Читать книгу Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa - Jacob Dlamini - Страница 19

Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion was the full title Plaatje had settled on, possibly taking his cue from a book of Alice Werner's called Native Life in East Africa published a few years previously. Native Life ran to 352 pages and was bound in a solid wine-coloured hardback cover, good value for 3s 6d. It described the events leading up to the passage of the Natives' Land Act, the effects of its implementation, the campaign mounted by the South African Native National Congress to secure its repeal, the story of the deputation to England and the reception it received, and an account of several historical episodes illustrating the loyalty of African people in South Africa to the cause of the imperial government. Without doubt the most striking chapters of the book are those in which Plaatje described his own observations of the effects of the Land Act during the journeys he made in South Africa in 1913 and 1914.

Native Life in South Africa was formulated as a direct and often emotional appeal to the British public to right the wrongs being done to the African people of South Africa and to secure, above all, the repeal of the Natives' Land Act. ‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913,’ so Plaatje began, in words that would become famous, ‘the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth’. He justified his appeal not simply by reference to the constitutional responsibilities that Britain retained for South Africa, but upon the conviction that his people shared with the British public a common humanity: natural justice and Christian belief alike demanded their intervention.

Throughout Native Life Plaatje was at pains to present his case in terms that were meaningful to an English audience. In trying to convey what the Natives' Land Act meant, for example, he likened its operation to an imaginary decree of the London County Council; he evoked memories of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year by comparing the effects of the Land Act to those of the plague; he quoted Oliver Goldsmith's poem ‘The Deserted Village’ to emphasise the parallels between the evictions that followed the Natives' Land Act with those same consequences that had followed the enclosures in England more than a century earlier.

The war and its relevance to his arguments was a central theme. In the circumstances this was hardly something that he could have avoided. What he did, though, with considerable skill, was to turn a potential obstacle to any consideration of his case into a powerful argument in his favour: he emphasised the loyalty of his people to the cause of the imperial government in both past and present conflicts, arguing that this entitled them to ‘fair play and justice’, and relief from the ‘tyrannical enactment’ of 1913. Against this stood the behaviour of the Boers, the instigators, he argued, of the Land Act itself – some of whom rose in rebellion at the outbreak of the First World War. His own people, by contrast, remained loyal to the imperial cause, their representatives – the South African Native National Congress – resolving at their meeting in August 1914 to ‘hang up their grievances' for the duration of the war.

Overall, Native Life in South Africa was a powerful and sustained polemic, shrewdly cast in the terms and language most likely to appeal to the conscience of a nation at war, and the first book-length statement of the grievances of the African people of South Africa by one of their own leaders. It certainly struck a chord with the British press and public, its significance appreciated by the reviews that soon appeared. The liberal Daily News and Leader, for example, thought the book, ‘though possibly open to criticism on points of detail’, nevertheless ‘a very lucid and forcible – and, all things considered, not intemperate – statement of some very real and galling native grievances’. The Birmingham Post was likewise impressed by the strength of Plaatje's argument. ‘It is a serious case, well and ably put,’ it said, ‘and the evidence embodied in it is very disquieting. Here at any rate is a book which makes the native agitation intelligible and may conceivably have an influence on future events in South Africa – and at home, for by no legal fiction can the Imperial power dissociate itself from responsibility for Native affairs.’⁹

Other reviews took a similar line, several of them commenting on how remarkable it was that such a book could have been written by an African. Even the journal South Africa, so scathing of the Congress deputation in 1914, thought that ‘there is the spice if not the charm of novelty about this book’, that ‘its author occasionally expresses himself well and forcibly’, and that it was ‘all to the good that South African publicists should have the advantage of reading the opinions of a native observer when dealing with legislation affecting his race’. Just as surprising was the apparent approval of United Empire, the journal of the Royal Colonial Institute. ‘Mr Plaatje,’ it thought, ‘has marshalled his facts with considerable skill. He sets forth the case of his countrymen with energy and moderation. His conclusions seem to be warranted by the information at his disposal, and the facts he adduces seem to bear but one interpretation. And lastly, in the existing circumstances, he is fully justified in appealing to the court of public opinion.’¹⁰

The response was not uniformly favourable, however. A reviewer in New Age thought Native Life was ‘quite good journalism’, but that its author ‘does not make it easy for us to understand the real dimensions of his grievance’. ‘Delta’, in the African World, complained that the title of the book did not accurately reflect its content, that it was too long and in places ‘melodramatic and childish’, and full of ‘unjust and illogical’ generalisations. ‘Delta’ sympathised with Plaatje's case, but thought that ‘all real sympathisers with Mr Plaatje and his friends' would wish he had presented it ‘with more dignity’.¹¹

The novelist Olive Schreiner, now living in London, had other objections. A friend of Georgiana Solomon's, she sympathised with his cause but disapproved – on pacifist grounds – of what she had heard about the book: ‘You know, I am a pacifist,’ she wrote to Mrs Solomon, ‘and from what I hear he advocates the natives coming over here to help kill.’ She had evidently not (at least when she wrote this) read the book, but was now prompted to do so.¹²

