Читать книгу Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa - Jacob Dlamini - Страница 10

In the century since its publication, Native Life has been curiously neglected by historians. This contrasts with the attention it attracted at the time it was published, when it was widely read, reviewed and even mentioned during debates in the South African House of Assembly. But after that it largely disappeared from view. Partly this was because it self-evidently failed to achieve its objective. Not only was the Land Act not repealed, but other legislation built upon its foundations, taking South Africa further down the path of segregation.

It did not help either that the book defied easy categorisation. Part polemic, part political commentary, part history, part autobiography, it fitted into no recognised genre, falling between the cracks of conventional epistemologies.

A more damning reason for Native Life's neglect was its being a book written by a black South African – its seriousness, reliability, and relevance arguably not being recognised. For much of the twentieth century historians engaged with South African history through the lens of the white population. Black history, when it made an appearance in historical writing, was largely relegated to the realm of the tribal and customary.

Historians were slow to develop a more inclusive approach to South Africa's past. When they did, Native Life was mostly neglected. For example, Eddie Roux's Time Longer than Rope,¹³ a valuable, pioneering account of the black political struggle by a leading member of the Communist Party of South Africa, published in 1948 on the threshold of the Nationalist Party's coming to power, failed even to mention Native Life.

From the 1960s and 1970s, though, as historians began to take a more sustained interest in black South African history and the origins of political opposition, Native Life was rediscovered as an important source. Peter Walshe draws upon it in his account of the early history of the SANNC,¹⁴ as does the Oxford History of South Africa, published in 1975. Here, Native Life is described as ‘a fascinating book’, its evidence of the effects of the Land Act cited in support of the contention that ‘few laws in South Africa have been felt with such immediate harshness by so large a section of the population’. Plaatje ‘documented the oppressive operation of the Act in a vigorous indictment of white policies’, another chapter of the Oxford History says.¹⁵

In the following decade, Native Life came into its own. Ravan Press published a new edition, the first time it had been printed in South Africa. The Land Act, too, attracted more scholarly attention as historians turned their attention to rural history. In particular, Tim Keegan's Rural Transformations in Industrialising South Africa (1986) investigated the background and impact of the Land Act in greater detail than hitherto, and he treated Native Life as an important source. Keegan's concern was with the Orange Free State, the focus of Plaatje's investigative travels. Drawing upon extensive research in contemporary newspapers and official records, Keegan found plenty of corroboration for Plaatje's account of the evictions that took place in the wake of the Land Act – particularly in the evidence taken by the Beaumont Commission when it visited the Free State in October 1913, shortly after Plaatje's visit. Taken together, the evidence, Keegan wrote, ‘clearly illustrates the widespread occurrence of evictions which followed the passing of the 1913 Land Act’.¹⁶

In 2013, the centenary of the passing of the Land Act focussed attention not only on the Act itself and its consequences, but led several historians to take a closer look at Native Life. An important article by Peter Delius and William Beinart revisited and questioned the significance of the Land Act in the larger span of South African history, arguing that it has been amplified in ‘the popular consciousness’ and that, in the short term, it has had a relatively limited impact. ‘Its most immediate effect,’ they maintain, ‘was to undermine black tenants on white-owned land, but even here the consequences were mixed and slow to materialise.’ While not ‘minimising the immiseration’ of those evicted and affected, the emphasis of their article is on ‘trying to understand and periodise the balance of forces in the countryside’. They point to the longer timescale of the history of dispossession, reminding us that this had largely taken place before the Land Act, and that land purchases by Africans outside the ‘scheduled areas’ continued to take place on a significant scale after 1913. Yet, they also seem to suggest that Plaatje was guilty of some exaggeration, or at least of generalising from the particular, and that what he witnessed and reported was not typical or representative of the impact of the legislation elsewhere.¹⁷

Plaatje made no secret of his strong feelings about the Land Act. He used emotive language, as he needed to, given that his book was positioned in the first instance as an appeal to the British public, and that he had a case to make. He reported what he saw, making efforts to note locations and details, drawing on his first-hand experiences in the Orange Free State and western Transvaal in August and September 1913. Plaatje's concern here was with the immediate effects of the Land Act, and what he writes is corroborated by Keegan's review of the evidence. Given that Native Life was published in 1916, based on his observations from two years before, Plaatje can scarcely be blamed for failing to consider the longer-term consequences of the Act. He could not know that land purchases outside the scheduled areas, in the Transvaal at least, would continue on a significant scale, or that many of those who left or were evicted ended up returning, albeit under terms more adverse than before.

There is no reason to doubt Plaatje's claims that he found ‘the Plague Act was raging with particular fury’ in a few eastern Cape districts in 1913.¹⁸ Indeed he gives examples of landowners taking advantage of the legislation to exert pressure on their tenants. It was certainly the case that the land purchase provisions of the Land Act did not apply to the Cape Province by virtue of the entrenched nonracial franchise provisions, but at this point the other provisions were believed to hold. It was only as a result of a court ruling in 1917 that the Land Act in its entirety was deemed not to be applicable to the Cape. The closing sentence of Native Life's prologue draws from W E B Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks in conveying Plaatje's approach to narrating the effects of the Land Act: ‘I do not doubt that in some communities conditions are better than those I have indicated; while I am no less certain that in other communities they are far worse.’¹⁹