Page 5 - Our Land

OUR LAND 5

STUCK IN THE PAST Not much has changed at Kimberley’s railway station and it still looks much as it did in Sol Plaatje’s time

CROSSROADS Boshof in the Free State. Sol Plaatje was born on the Doornkop farm a HISTORY PRESERVED Daniel Plaatje, Sol Plaatje’s great nephew, in the Sol Plaatje
short way from the town Museum in Kimberley

history to the Kimberley of once upon a time. was a newspaperman and stinging editorialist; he was have an undisputed claim to six feet [1.82m] of ground on
In the little Transnet museum tucked away at the end also a clerk and court interpreter during the Siege of which to rest their criminal remains,” he writes. “But
of the main platform, there are collections of railway Mafeking (now Mahikeng). under the cruel operation of the Natives Land Act, little
lamps and old black and white photos of the track that “One can only imagine what it must have been like for children, whose only crime is that God did not make
was once laid across South Africa. There are cutaway him to write out letters of execution,” says Cronjé. them white, are sometimes denied that right in their
sections of old SA Railway (SAR) carriages, with a Sixty kilometres outside Kimberley is the hamlet of ancestral home.”
mannequin sitting demurely on a green leather seat. All Boshof, the closest village to the farm on which Plaatje So we drove through this land of subtle beauties and
the appurtenances that made railway travel so ordered was born. The small museum was closed on the morning winter sorrows. Both before and after Boshof, the land
and luxurious are here. The branded white SAR/SAS we visited, so it is difficult to say whether Plaatje’s was fenced off – a never-ending game farm. Later, it gave
crockery; the tin wash basins and the dormer windows; presence hereabouts is recognised in any way. With its way to agribusiness – tractors with trailers wiggling
the water canisters at the end of the carriage, strapped old red-brick churches, freshly built cooperative store and down the road, doek-clad workers statuesque in the
into place with a brown leather thong. cut-price takeaways (“Gompie Kafee Wegneem etes”) every empty fields, white mounds of lime or fertiliser awaiting
Despite the helpful attentions of Carine Viljoen, the façade hereabouts looks like something you might have spreading. The land here was being worked, apparently
curator, the museum has a vaguely threadbare feel. No seen before – a sumptuous, nostalgia-drenched painting at peace. The debates about restitution and dispossession
mention is made of Plaatje and his contingent’s trip to by Walter Meyer, for example. seemed far, far away.
Bloemhof during what he called Black July all those Turn a dusty corner and then another and you arrive From the Bloemhof train station (now boarded up
years ago. at a different view: the township, with corrugated tin with blue palisade fencing), Plaatje’s party travelled into
This is not to say that Kimberley has forsaken Plaatje. roofs twinkling in the morning sun. Such a township – then Transvaal and later the Orange Free State as far
The municipality is named after him, as is the university. and townships generically – are what often became of afield as Alice. In a land of great political journeying (the
There is a statue of him in the middle of one of the the people forced off the land in 1913. If Meyer is part of Pan Africanist Congress’ Philip Kgosana’s march to the
town’s traffic circles. There is a little Sol Plaatje Museum this broad landscape – and part of the sentimental Houses of Parliament; Deneys Reitz and his treks in the
on Angel Street and he is buried in the West End longing for the truth of this landscape – so is Plaatje. He South African War), his is among the most heroic and
Cemetery. Indeed, Plaatje, his name and his image writes about this landscape’s dark side; what happens in curious.
abounds. the shadows where it is difficult to see. It is also among the bravest. The book he wrote about
Thanks to Johan Cronjé, the curator of the museum As much as anything else, he animated this land, his journey is not always a comfortable read because it is
and library, we know that Plaatje’s Dutch-sounding giving it shape and depth. He detailed the lonely horrors a kaleidoscope of parliamentary debates, anthropological
surname probably came from his grandfather or of Black July. He complimented white farmers’ wives for reflections of African superstition and a travelogue all
grandfather’s brother, who was flat-headed and so called their humanity, noting that they were often the only thrown together with snatches of autobiography. Such
“Plat-ene”, which, in turn, became, “Plaat-je”. barrier between cruelty and destitution. jostling registers don’t always harmonise. For all this, one
Educated by German missionaries, Plaatje was a In the early part of Native Life, he wrote about the thing is unmistakable: secreted behind the words in
telegraph messenger and a letter carrier at the Kimberley privations of the goat farmer Kgobadi, who had to bury Native Life in South Africa is a great howl of anguish. It
Post Office. A lifelong teetotaller, he loved Shakespeare, his child under the cover of darkness. is an anguish that has never gone away. Perhaps it
played indifferent cricket and fathered six children. He “Even criminals dropping straight from the gallows never will.