The book was published in 1916 by P. S. King in London.
It was dedicated to Harriette Colenso, doughty woman camnpaigner
who had inherited from her father, Bishop Colenso, the mantle of advocate
to the British establishment of the rights of the Zulu nation in South Africa.

While in England Plaatje pursued his interests in language and linguistics
by collaborating with Professor Daniel Jones of the University of London --
inventor of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and prototype for
Professor Higgins in Shaw's "Pygmalion" and thus the musical "My Fair Lady".
In the same year as Native Life was published, 1916, Plaatje published
two other shorter books which brought together the European languages
(English, Dutch and German) he loved with the Tswana language.
"Sechuana Proverbs" was a listing of Tswana proverbs with
their European equivalents. "A Sechuana Reader" was co-authored with Jones,
using the IPA for Tswana orthography.

Plaatje returned to South Africa but went once again to England
after the war's end, to lead a second SANNC delegation keen to make its mark
on the peace negotiations in 1919. This time Plaatje managed to get
as far as the prime minister, Lloyd George, "the Welsh wizard".
Lloyd George was duly impressed with Plaatje and undertook
to present his case to General Jan Smuts in the South African government,
a supposedly liberal fellow-traveller. But Smuts, whose notions of liberalism
were patronizingly segregationist, fobbed off Lloyd George
with an ingenuous reply.

Disillusioned with the flabby friendship of British liberals,
Plaatje was increasingly drawn to the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois,
president of the NAACP in the United States. In 1921 Plaatje sailed
for the United States on a lecture tour that took him through