of black South Africans under the whites-only government of newly unified
South Africa. It focuses on the effects of the 1913 Natives' Land Act
which introduced a uniform system of land segregation between the races.
It resulted, as Plaatje shows, in the immediate expulsion of blacks,
as "squatters", from their ancestral lands in the Orange Free State
now declared "white". But Native Life succeeds in being
much more than a work of propaganda. It is a vital social document
which captures the spirit of an age and shows the effects of rural segregation
on the everyday life of people.

Solomon Tshekeisho Plaatje was born in 1878 in the lands of
the Tswana-speaking people, south of Mafeking. His origins
were ordinary enough. What was remarkable was the aptitude he showed
for education and learning after a few years schooling under the tuition
of a remarkable liberal German Lutheran missionary, the Rev. Ludorf.
At the age of sixteen Plaatje (using the Dutch nickname of his grandfather
as a surname) joined the Post Office as a mail-carrier in Kimberley,
the diamond city in the north of Cape Colony. He subsequently passed
the highest clerical examination in the colony, beating every white candidate
in both Dutch and typing.

From Kimberley the young Plaatje went on to Mafeking, where he was
one of the key players in the great siege of 1899-1900.
As magistrate's interpreter he was the vital link between
the British civil authorities and the African majority
beleaguered inside the town's military perimeter. Plaatje's diaries
from this period, published long after his death, are a remarkable record
both of the siege and of his early prose experimentation --
mixing languages and idioms, and full of bright humour.