One of Sol Plaatje's earliest responses to the passing of the Natives’ Land Act, a foundational piece of segregationist legislation that would define politics in unionist South Africa, was to visit Bloemhof, a village 170 km north-east of his home in Kimberley.

Setting off early one morning in the first week of July 1913, Plaatje, accompanied by an unnamed group of friends, arrived by train in this small agricultural and mining settlement on the northern banks of the Vaal River. The purpose of his visit was existential as much as journalistic. A month earlier, white parliamentarians in Cape Town had voted in favour of passing the Natives’ Land Bill. Shortly before the Bill's adoption, Plaatje had written that, if passed, the new law would deprive black inhabitants of what little they possessed and ‘make them roving wanderers and potential criminals’. Its subsequent passage into law motivated Plaatje to embark on ‘a tour of observation’ regarding the new law's early operation in the Orange Free State.

Native Life in South Africa, Plaatje's petitionary dissertation on the Natives’ Land Act, threads together first-hand observations made during a series of investigative journeys to far-flung parts of the Orange Free State and eastern parts of the Cape Colony. These descriptions are in many ways the fulcrum of Native Life: they humanise Plaatje's grand-scale political history, lending it a human-scale dimension, often in stark terms. Many of the most compelling reports were recorded in and around Bloemhof.

Beginnings matter. Arriving in Bloemhof in June 2015, intent on revisiting the places visited by Plaatje during his investigative sorties, I found myself wondering: why Bloemhof? It is an unremarkable place to start a journey. A town of 27 000 inhabitants, Bloemhof has no defining prospect. Like many of the rural towns and settlements Plaatje visited in 1913, Prince Street, Bloemhof 's main boulevard, is a muddle of formalised businesses and informal street hustle. Franchised food retailers and fuel stations, most of them owned by white businessmen, neighbour on cut-price retail stores established by recent migrants from Asia. Large diesel trucks are a constant feature of the town's life. Bound for markets in Kimberley, Klerksdorp and Johannesburg, at night they audibly disturb the quiet of Bloemhof 's idiosyncratically named guest lodges (Why Not, Villa de Rosa, Place of the Fish Eagle).