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SA literature: black writing emerges

Literature by black South Africans emerged in the 20th century. The first generation of mission-educated African writers sought to restore dignity to Africans by invoking and reconstructing a heroic African past.

Sol Plaatje

The first novel by a black South African was Mhudi (completed in 1920 but only published in 1930), by Solomon (Sol) Thekiso Plaatje.

This epic story follows the trajectory of the Tswana people during and after their military encounter with the Zulus under Shaka, the Zulu conqueror of the 19th century, and encompasses their earliest encounters with the white people moving into the interior.

Viewed as the founding father of black literature in South Africa, Plaatje was also the first secretary general of the then South African Native National Congress (now the African National Congress) at its foundation in 1912.

His Native Life in South Africa (1916) was a seminal text in the study of land dispossession in South Africa. He also wrote a diary of the siege of Mafeking during the Boer War, and translated Shakespeare into the Tswana language.

Thomas Mofolo

While Plaatje’s Mhudi related the history of the Tswana people in South African literature, Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka reinvents the legendary Zulu king, Shaka.

Mofolo portrays him as a heroic but tragic figure, a monarch to rival Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Mofolo, however, also invests Shaka with a complex personality, in which good and evil are at war - in contrast to white colonial historians who made him a simplistic monster of tribal savagery.

Completed in 1910, the novel was published in 1925 and the first English translation came out in 1930.