WHOSE PAST?

Abstract

Soon after it was published in London in 1916, Native Life in South Africa , Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion appeared in further editions, in both London and New York. More than six decades later, in 1982, Ravan Press, a progressive publisher based in Johannesburg, produced the first South African edition, an inexpensive paperback, so allowing Native Life a much wider readership, especially in South Africa. When Ravan Press decided to bring out the new edition, its director asked the novelist Bessie Head, living in exile in Botswana, to write a Foreword. From what she wrote, one might gain the impression that Native Life was primarily a work of history. In his book, she said, Plaatje ‘unfolds the history of a mute and subdued black nation who had learned to call the white man “baas” ‘. She continued: Native Life is wide and deep in its historical reach. A full portrait of the times emerges and we are presented with a view of history reaching back nearly five hundred years and up to a period of change and transition as it has affected the lives of black people. Head ended her Foreword by commenting that ‘most black South Africans suffer from a very broken sense of history. Native Life provides an essential missing link.’ Before a consideration of Head's comments, let me provide some historiographical background. When I wrote a history of South African historiography in the mid-1980s, I wished to make the point that black Africans had written works of history that had been ignored by white professional historians. Native Life was one of the books I mentioned. The earliest of these works by black Africans, I suggested, was the Short History of the Native Tribes of South Africa written by Francis Peregrino, a recent immigrant to South Africa whose father came originally from West Africa. I then mentioned two works of which no copies survive. Alan Kirkland Soga, a contemporary of Plaatje's who also edited an African newspaper, Izwi Labantu , had written a large work of more than 500 pages entitled ‘The Problem of the Relations of Black and White in South Africa’, which seems to have been about to be published in 1906.