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ABSTRACT
Solomon Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916) has recently been reinterpreted as a foundational text for black South African history, politics and literature. But what importance might it have for scholars interested in literature and the environment in Africa? This essay re-reads Native Life through Rob Nixon’s work on environmental writer-activism and environmental justice and Jennifer Wenzel’s concept of “contrapuntal environmentalisms” in pursuit of three interrelated goals: to excavate the ecological subtext of Native Life in South Africa; to re-insert Plaatje and Native Life into the broader history of writing about land and landscape in the region; and to consider Plaatje’s importance to some of the debates about environmental justice and environmental aesthetics that preoccupy the environmental humanities today.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Plaatje, Native Life, 17.
2 Cherryl Walker points out that these popularly cited figures are part of a history that has been appropriated in problematic ways by the post-apartheid South African state. She does not directly dispute the accuracy of the 87%/13% distribution, but does suggest that the differences between legal ownership and land occupation are more complicated than the ANC’s version of history makes it seem. See Walker, “Critical Reflections.”
3 Here and elsewhere I highlight the importance of agricultural land to foreground the human-centered aspects of Plaatje’s nascent environmentalism and to distinguish the land in question from other Southern African landscapes that have been important to the study of literature and the environment in Southern Africa. Plaatje’s concern in Native Life in South Africa is working land, not the animal-filled scenery of Kruger Park or the seemingly inhuman vastness that defines Olive Schreiner’s Karoo from Story of an African Farm (1883) or J. M. Coetzee’s in Life & Times of Michael K (1983).
4 I define “environment” as the material conditions defining a given place or locale, and “ecology” as the system of relations between living and non-living elements of a given place or locale. For more on the concept of “environment,” see Mazel, “American Literary Environmentalism,” 137–146. On “ecology” as a concept in ecocriticism, see Phillips, Truth of Ecology, 42–82.
5 In addition to being a prolific writer, Plaatje was a founding member of the South African Native National Congress, which later became known as the African National Congress, or ANC. See Chrisman, “Fathering the Black Nation,” 57–73 and Boehmer, Empire, 125–168.
6 Sandra Swart brings the tools of animal studies to bear on Native Life in South Africa in “The Politics of Species.” However, most of the other recent scholarship on Plaatje’s life and work focuses on his role as an activist or on the place of his work in the context of Atlantic modernity. See, for instance, Willan, Sol Plaatje; Voss, “Sol Plaatje”; Masilela, “The ‘Black Atlantic’”; and Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions, 89–106. Many of the foregoing themes are explored anew in Janet Remmington, Brian Willan and Bhekizizwe Peterson, eds. Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa.
7 In using the concept of the “environmentalism of the poor,” Nixon draws on the thought of Joan Martinez-Alier, whose work on the social contexts of environmental problems has been fundamental to our understanding of the concept. As Alier explains, the “environmentalism of the poor” is defined by a “material interest in the environment as a source and a requirement for livelihood; no so much a concern with the rights of other species and of future generations of humans as a concern for today’s poor humans.” See Martinez-Alier, Environmentalism of the Poor, 1, 11.
8 Beinart and Delius, “Historical Context.”
9 Jennifer Wenzel, “Reading Fanon.”
10 For an analysis of Du Bois’ relationship to environmental justice thinking, see Oliver, “Apocalyptic and Slow Violence.” On Gandhi’s relationship to environmentalism, see for instance, Naess, Gandhi and the Nuclear Age and Galtung, “Arne Naess, Peace and Gandhi.” On the relationship between black Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies, see Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean.”
11 Plaatje, Native Life, 19.
12 Ibid., 19.
13 Plaatje’s account of burying his son deliberately reworks Du Bois’ account of the same act in The Souls of Black Folk, and Native Life in South Africa mirrors much of Souls in its overall structure and tone. Du Bois, for his part, reveals Plaatje’s influence throughout the pages of Darkwater, where the Land Act of 1913 becomes part of his argument about the evils of white supremacy on a global scale. On the links between Native Life and The Souls of Black Folk, see Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions, 89–137. For the relevant sections of Darkwater, see Du Bois, Darkwater, 63.
14 On the history of land distribution, also see Feinberg and Horn, “South African Territorial Segregation.”
15 Beinart and Delius, “Historical Context,” 670.
16 See Plaatje, Native Life, 112 and Beinart and Delius, “Historical Context,” 690.
17 Keegan, Rural Transformations, 191.
18 Beinart and Delius, “Historical Context,” 668.
19 In his contribution to Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present, Keith Breckenridge addresses the claim that, as he describes it, “the arguments in Native Life were neither representative of the desires of the majority of Africans on the land, nor––most importantly––of the actual conditions under which farming continued for much of the twentieth century,” a position he aligns with Delius and Beinart, among others. I turn to Delius and Beinart not because I wish to join those who might see Plaate’s class status as blinding him to the consequences of the Land Act as experienced––I do not believe their account supports such an interpretation of Native Life––but because of how their suggestion that history as it actually happened may have unfolded differently enables me to reframe Native Life in South Africa through the lens that Nixon offers. In this view, Plaatje emphasizes the scale of evictions not because he is biased or unreliable, but because Native Life reworks the events in question into a narrative meant to compel its readers to action against a violence that might otherwise be recognizable. See Breckenridge, “African Progressivism,” 175.
