This biography of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932) is a weighty but enthrallingly readable account of the life and times of a South African politician, journalist, linguist, novelist and translator who has attained almost legendary status. Sol Plaatje was a founder member of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), now known as the African National Congress, and the first general secretary of the party. He fought tirelessly for the rights and liberation of black people in South Africa. But the book has unique additional interest for phoneticians on account of Plaatje’s encounter in 1915 with Daniel Jones (1881–1967), which led to their brilliant joint pioneering work on the phonetics of Plaatje’s native language, Setswana, published in A Sechuana Reader (Jones & Plaatje Reference Jones and Plaatje1916).
At over 700 pages, the book is a monumental and meticulously researched contribution to African history which locates its subject in a rich context, brought alive for the reader with numerous photographs and maps. It will no doubt become a standard reference for anyone interested in Plaatje. The author, Brian Willan, is a historian who has written extensively on Plaatje and South African history in general over many years. This is his second biography of Plaatje; the first was published 35 years ago, when the policy of apartheid was at its worst in South Africa. The new biography entirely supersedes the old, and brings forward a wealth of new information. The author states ‘I have been able to uncover far more new evidence and information… shedding new light on every aspect of his life’ (p. xxii). Both Plaatje’s public struggles and achievements as well as his private life are brought into sharper focus than ever before. But anyone looking for hints of scandal – or indeed anything negative – in the new detail will be disappointed; if Plaatje had any failings, his diligent and tenacious biographer has not found them.
Plaatje (the family name probably originated as a Dutch nickname applied to one of his forebears) was born into the Barolong clan within the Tswana ethnic group. His parents were Christians and worked in missionary stations in South Africa. As a result he received a sound mission education. His intellect, resilience and eagerness to learn saw him become a pupil teacher at the age of 15 years. Thereafter, he worked as a post office messenger in the town of Kimberley (where he is buried) before progressing to a career as a court interpreter and moving to Mafeking (Setswana Mafikeng), where during the siege of 1899–1900 he documented events in a diary, which came to light and was published after his death. His education, experience and tireless application to study made him into a considerable polyglot. By his early twenties he was fluent and literate in English, Dutch, Sesotho and Setswana and amply competent in Xhosa, German, Zulu, Korana, and Herero.
Plaatje went on to become a prolific journalist, author and translator. He was to translate several Shakespeare plays into Setswana, and publish a novel Mhudi (1930) written in English. But it was when he first travelled to England in 1914 as part of an SANNC delegation to present the case of Africans against the repressive Natives’ Land Act of 1913 that he discovered phonetics. Willan’s account (pp. 291–298) must be read in conjunction with the detailed endnotes (pp. 636–637). It is not entirely clear whether Willan is adding greatly to the long account given by Collins & Mees (1999: 144–163), but he is certainly setting the story in a new perspective. Like Collins & Mees, Willan draws on Jones’s 1916 lecture ‘How to use phonetics in connexion with little-known languages’, which gives Jones’s own detailed account of working with Plaatje and is crucial to an understanding of the cooperation between the two men – though Willan seems not to be aware that the lecture, unpublished in Jones’s lifetime, has long been available in print (Collins & Mees 2003).
It is plain that Plaatje was no ordinary ‘informant’. Jones saw at once that he had ‘unusual linguistic ability… [he] soon understood what I was driving at and was able to help very materially in the investigation’. Plaatje not only provided the texts (some of them specially written) for the Sechuana Reader, but collaborated with Jones on the analysis. Jones’s account of the work is all in the plural (his short preface has around a dozen uses of ‘we’, ‘our’ or ‘us’), and anticipates further joint work to come: ‘We hope… to give at some future date much more detailed descriptions’. There is no doubt that Plaatje fully deserved his place on the title page as co-author of the book.
Jones’s generous acknowledgement of Plaatje’s contribution makes an interesting contrast with his dismissive rebuttal of the attempts of another notable – but very different – African consultant, Jomo Kenyatta (1891–1978), to be named as a co-author of a later work produced in Jones’s department (Armstrong Reference Armstrong and Honikman1940); see Collins & Mees (1999: 346). Of course, we do not know in full Jones’s motivations for working with Plaatje. Willan is probably quite right to hint, as he does on page 291, that like other academics then taking an interest in African languages, Jones had one eye on the advancement of his own academic career. We don’t know either what Jones made of Plaatje’s political message. We do know, however, that the two remained in contact, that Jones put further paid work Plaatje’s way when Plaatje found himself penniless in London on a second visit, and that he did what he could to assist Plaatje in gaining grants and awards (pp. 374, 506).
Although Willan’s focus is of course not primarily on the phonetics of Setswana, it is a shame that he did not include an extract from the Sechuana Reader showing the phonetic transcription the two authors devised. He perhaps does not fully appreciate the significance of the work in the development of Jones’s thinking and methodology – and its landmark status in the growth of understanding of linguistic tone in phonetic science. It is regrettable that even a century later Willan does not feel able to say simply ‘Setswana is a tone language’, but feels he must explain that tones are ‘crucial to meaning’ (p. 292) as if this were an exotic curiosity. This is an indictment of the level of ignorance on linguistic matters likely still to be found among the otherwise well-informed readers that Willan is aiming at.
Willan does reproduce (p. 292) part of Plaatje’s wonderful preface to the 1916 Reader, which should surely be obligatory reading for every beginning student in phonetics:
I had but a vague acquaintance with phonetics until early in 1915, when Miss Mary Werner took me one day to the Phonetics Department of University College, London, where Mr. Daniel Jones was conducting a class. After some exercises I gave the students a few Sechuana sentences, which Mr. Jones wrote phonetically on the blackboard. The result was to me astonishing. I saw some English ladies, who knew nothing of Sechuana, look at the blackboard and read these phrases aloud without the least trace of European accent …as if [they were] Bahurutshe women on the banks of the Marico River. I felt at once what a blessing it would be if missionaries were acquainted with phonetics. They would then be able to reproduce not only the sounds of the language, but also the tones, with accuracy.
Plaatje took easily to the use of transcription, and his attachment to phonetic symbols for the accurate representation of Setswana stayed with him and informed the battles that he later fought over recording and augmenting the literature of Setswana and standardizing the orthography, all of which is dealt with in Willan’s Chapter 16, ‘Setswana’. But the International Phonetic Alphabet had many hostile critics and opponents, particularly when it came to establishing new orthographies in the face of vested interests and loyalties, and in the end Plaatje’s ‘odd spelling’ was not to prevail.
Given the central role of the Setswana language in Plaatje’s life and Willan’s narrative, it is somewhat disappointing that Willan does not anywhere give a coherent sketch of the main features of the language, instead scattering examples piecemeal through the text, and does not cite an up-to-date reference on Setswana phonetics or tone (an excellent choice would be Bennett et al. Reference Bennett, Diemer, Kerford, Probert and Wesi2016).
Willan writes elegantly, and the scholarly apparatus of the book is superb. There is a comprehensive list of abbreviations, explanatory notes on terminology, and a detailed list of archives and newspapers referred to and interviews conducted. The endnotes run to over 90 pages packed with information (though a running header linking them more transparently to the text by chapter or page number would make them easier to use), and the extensive index is helpful and accurate.
While the reader with linguistic interests will feel the need to supplement the book by consulting the additional sources we have mentioned, we warmly recommend this informative, compelling – and in places deeply moving – account of a truly remarkable man.
