11/02/2024
Factoid 6 Pan-Africanism is Black history
- Sol Plaatje in America
Founding member of the African National Congress, author, actor, activist, polyglot.
He came to Chicago, stayed at fellow journalist Ida B Welles home, met with William Foster to discuss distribution black films in South Africa, sat with Garvey, and Dubois.
In the mid-1920s, Plaatje toured the South African countryside showing films he brought from the Tuskegee Institute in the United States. Plaatje’s cinema tours complemented his educational talks on the status of Africans in the Union of South Africa alongside the material he collected for books, speeches and political tours
Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (9 October 1876 – 19 June 1932) was a South African intellectual, journalist, linguist, politician, translator and writer. Plaatje was a founding member and first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), which became the African National Congress (ANC).
A short, well-dressed 44-year-old man of the southern African Barolong tribe stood at the American border near Niagara Falls holding Canadian passport No. 79551. It stated the bearer was a British national and a resident of Toronto. In fact, he was Solomon Plaatje, the first secretary-general of what would become the African National Congress — the party Nelson Mandela would later lead, and the party that would eventually overthrow South Africa’s old racial order.
Plaatje was headed to the U.S. for a series of speaking engagements intended to spread the word about alarming new segregation laws being passed back home. Just how he persuaded Canadian officials to issue him a phony passport is lost to history. In his recollections, he simply notes: “I crossed the border about noon and reached Buffalo.”
The previous year, 1920, Plaatje had written to American social activist and author W.E.B Du Bois, stating he might not be able to meet him because South African authorities “had the measure of me.” Indeed they did. Edward Barrett, the South African secretary of native affairs who withheld Plaatje’s passport, described the ANC leader as “a troublesome professional agitator” whose lectures in the U.S. would “no doubt consist of mendacious attacks” on the South African government.
Mendacious, unlikely; clever, certainly. Plaatje was an autodidact of prodigious talents. Educated at a remote German missionary school to the level of a 13-year-old, he was fluent in seven languages by age 18. He went on to translate Shakespeare and author one of the first novels written in English by a Black South African, Mhudi. He started his career as a postman, but by 1921 he was well-known in South Africa and Britain as a writer, newspaper editor, politician and activist.
If allowed in the U.S., Barrett believed Plaatje would ally himself with the “mischievous activities” of a fellow traveler — Marcus Garvey, a leading American proponent of Black nationalism. Although Plaatje shared the stage with Garvey at a sold-out Liberty Hall in New York, Black nationalism was not on Plaatje’s agenda. He fervently opposed a separate-but-equal solution to the race question. Instead, he, like his lifelong friend Du Bois, fought for racial equality under the law. Plaatje was hugely influenced by his meetings with African-American intellectuals and with Du Bois in particular, whom he took “as a model for black modernity,” says Laura Chrisman, a professor of English at the University of Washington.
Few records of Plaatje’s tour of the U.S. remain. Brian Willan, author of Sol Plaatje: A Biography, uncovered a report in the publication Negro World stating the South African held his audience “spellbound” during a lecture in Brooklyn. A faded poster broadcasts Plaatje’s upcoming appearance on March 13 at the Bethel AME Church in Harlem to give “a thrilling account of the condition of the Colored Folk in British South Africa.”
Despite traveling widely — Washington, D.C., the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee University in Alabama and elsewhere — Plaatje’s overall impressions of America are preserved only in a letter to an English friend. In the missive, he marvels at his white traveling companions in a Pullman railroad car. “Should South Africa ever get Pullman carriages of this type,” he wrote, “the Jim Crow Act No. 22 of 1916 would prohibit a Native from looking into one, except perhaps as a cleaner.” In the same letter, he noted with amazement that white Americans “speak to me precisely as if the world had no such thing as color.”
He is said to have attended the first pan-African conference in Paris in February 1919 and also the 1921 conference, but no evidence supports this. He did return to London in May 1919, a few months after the SANNC deputation to Versailles had left South Africa. Late in 1919 he took part in a meeting with British Prime Minister Lloyd George. In December 1920 he went to Canada and the United States, where he traveled widely. Meeting with leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he arranged for an American edition of his book. Native Life, to appear.
At the end of 1923 he returned to South Africa. He continued to write, and when Parliament was in session he traveled to Cape Town to cover the sessions and to lobby for African interests as a representative of the ANC. Influenced by his experiences in the United States, he became involved in the Joint Council movement. He also joined the African People's Organization of Abdul Abdurahman. He made a trip to the Congo to observe conditions there and was active in civic affairs in Kimberley. Although his relations with the ANC were sometimes uneasy, in December 1930 he accompanied an ANC deputation to the Native affairs department to register African complaints against the pass laws. He died of pneumonia while on a trip to Johannesburg on 19 June 1932.
https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/solomon-tshekisho-plaatje
