‘It Is As Bad To Be a Black Man's Animal As It Is To Be a Black Man’ – The Politics of Species in Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa

Abstract

‘This law makes us dogs, stray dogs for all time’1Ilanga Lase Natal, 22 August 1913Sol Plaatje and his contemporaries described the traumatic effects of the Natives Land Act 27 of 1913: forced expulsions of Africans and their animals, followed by desperate livestock sales at slaughterhouse prices. In many places, previously secure sharecroppers on white-owned farms became roaming exiles accompanied by their skeletal sheep and cattle, many of which starved along the road. Yet no single overarching narrative can capture the new law's immediate effects, as the dynamics of changes were geographically idiographic. This Act is perhaps the most thoroughly studied piece of legislation in South Africa's past, but the historical meta-narrative should be contested. The ‘land’ part of this Act has monopolised historiographical attention, while other aspects have been neglected. In this essay, I hope, therefore, to contribute another category to the analytical lens of class, race and gender through which the Act has been considered: species. Thus I focus on Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa as a key source, arguing that his repeated refrain that the Act was ‘cruel to animals’ was both a sincere response to its impact on African livestock and a deftly deployed act of political theatre scripted by Plaatje himself.