoxes and pleasures that informed the consciousness and agency of Africans and the fractured readerships that they were addressing in colonial South Africa and elsewhere.
My discussion will be organised around two creative and tactical interventions that Plaatje makes that result in a compelling and affective narrative, giving credence to Es'kia Mphahlele's view that in the midst of profound social changes, dilemmas and challenges, the best that writers can be is to be ‘historians of feeling’. The first of the two interventions is the striving for a modernist form that can contain and transcend the myriad sociopolitical, cultural and intellectual challenges that the book is meant to circumvent. Then there is the astute use of language and style, particularly the deployment of different symbolic tropes, forms of irony, linguistic registers, literary and musical references, quotation and proverbs. These interventions are suggestive of Plaatje's ideas and campaigns regarding the role of culture and the language question in South Africa, the latter in relation to the preservation of oral traditions and repertoires.
Native Life and modernism
The introduction of missionary education to the Eastern Cape in the eighteenth century marks the first substantive attempt to provide western education to Africans and, consequently, the first significant and sustained exchange on the level of ideas between Africans and Europe, the Americas and the world at large. Literature with a capital L, together with the other forms of the arts were regarded as key attributes and signs of cultural and intellectual refinement, taste and discrimination. Africa, to cut a long story short, was caricatured, even by key thinkers of the Enlightenment as ‘the dark continent’. Such negative attributes were, apparently, evident in a range of absences in the culture, history, politics and economics of the continent, including the lack of any noteworthy sense and practice of art.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South AfricaPast and Present, pp. 18 - 36Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016