Sol Plaatje. A Biography

(Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984) 0869752529. Author's signed presentation inscription to half-title. 233 x 155 mm; laminated pictorial wrappers; pp. xi + (i) + 436, incl. index; map; plates. Very good condition. "Author, journalist, political spokesman and leader of his people - Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was one of the most gifted and versatile men of his generation. He devoted his many talents to one overriding cause: the struggle of the African people against injustice and dispossession in the years that saw South Africa transformed from a colonial backwater into an industrial state. He is best known today as the author of two books: Native Life in South Africa, a scathing indictment of the Natives' Land Act of 1913, one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation in South African history; and Mhudi, the first novel in English to be written by a black South African. This extensively illustrated biography tells the story of Plaatje's remarkable life for the first time. The early years - his childhood on a German mission station in the Cape Colony of the 1880s and '90s, his first job as a messenger with the Post Office in the diamond town of Kimberley - culminate in his work as a court interpreter for the British military authorities at the famous siege of Mafeking. As the new century began, the political struggle came to dominate Plaatje's life. He was the first secretary of the African National Congress. Political campaigning took him to Britain where he met Lloyd George, and to the United States, where he met black leaders like Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois. He spent the last years of his life in South Africa, devoting himself to the preservation of the Tswana language and literature." .