Page 4 - Our Land
P. 4
OUR LAND 4
LIFE GOES ON This tree at Kimberley’s railway station was there when Sol Plaatje visited the city 100 years ago
BLACK JULY
AND THE HOWL OF ANGUISH
Luke Alfred and photographer John Hogg retrace the steps of Sol Plaatje’s
‘tour of observation’ following the devastating Natives Land Act of 1913
arly one morning in the first week of July The Sol the crop in return. They preferred servants and labourers
1913, an unusual group of passengers Plaatje with no independent access to, say, a small herd of cattle.
boarded an east-bound train at Kimberley statue Literally between a rock and a hard place, many
station. They were travelling with bicycles, at the sharecroppers voted with their feet after the act had
notebooks and pens and, as the sun rose, municipal been passed. They gathered their possessions and walked
Ethey shuttled across the winter veld as far building in off farms on which they’d worked for years. After a
as Bloemhof, just inside the Transvaal border. Kimberley, summer of drought and a winter of cold, they left their
The following morning, they woke, left their luggage on the site homes to face a perilous future.
with the local mission school teacher and mounted of his There was another compelling reason for the Natives
their bicycles, peddling to the diamond diggings on the printing Land Act. On the Witwatersrand far away, the mines
banks of the Vaal River. works were facing a labour crisis. The experiment with the
They had notebooks at the ready and their mission importation of cheap Chinese labour had run its course.
was hard-nosed: they had come to find evidence of the The Union government needed to find a means of
dispossessed, those former African sharecroppers who re-directing the self-sufficient labouring poor off the
had been forced off the land by the infamous Natives land. If people weren’t voluntarily going to come to the
Land Act of 1913 and flooded into the Transvaal like the cities, they needed to be prodded there, like cattle. The
waters of the river they had just crossed. foundations of our modern industrial economy were
Dubbing this a “tour of observation” they wanted to being laid, brick by coercive brick.
see for themselves the effects of the act, to witness the If you walk along the platform at Kimberley’s railway
tangible effects of legislation that had remained abstract. station today, you will find it largely as Plaatje and his
One of their number, a short, round-faced man with a fellow travellers found it that July morning 105 years
sturdy mission-school education and penchant for tweed ago. Yes, there are two bright-blue diesel locomotives
suits, wrote a book about his travels. His name was Sol squatting on the track, but, in other respects, the scene is
Plaatje and his book, published after much struggle in peaceful and unchanged.
1916, was called Native Life in South Africa. The wrought-iron latticework of the platform awnings
For many reasons – literary, political, sociological – the is as it was way back when and the platform has been
book became famous. The best reason for its fame (and recently hosed down, awaiting its next contingent of
continuing fame) is that it documents – in sometimes snap-happy Rovos Rail travellers. Walk further down
harrowing detail – the founding of modern industrial the platform and there’s a gigantic magnolia tree that
South Africa. must have been there in Plaatje’s day. Idle further still
The legislators didn’t like the idea of partially into the shunting yards behind the mainline station and
autonomous black sharecroppers, folk who helped a you can see church spires and steeples on three of the
farmer plant and harvest while taking a small share of four hands of the compass, a quick glimpse through