By far the strongest critic of Native Life in South Africa was John Harris, whom Plaatje now considered ‘the South African government's most sturdy defender’. Having failed to prevent the publication of Native Life, Harris did all he could to discredit the book and its author, believing it his duty to give General Botha ‘a helping hand’ in carrying out his ‘great policy’. He sent a stream of articles to the daily and periodical press in England in support of the policies of the South African government, comparing General Botha variously to Moses and Abraham Lincoln and denouncing Native Life for its ‘grotesque misrepresentations' and ‘almost deliberate untruths’. In one of these articles, in the influential Journal of the Royal African Society, he argued that ‘the attitude adopted at the moment by the natives’ constituted ‘by far the most formidable difficulty in relation to General Botha's native policies’, and that such attitudes had ‘just received most unfortunate emphasis by the publication of a book which shows that even now there is an intelligent, well-educated native who either cannot, or will not, grasp plain facts’.¹³

Despite his antipathy, Harris was nevertheless obliged to admit that it was not just Plaatje who constituted the problem: ‘It cannot be overlooked,’ he acknowledged, ‘that at the present time the natives as a whole are against General Botha's policy.’ It was an extraordinary position for the organising secretary of the ‘so-called Aborigines' Protection Society’ to have arrived at.¹⁴

Plaatje's differences with John Harris were intensified by the publication of the report of the South African Land Commission (the Beaumont Commission) shortly after the first edition of Native Life came out. This was the commission that had been set up under the provisions of the Natives' Land Act in order to find further areas of land for African occupation. As Plaatje and other African leaders had predicted, the commission had been unable to find any substantial areas of land for this purpose, and its recommendations were soon rejected by the South African Parliament. While Harris preferred to find reason for encouragement in the report on the grounds that it offered further guarantees on the principle of segregation, Plaatje was fiercely critical, and took its findings as vindication of what he had been saying over the past three years, and exactly what he had predicted. ‘Surely, Miss Werner,’ he wrote, ‘you never expected that a commission of five interested white men could pass a fair segregation measure between themselves and the blacks.’¹⁵

Thanks to a generous subvention from Mrs Solomon, Plaatje managed to have his thirty-page analysis of the report bound in with the 500 copies that remained from the initial print run. This second edition was published in November 1916 and included an additional page, inserted at the beginning of the book, with extracts from eight reviews extolling its virtues. All but one were from British journals or newspapers, the exception being a review in the Lahore Tribune that appeared within days of Native Life's publication.¹⁶

Plaatje's analysis subjected the Beaumont Commission's report and its recommendations to detailed scrutiny, and left his readers in no doubt as to the depth of the deceit he believed had been perpetrated: ‘I must say,’ he wrote, ‘that until this Report reached me, I never would have believed my white fellow countrymen capable of conceiving the all but diabolical schemes propounded between the covers of Volume I of the Report of the South African Land Commission, 1916, and clothing them in such plausible form as to mislead even sincere and well-informed friends of the Natives.’ Fearful of the ultimate consequences for the future of South Africa if such policies were not altered, Plaatje again appealed to British public opinion to ‘stay the hand of the South African Government, veto this iniquity and avert the Nemesis that would surely follow its perpetration’.

Harris, by contrast, sought to align his society ever more closely with the policies of the South African government, and a resolution to this effect, welcoming the report of the Beaumont Commission, was passed in August 1916. It was opposed vociferously by Mrs Solomon and Mrs Cobden Unwin, but they were in a minority and unable to prevent it from being adopted. He then stepped up his efforts to blacken Plaatje's reputation, discouraging newspaper and journal editors from giving him a hearing and complaining when they did. ‘Months ago some of us were compelled to terminate relationships with him,’ Harris told the editor of the New Statesman, and assured him of ‘how unsafe a guide is this man whose activities are guided almost exclusively by sentiment’. He wrote similarly to Sir Harry Wilson, editor of the journal of the Royal Colonial Institute, expressing surprise that it should have carried so favourable a review of Native Life.¹⁷ Such actions, ‘by means of confidential letters from behind closed doors’, so Plaatje told Mrs Solomon, were typical of the way Harris operated.¹⁸

Matters came to a head at a conference the society convened in October 1916. Jane Cobden Unwin tried at the last minute to secure an invitation for Plaatje to attend so that he could present his case in person, only to be met with a point blank refusal. Undeterred, the two ladies argued as powerfully and as emotionally as ever against the direction in which their society was being taken, and personal relations with the two secretaries reached a new low. Jane Cobden Unwin accused Harris of pretending to be ‘a friend of the natives … while all the time he was secretly working against them’. In response, Harris demanded an apology and threatened to resign if he did not get it, confident that the society's committee would not countenance such a possibility. One committee member, the journalist and writer Henry Nevinson, thought the very future of the society was at stake, and sought unsuccessfully to broker a compromise. The crisis rumbled on until the two ladies, unrepentant to the last, were finally removed from the society's committee, by a single vote, in April 1917. ‘This Land Act is, as it has been all along,’ said Jane Cobden Unwin in her final appeal to the committee, ‘a tyrannous law: and a Society like ours can only bring misfortune down upon our great cause by supporting in any way so un-British a return to oppression in South Africa.’¹⁹