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Early
life
Plaatje
was born near Boshof, Orange
Free State
(now Free
State Province,
South
Africa).
He received a mission-education at Pniel.
When he outpaced fellow learners he was given additional private
tuition by a missionary, Ernst Westphal, and his wife. In February
1892, aged 15, he became a pupil-teacher, a post he held for two
years.
Career
As
an activist and politician he spent much of his life in the
struggle for the enfranchisement and liberation of African people.
He was a founder member and first General Secretary of the South
African Native National Congress (SANNC), which would later become
the African
National Congress
(ANC). As a member of an SANNC deputation he would travel to England
to protest the 1913 Native Land Act, and later to Canada
and the United
States
where he met Marcus
Garvey
and W.
E. B. Du Bois.
While
he grew up speaking the Tswana
language,
Plaatje would become a polyglot.
Fluent in at least seven languages, he worked as a court
interpreter during the Siege
of Mafikeng,
and translated works of William
Shakespeare
into Tswana. His talent for language would lead to a career in
journalism and writing. He was editor and part-owner of Koranta
ea Becoana (Bechuana Gazette) in Mafikeng,
and in Kimberley
Tsala ea Becoana (Bechuana Friend) and Tsala ea Batho
(The Friend of the People). Plaatje was the first black South
African to write a novel in English - Mhudi. Plaatje wrote
the novel in 1919, but it was only published in 1930. In 1928 the
Zulu writer R.R.R. Dhlomo published an English-language novel,
entitled 'An African Tragedy', at the missionary Lovedale Press,
in Alice. This makes Dhlomo's novel the first published black
South African novel in English, even though Plaatje's 'Mhudi' had
been written first. He also wrote[1]
Native Life in South Africa, which Neil Parsons describes
as "one of the most remarkable books on Africa by one of
the continent's most remarkable writers";[2]
and Boer War Diary that was first published 40 years after
his death.
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