half the country. He paid his own way by publishing and selling
18,000 copies of a booklet titled "The Mote and the Beam: an Epic
on Sex-Relationship 'twixt Black and White in British South Africa"
at 25 cents each. In the following year, after Plaatje had left,
this new edition of "Native Life in South Africa" was published,
by the NAACP newspaper "The Crisis" edited by Du Bois.

Plaatje returned home to Kimberley to find the SANNC a spent force,
despite its name change to ANC, overtaken by more radical forces.
At a time when white power was pushing ahead with an ever more intense
segregationist programme, based on anti-black legislation,
Plaatje became a lone voice for old black liberalism. He turned from politics
and devoted the rest of his life to literature. His passion for Shakespeare
resulted in mellifluous Tswana translations of five plays
from "Comedy of Errors" to "Merchant of Venice" and "Julius Caesar".
His passion for the history of his people, and of his family in particular,
resulted in a historical novel, "Mhudi (An Epic of South African Native Life
a Hundred Years Ago)", dedicated to his daughter Olive who had died
in the influenza epidemic while Plaatje was overseas --
described in the dedication as "one of the many victims of a settled system".

"Mhudi" was published by the missionary press at Lovedale in 1930,
in a somewhat bowdlerized version. It has since been republished
in more pristine form and is today considered not just the first
but one of the very best novels published by a black South African writer
in English.

Plaatje lived an extraordinary life but died a largely disappointed man.
His feats of political journalism had been largely forgotten
and his creative talents had hardly yet been recognised