Native Life in South Africa is remarkable not just for what it is but for how it came into being, its writing and publication, in the face of considerable odds, a triumph of the first order. But it was a close run thing: it could very easily have failed to see the light of day. This chapter aims to tell that story.

The book had its origins in the campaign of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) against the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. Unable to persuade the South African government of its case against the legislation, Congress met in Kimberley in February 1914 to elect a deputation to take their case to London to lay before the British imperial government, which still had formally to approve all South African legislation. Plaatje, general secretary of Congress, was elected a member of the deputation and – with three others – accompanied John Dube, president of Congress, to London in May 1914.

Plaatje had taken a leading part in the organisation's campaign against the Act and had written extensively about it in the columns of his newspaper, Tsala ea Batho (Friend of the People). He must have conceived the plan to set out the case in book form well before he set off for England, and he began writing it on board the SS Norseman once it set sail from Cape Town in May. ‘I am compiling this little book on the Natives’ Land Act and its operation,’ he wrote when on board ship, ‘which I hope to get through the press immediately after landing in England.’ He added that it kept him ‘busy typewriting in the dining room all forenoons’, while ‘the afternoons I spend on deck, making notes etc’.

His book was written in the first instance in the form of an appeal to the British public. This was so because Plaatje and his colleagues were under no illusions that the colonial secretary Lord Harcourt was likely to disallow the Natives’ Land Act, and that they had therefore to appeal to the British public for support. From the beginning, the book was conceived as an integral part of this campaign. It would be nearly two years, however, before it was published – and, at more than 350 pages, would not be the ‘little book’ he had in mind when working on it aboard the Norseman.