Sol T. Plaatje's paremiological quest: a common humanity in cultural diversity

Abstract

Having written and compiled from memory, over 700 Setswana proverbs when he was briefly resident in London, around the 1900s, Sol T. Plaatje exhibited unusual ethnographic knowledge and remarkable, creative translation skills in diaspora-like circumstances. While most literary researchers attest to those achievements, few have been the theories that account sufficiently for Plaatje's multilingual proverb renditions. The view propounded here is that Plaatje's paremiological enterprise was probably never only an exercise of his polyglot abilities. Rather his quest appears to have been to assert the cultural similarities and convergences between African and European people's histories. His socio-political beliefs propelled deep pride over his Setswana identity and became the driving force for highlighting the human bonds among nations of the North and the South. For Plaatje, seeing the overlaps and equivalences in and through the proverbs of the Dutch, English, French, Germans and the Batswana peoples, firstly validated orality as the bedrock of modern literary expression. Secondly, the relationship of the two seemed to recapitulate the communicative connections among people and their languages, across time and space. Lastly, the paper makes the point that Plaatje's search for unity in the cultural diversity as exhibited in his 1916 Diane tsa Setswana collection and the 1924 A Sechuana Reader stories, provides instructive lessons that present-day South Africa would ill afford to ignore considering the social cohesion challenges the nation faces.