Seetsele Modiri Molema's Sol T Plaatje: Morata Wabo is the earliest book-length biography of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje. A manuscript long housed in the archives of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, it is the sole biography written in Plaatje's own language, Setswana. One other eighteen-page tribute with a reflection on Plaatje's life, written by his brother-in-law, Isaiah Bud M'belle, is the only other account written by someone who actually knew him. There are by now a number of published Plaatje biographies. These accounts all present him as a pioneer black politician and African man of letters. Seetsele brings a distinctive and quite unique perspective, presenting Plaatje as a man with a destiny in space and time, announced by the cosmos. To Seetsele, Plaatje the human being is felt as integral to, and pulsating through, his identities as politician and man of letters.

Brian Willan's 1984 deeply researched and informative Sol Plaatje: A Biography was the first to be published and is widely used by academics. Peter Midgley's entry in the 2000 Dictionary of Literary Biography on ‘Sol T Plaatje’ draws primarily on Willan. Subsequently, there has been a trend to make Plaatje biographies more accessible to the general reader. Maureen Rall's Peaceable Warrior (2003) was written for the library-using and museum-going public and The Story of Sol T Plaatje (2010) by Sabata-Mpho Mokae, written in a very accessible style, aims to reach an even broader public readership. The trend shows that knowledge need not, and indeed should not, remain the preserve of an elite few. The time is long overdue for Plaatje to be known to his people and to the broader South African public. Two short biographies intended for young readers and learners have also appeared in recent years: in 1992, John Pampallis's They Fought For Freedom: Sol Plaatje and in 2001, GE de Villiers's Servant of Africa: The Life and Times of Sol T Plaatje.

Willan argues that Plaatje drew on the best of both European and African traditions but, and by his own admission, lack of access to Plaatje in languages other than English means that his biography lacks equal evidence regarding African and Batswana influences on Plaatje.