20 My argument in this section touches on some similar questions as does Bhekizizwe Peterson’s recent “Modernist at Large: The Aesthetics of Native Life in South Africa.” However, while Peterson emphasizes Plaatje’s ties to the networks of global modernism, my discussion locates Plaatje within a more expansive history of writer-activism and the environmentalism of the poor.
21 Nixon, Slow Violence, 15.
22 Plaatje, Native Life, 15.
23 Peterson, “Modernist at Large,” 27.
24 Plaatje, Native Life, 21.
25 Ibid., 81.
26 Ibid., 76.
27 See Gordimer, Six Feet, 70–71.
28 Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.
29 Ibid., 6.
30 Plaatje, Native Life, 155, 162.
31 Plaatje’s insistence that the Land Act was primarily a means of catering to Afrikaner farming interests is contested by historians who point out that the rigid spatial segregation inherent in the apartheid system was in many respects a natural outgrowth of British colonial policy in South Africa. See Keegan, Colonial South Africa, 4.
32 Nixon, Slow Violence, 18.
33 Ibid., 19.
34 Ibid.
35 Plaatje, Native Life, 60.
36 Ibid., 61.
37 Ibid., 62.
38 Chrisman, “Fathering the Black Nation,” 57.
39 On the controversies among historians regarding Native Life, see Saunders, “Whose Past?” .
40 See, for instance, Khan, “Environmental Racism.” Other versions of this argument can be found in Steyn and Wessels, “Emergence of New Environmentalism” and Patel, “Environmental Justice in South Africa.”
41 On Plaatje and British literary history, see Voss, “Sol Plaatje.” For an overview of Native Life’s place in South African literary and political history, see Remmington et al, “Native Life in South Africa.”
42 Blair, “The Liberal Tradition,” 475.
43 Ngcobo, “A Black South African Woman,” 189.
44 John Kumalo is said to have a powerful voice but “with no brain behind it to tell it what to say, with no courage to say if it knew.” See Paton, Cry, 167.
45 On this point, see Coetzee, White Writing, 5.
46 See Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions, 98–99.
47 See Plaatje, Native Life, 15.
48 Sukanya Bannerjee makes both Gandhi and Dadabhai Naoroji into central figures in her account of the politics of imperial citizenship in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in Becoming Imperial Citizens. Elleke Boehmer provides an extensive analysis of the parallel careers of Gandhi and Plaatje in Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 125–168. Breckenridge discusses the relationship between Plaatje and Gandhi in “African Progressivism.” Jacob Dlamini also touches on Plaatje’s interest in imperial citizenship debates in “Land and Belonging,” 202.
49 Bannerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens, 24.
50 Plaatje, Native Life, 15–16.
51 Paton, Cry, 226–35.
52 On the history of drought and deterioration in the colonial imagination, see Beinart, “Introduction,” 147–48.
53 Showers, “Soil Erosion,” 264.
54 Ibid., 268.
55 Plaatje, Native Life, 61.
56 Ibid., 62.
57 Coetzee, White Writing, 5.
58 Schreiner, African Farm, 88.
59 Ibid., 83.
60 Remmington, “Going Places.”
61 See Vital, “Situating Ecology”; Vital, ‘Another Kind of Combat”; and Vital, “Towards an African Ecocriticism.”
62 Peterson, Modernist at Large, 31–33.
63 Saunders, “Whose Past?” .
64 For a brief overview of environmental justice groups in contemporary South Africa, see Cock, “How the Environmental Justice Movement is Gathering Steam.” Scholarly accounts of environmental justice issues in post-apartheid South Africa include Leonard, “Bridging Social and Environmental Risks”; Patel, “Environmental Justice in South Africa”; and Leonard and Pelling, “Mobilisation and Protest.”
65 See, for instance, DeLoughrey and Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies and Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green.
66 Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.”
67 Plaatje and Du Bois actively corresponded with one another, but as Elleke Boehmer explains, Gandhi and Plaatje never interacted and each writer showed clear hostility to each other’s respective racial group. On Plaatje and Du Bois, see Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions, 89–137. On Plaatje and Gandhi’s attitudes towards Indians and Africans, respectively, see Boehmer, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 159–164.
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Brady Smith
Brady Smith works on African literature and the environmental humanities, with a focus on Southern Africa. He teaches in the HIP Thinking Program at Avenues: The World School in New York City. He was previously a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he taught in the Humanities Core and in the Department of English.