Academic literature on the topic 'Plaatje, Sol T., 1875-1932. Mhudi'

This study brings together Plaatje’s politicaland literary visions, arguing that the one informs the other. Plaatje’s literary work is used as a starting point for the discussion, and the first chapter explores the relationship of his political and artistic visions. Mhudi is his definitive romance text, and it is argued that Plaatje’s romance visionin this text is reflected in his political thinking, and in turn reflected by it. His romance work was part of a literary romance tradition which Plaatje both drew upon and transformed, and thus the basic features of romance are explored in Chapter Two. Plaatje’s work is situated between two influential romance models, therefore Chapter Two also discusses the romances of Shakespeare, whomPlaatje read as reflectinga non-racial humanism that was translatable into the African context, in terms of political vision and of literary text. His other models were the colonial romances of Haggard. It is argued that, while Plaatje could glean many elements fromHaggardthat suited his purposes as an African, specifically a SouthAfrican, writer, he nevertheless—despite his own pro-British leanings, qualified though they might have been by the complexities of his colonial context—would not have represented Africa and Africans in terms of the exotic other in the way Haggard clearly did. Thus Plaatje, in terms of his romance vision, may have usedmanyofthe themesand techniques of Haggardianromance, but consistently qualified these colonial works by using the more classically shaped Shakespearean romance structure at the deep level of his work. The third chapter examines Haggard’s romance, but differentiates between two Haggardian types, the completed or resolved romance, whichis more classical in its form, and evokes an image of a completed quest, as well as the necessity of the quester entering the world again. Haggard’s “completed” African romance, it is argued, is resolved only in terms of a colonial vision. Chapter Four, by contrast, examines examples of his unresolved African romance, in which African ideals implode, and show themselves to be inneed of foreign intervention. It is argued that Haggard’s image of Africa was based on the unresolved or incomplete romance. His vision of Africa was such that it could not in itself provide the materialfor completed romance. This vision saw intervention as the only option for South Africa. While Plaatje uses elements of Haggard’s “incomplete” romance models when writing Mhudi, he handles both his narrative and politicalcommentaryin this text in terms of his own politicalthought. This non-racial politicalvisionis guided by his belief that virtue and vice are not the monopoly of any colour, a non-racialism he associates with Shakespeare. However, within the context of the South Africa of his fictionand of his life, this non-racial ideal is constantly under threat. It is partly threatened by political forces, but also challenged by moral changes within individuals and societies. In Chapter Five the examination of Plaatje’s work begins withhis Boer War Diary, inwhicha romance structure is sought beneath his diurnal observations and political optimismduring a time of warfare and siege. The discussion of this text is followed by a reading of Native Life in South Africa in which it is argued that Plaatje looks, in the midst of personal and social suffering, for that which can translate a tragic situation into romance resolution. “Translation” is used in a broad sense, echoing Plaatje’s view of the importance of translation for cross-cultural understanding and harmony. The arguments of Chapter Five are extended into Chapter Six, where a reading of Mhudi places emphasis on the possibilities of change implied in romance. Plaatje’s non-racial humanism recognizes the great potential for injustice and human suffering within the context of South African racism, but constantly seeks to translate such suffering into the triumph of romance. While the narrative of Mhudi concludes on a romance peak, tensions between the tragic and romance possibilities alert the reader to the sense that, despite its romance resolution, something has been lost in the translation of the potential tragedy into romance.

This thesis essays a comparative study of William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe (1925) and Sol Plaatje's Mhudi (1930). Although writing from very different subject positions within the social order of the time, Plomer and Plaatje embody in their novels a strikingly similar vision of a South Africa free of racial barriers. Plaatje's version of South African history in Mhudi deconstructs colonial binarism by dramatizing not only conflict and difference but also co-operation and commonality. Holding the past up as a mirror to the present, it protests against racial injustice while implying the continuing possibility of reconciliation. Plomer reacts angrily to white hypocrisy and insists on the rights and humanity of his African characters, in the name of imperatives both moral and political. He seeks additional sanction for these by situating the South African race questioning the context of a Western world slowly awakening to the consequences of modernity. During a time of political turbulence, both writers speak out boldly and confidently against the rising dominance of segregationist ideology. The imminent inception of full democracy in South Africa has reanimated the relevance of these writers' vision of a non- racial social order. If one of the challenges facing the South African literary historian 'today is the reconstruction of a truly national literary tradition, then Mhudi and Turbott Wolfe would appear to be key works in such an enterprise. As different as Plaatje's epic myth-making is from Plomer's modernist irony, both novels contrive to speak with a new voice: a national voice which expresses the aspirations of all South Africa's people. They are, moreover, novels whose survival seems guaranteed as much by their aesthetic qualities as by their ideological orientation. The novels are examined against the backgrounds of South African society and colonial literary production. They are seen as milestones in the development of a liberal South African literary tradition. By breaking with the dominant oppositional mode, whether that of "white writing" or an emergent "writing black", Plomer and Plaatje exemplify a literature at once socially relevant and possessed of a prophetic vision that remains of significance in South Africa today.

