LESLEY MOFOKENG | Why Sol Plaatje’s journalism matters for SA today

Story audio is generated using AI Sol T Plaatje did not merely write about black civic life. He created it. On his 150th birthday, his story is a lesson every South African needs to hear. In the hands of a community that is formally excluded from institutional channels of political life, a newspaper can function as a catalyst and a theory of governance. Today, Plaatje would have turned 150. Widely known as a political and literary figure, I want to turn your attention to his journalism as I show you why it matters in 2026. Plaatje edited three newspapers, Koranta ea Becoana, Tsala ea Becoana and Tsala ea Batho, between 1901 and 1915. In the publications, he built the civic infrastructure that the colonial state had refused to provide. It came to represent a social contract for black South Africans when the actual social contract of the colonial state was explicitly designed to exclude them. The door was shut on the franchise, the administration of justice, property protections and dignified institutional channels. Out of a printing press, a proverb tradition, and a deep refusal to accept that silence was the only option available to him, Plaatje built a social contract. “[Plaatjes] newspaper was an advice bureau, a legal aid clinic, an organiser for the society.” — Lesley Mofokeng The philosopher Charles Mills, in his landmark work The Racial Contract argued that the famous social contracts of European political philosophy, such as Locke’s and Rousseau’s, the ones that formed the intellectual foundations of democracy, were always simultaneously racial contracts. They were agreements to include some citizens and exclude others. The citizen imagined by Locke was white, male, and propertied. Everyone else was governed not by the contract’s protections but by the terms of racial exclusion. Plaatje knew this. Not because he had read Mills (Mills would write his book 60 years after Plaatje’s death), but because he lived it. He had been a court interpreter in Mafikeng’s magistracy and watched the colonial justice system from the inside. He translated its language in both directions, and he knew precisely what it was doing and to whom. He knew the contract and who it excluded. So, he built something else. As the country gears up for local government elections, one is reminded that Koranta ea Becoana carried a voter registration guide in December 1903. The Cape Colony’s qualified franchise was technically available to black men who met certain income thresholds. In practice, it was designed to be impenetrable; it was a system whose hospitality to black participation existed only on paper. Plaatje’s guide did not simply explain the legal requirements. It named specific registrars in specific districts, identified which officials were cooperating with black applicants and which were obstructing them, and provided readers with the precise legal language needed to insist on their rights. The newspaper was an advice bureau, a legal aid clinic, an organiser for the society. This is what I mean when I say Plaatje built a social contract. He could not create the franchise. He could not amend the colonial constitution. But he could document its failures, educate the community it was failing, name the officials responsible, and give readers the tools to demand what they were legally entitled to. And then the Natives Land Act came in 1913. It allocated just seven percent of South Africa’s land to its black majority of about five million and prohibited them from purchasing or renting land outside designated reserves. Hundreds of thousands of farm labourers and sharecroppers were driven from land they had worked for generations. Plaatje crossed from the Cape into the Orange Free State to find out what it was doing to actual families in an early form of field journalism. He went to the source without an institutional budget or support, relying on his moral determination that if he did not record the suffering of his people, no record would survive. But the testimony I find most devastating in the whole archive is a business letter. The newspaper’s distribution agent in Wolvehoek, a small town in the Free State, wrote to cancel his account. His customers had been evicted from their land. There was no longer anyone to sell newspapers to. He sent 16 shillings for September and asked that no further copies be sent until, he wrote, “the evicted reached Madiko — for now, there were no customers to service.” The community had been dispersed. The civic infrastructure Plaatje had been building for 12 years was destroyed not by censorship or legal suppression but by the destruction of the economic community that had sustained it. The Land Act did not ban Tsala ea Batho. It simply scattered the people who read it until no one was left to collect it from the agent at Wolvehoek. The newspaper closed in 1915. But I wish for you to understand what it had been before it closed, as it speaks directly to what black communities do when the state fails to govern for them. In the Setswana columns of Koranta ea Becoana, Plaatje deployed a proverb that is, in my reading, the most concentrated political philosophy available in the early 20th-century South African archive: Fa ele selekanyo se o lekanyang ka shone le wena se tla go lekanyetsa. (The measure by which you measure will be used to measure you). This was a philosophical argument about the structure of legitimate governance. It says: any authority that applies one standard to itself and another to those it governs has forfeited its claim to legitimacy, because legitimacy in the Setswana political tradition is constituted through reciprocal obligation. That proverb, in 1902, was the governing argument. And it was made in a language the colonial administration could not read. On Plaatje’s 150th birthday, let’s remember that he built — without constitutional protection — an institutional channel for black civic claims and certainly without adequate financial support. He built newspapers in the language of his own philosophical tradition, using the conceptual resources his community’s oral culture had preserved. These were the institutions through which a political community that had no formal political existence could nevertheless speak. When you read about a community WhatsApp group organising to fix a pothole the municipality has ignored, or a stokvel providing financial services the banks won’t offer, or a neighbourhood watch doing the work that the police have abandoned, you are looking at Plaatje’s inheritance. It is an admirable power of community self-organisation and the refusal of silence. Happy 150th, Morolong. Dr Lesley Mofokeng holds a PhD on Plaatje’s journalism from Wits University, where he lectures at the Wits Centre for Journalism. He is the author of The Man Who Shook Mountains (Jonathan Ball, 2023).