Native Life in South Africa is an eloquent example of how generations of mission- educated African intelligentsia drew on orature and literacy to assert the integrity of African polities and their identities, as well as claim and defend their rights as modern citizens. It is evident in the book that Plaatje is aware of the intricate politics of reading, writing, narrative and performance, and that he marshals a range of literary, linguistic, stylistic and performative strategies. Plaatje uses aesthetics to negotiate the complexities, ambiguities, paradoxes and pleasures that informed the consciousness and agency of Africans and the fractured readerships that they were addressing in colonial South Africa and elsewhere.

My discussion will be organised around two creative and tactical interventions that Plaatje makes that result in a compelling and affective narrative, giving credence to Es'kia Mphahlele's view that in the midst of profound social changes, dilemmas and challenges, the best that writers can be is to be ‘historians of feeling’. The first of the two interventions is the striving for a modernist form that can contain and transcend the myriad sociopolitical, cultural and intellectual challenges that the book is meant to circumvent. Then there is the astute use of language and style, particularly the deployment of different symbolic tropes, forms of irony, linguistic registers, literary and musical references, quotation and proverbs. These interventions are suggestive of Plaatje's ideas and campaigns regarding the role of culture and the language question in South Africa, the latter in relation to the preservation of oral traditions and repertoires.

Native Life and modernism

The introduction of missionary education to the Eastern Cape in the eighteenth century marks the first substantive attempt to provide western education to Africans and, consequently, the first significant and sustained exchange on the level of ideas between Africans and Europe, the Americas and the world at large. Literature with a capital L, together with the other forms of the arts were regarded as key attributes and signs of cultural and intellectual refinement, taste and discrimination. Africa, to cut a long story short, was caricatured, even by key thinkers of the Enlightenment as ‘the dark continent’. Such negative attributes were, apparently, evident in a range of absences in the culture, history, politics and economics of the continent, including the lack of any noteworthy sense and practice of art.