The main thesis of this dissertation is that even a casual analysis of African writing reveals that contemporary African literature has and is still undergoing a distinctive metamorphosis. This change, which amounts to a significant departure from the early fifties, derives its creative impulse from demonic anger and cynical iconoclasm and is triggered by the mind-shattering disillusion that followed independence. The proclivity towards tyranny and the exploitation of the ruled in modern Africa is traced by radical African creative writers to an ancient source: the legendary and god-like rulers of precolonial Africa. Ouologuem's Bound to Violence and Armah's Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers hypothesize that past sins begot present sins. The legendary warrior heroes of the past, whose glory and splendour were once exalted in African writing, are now ruthlessly disentombed and paraded as miscreants and despots, who not only brutalized and sold their people into slavery but also ideologically fabricated their own legends and myths in order to maximize their tyrannical power. The preoccupation of these works is, therefore, to divest the ancient heroes of their false glory. contemporary critics tend to perceive this anti-traditional posture purely as a modern trend in African literature. The truth of the matter, however, is that the literary foundations of this anti-nativist/anti-Afrocentric literary tradition were laid by Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, whose Chaka (1925) and Mhudi (1930) are the precursors. The five primary works in this study parody and veer away from the generally accepted traditional African epic heroism and recorded history towards a communal heroic ideal which celebrates the larger community instead of the single epic heroes normally romanticized in African legendary tradition. These novelists, while dismantling the European and African myths about Africa's Golden Age, also disfigure the often glorified ancient historical landmarks and the fabled heroes of Africa's oral and recorded history. The rationale behind this investigation is the fact that though these works have innovated, assimilated, and parodied the African oral arts, particularly traditional African epic heroism, no detailed study has been made to explore the literary transformation these texts have undergone as written works. Treating African texts only as appendages of Western literature may undermine the ability of the critical evaluations which go into the heart of these texts and unravel their deeper meanings. The outcome of this kind of approach is that pertinent issues of style and theme originating from negro-African metaphysics, oral traditions, and iconography could thereby be left unexplored. Besides, the bulk of the current body of criticism on African literature, particularly on colonial Africa, tends to concentrate on colonialist Christian values and Western literary production models. One of the overriding concerns of this research, therefore, is to veer away from merely rehashing Eurocentric pronouncements on European influences and literary modes parodied by these works, by taking a fresh. look at the texts from the perspective of Afrocentrism and in particular from the point of view of the traditional African oral bards. To this end, therefore, the dissertation is divided into six main chapters and a short concluding chapter: Chapter 1, A Survey of Black Representations of Pre-colonial Africa, functions as an introduction, sketches the European image versus the Black counter-discourse, and locates the study within the current debate on the concept of pre-colonial Africa's Golden Age. Chapter 2, Thomas Mofolo's "Inverted Epic Hero", the nucleus of the study I analyzes the anti-epic and ironic modes manipulated by the text and also maps out the epic generic framework which structures the whole dissertation. Chapter 3, Traditional African Epic Heroism Revised, discusses Plaatje's Mhudi, paying special attention to the text's deployment of the African epic genre as well as the caricaturist and the anti-heroic modes. In Chapter 4, Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence is examined under the title A World Trapped in an Orgy of Violence, Barbarism and Servitude. African oral art is used as the hermeneutic key in unlocking the complexities of Ouologuem's novel. Chapter 5, The African Anti-Legendary Creative Mythology, scrutinizes Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, highlighting, among other topics, Armah's daring innovative stylistic experimentation. Chapter 6, entitled The Akan Iconic Forest of Symbols, deals with Armah' s The Healers, concentrating on the Akan iconographic backdrop which shapes and informs this work. And finally, The Metamorphosis of Traditional African Epic Heroism, the title of the concluding chapter, sums up this dissertation.

Submitted in the partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Arts to the Department of African Literature University of the Witwatersrand, 2017
Sol Plaatje’s novel Mhudi revisits prominent events detailing the relationship between the various clans that occupied the South African Landscape in the 1800’s. This story is a reflection of the conflict that arises between the different groups, how it is overcome and prospects of a new harmonious beginning. Plaatje writes his novel in the light of the occurrences in South Africa following the 1913 Natives Land Act. Plaatje uses various elements of culture and literary aesthetics to pose Mhudi as an allegory of the 1913 Natives Land Act. Literature is a carrier of culture and knowledge that can be used as a credible source to assess the past, the present and the future. Plaatje uses a story of love to elucidate how love conquers evil, the story of land and the knowledge and cultural significance it holds. Through this he highlights the wisdom that lies in the knowledge and application of culture through reverence.
XL2018

The primary intention of this study is to establish the theoretical significance of silence within the sphere of the twentieth-century Southern African novel in English. Clearly a feature of recent writing, silence is less overtly thematised in earlier work. Since relatively little critical and theoretical attention has been paid to silence as a positive phenomenon, however, modes of reading it are sought within the broader sphere of the social sciences, and specifically its tradition of social constructionism. Care is taken to address the pressures of the local context, identified in terms of the postcolonial paradigm as relating to language and to culture. A deliberate theoretical innovation is the renunciation of the trope of penetration in favour of the notion of an interface between intact language-culture systems, given an understanding of culture as existing between subjects in relations of power. Fictional narrative which addresses cross-culturality is thus read as a process of cultural translation, and the volitional deployment of silence as an act of resistance to its power. The significance of language is registered in the use of speech-act theory, in the insistence on meaning as generated in spatially and temporally situated conversation, and in the exploration of the influence of pronominal relations on identity. Emerging from my investigation is a recognition of the measure offered by silence of the autonomy of character as subject, and a corresponding recognition of the constitutive capacity of the reader to site the power of narration amongst the polyphonic voices within the culture of the text. The postcolonial paradigm indicates the need for a regional rather than a national perspective; thus the interfaces considered in the case studies include, in Plaatje's Mhudi, orality and literacy, tribal membership and non-sectarianism, Tswana and English; in Paton's Too Late the Phalarope the private domain and apartheid as public hegemonic discourse, narration as possession, and the tragic as structuring textual relations; and in Head's Maru the constitution of a postcolonial identity that resists and transcends the discursive hostility of racism, and the dislocation, displacement and alienation of exilic refuge from apartheid.
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.