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sol plaatjelatest news & developments
Leadership: Bonang Mohale is many things, yet, beyond the impressive titles and achievements lies something far more important: a deep and abiding love for people. Photo: TBCSA / Thabang Radebe
AHMED KATHRADA

You have to love your people to lead them

Too often, leadership is seduced by power. The allure of authority, prestige and influence can slowly overwhelm the original motivation to serve people. What begins as a…

  • Sello Hatang
8 min read
Sepedi poet and cultural worker Moses Seletisa
AFRICAN LANGUAGES

Speaking in tongues: The literary revolution rooted in Sepedi and Setswana

The quiet power of Moses Seletisa’s Sepedi poetry and Sabata Mokae’s Setswana novels

  • Rolland Simpi Motaung
8 min read
Grounded: Among the issues explored by Lebogang Seale in his book One Hundred Years of Dispossession is the failure of the government to equitably redistribute and restore land.
BANTU AUTHORITIES ACT

Lebogang Seale’s book tracks a century of injustice in his family’s quest for land

One Hundred Years of Dispossession: My Family’s Quest to Reclaim Our Land traces his family’s ongoing struggle to strengthen their restitution case

  • Lesego Makgatho
5 min read
South African writer Sol Plaatje was aware of the irony that the British Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act was passed a year after the enactment of the Natives Land Act, says Sandra Swart in her book The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past.
BOOKS

People and animals: A shared history, shared cruelties

An edited extract from The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past

  • Professor Sandra Swart
11 min read
(Rajesh Jantilal/Getty Images)
ALBERT LUTHULI

Has the tripartite alliance become an anachronism?

Can the South African Communist Party exist effectively and independently of the ANC?

  • Benzi Ka-Soko
5 min read
Chris Hani was shot dead in the driveway of his home in 1993. Photo: Supplied
ALBERT LUTHULI

Has the tripartite become an anachronism?

Can the South African Communist Party exist effectively and independently?

  • Benzi Ka-Soko
5 min read
Words: Among SA’s celebrated people is activist, academic and writer Charlotte Maxeke
ARCHIE MAFEJE

OPINION| Black writers and publishers are South Africa’s ‘linguistic orphans’

The challenges we face in the world of scholarly and leisure reading and writing are not unique to our country but it is crucial to overcome them if we want to be as good as we…

  • Karabo Kgoleng
4 min read
Culture of struggle: Diturupa troupes in Makapanstad celebrate the role of black soldiers in the first and second world wars. (Photos: Lucas Styles Ledwaba)
BOOK REVIEWS

Review: ‘Culture and the Liberation Struggle in South Africa’: On the arts as a catalyst in the quest for true freedom

This new collection of essays, tributes and analyses focuses on the role of culture in the fostering of radical consciousness

  • Gaongalelwe Tiro
7 min read
Bhekizizwe Peterson pictured with National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) awards judge Professor Hlonipha Mokoena in 2018, after a book he co-edited won a prize. (Image courtesy of NIHSS)
AFRICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION ALA

Great heart of African literature: Bheki Peterson’s expansive vision of the world

Having conducted the bulk of his study during apartheid, which informed his scholarship, Peterson left us with provocations for the future

  • Janet Remmington
6 min read
Transdisciplinary: Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson enjoyed challenging young people’s views. (Photo: Nom’Ay Matola)
AFRICAN ARTS

Bheki Peterson: Pursuing radical epistemological thought with an understated erudition

The soft-spoken scholar had a towering impact on scholarship, artistic work, teaching practice and activism

  • Sanele kaNtshingana
7 min read
Writer Sol Plaatje ‘constantly exploded the image created of him’. (SOAS Archives, University of London)
AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS
Video

Sol Plaatje and the antinomies of writing against ‘South Africa’

The renowned author’s foundational anti-colonial work deserves more than a dogmatic reading

  • V Njabulo Zwane
5 min read
Stephen Gray edited a series of South African works for Penguin, bringing back into print several almost forgotten classics. (Paul Botes)
ATHOL FUGARD

Obituary: Literary allrounder Stephen Gray was a scholar, critic, novelist and poet

Stephen Gray made an immense, long contribution to the South African literary landscape across many genres, but it was poetry that he described as ‘the main activity of my life’

  • Shaun De Waal
4 min read
South Africa’s land reform journey is still shaped by the legacies of colonial conquest and apartheid. (Madelene Cronjé)
1913 LAND ACT

Recall unheard voices in South Africa’s history

Adelaide Tantsi Dube’s poem was published in 1913, the year Africans were stripped of their land

  • Athambile Masola
5 min read
A new biography gives  the real Sol Plaatje
SANNC

A new biography gives  the real Sol Plaatje

The Sol Plaatje biography is a triumph of research to which its length gives testimony.

  • Matthew Blackman
  • Matthew Blackman Guest Author
7 min read
ANC insiders in the municipality say this is all bad blood stemming from the removal of former mayor Mangaliso Matika. (Find it in Kimberley)
ANC

Sol Plaatje Mayor steps down following reinstatement by the court

The ANC regional executive committee will now provide the provincial executive committee with three potential candidates to become the new mayor

  • Gemma Ritchie
2 min read
Mangaliso Matika (Find it in Kimberley)
AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS

DA applies for interdict demanding mayor’s removal

The Northern Cape High Court will hear an urgent application on Tuesday calling for mayor Mangaliso Matika’s removal.

  • Richard J Loria
3 min read
In-depth interviews with black women in the media conducted in the study attest to daily struggles with race and gender (John McCann)
ANC

75 schools closed in Kimberley as violent protests pick up

Sol Plaatje municipality may be facing another shutdown after schools were closed and businesses disrupted on Monday

  • Gemma Ritchie
2 min read
Sol Plaatje at his writing desk taken from his book Native Life in South Africa.
KIMBERLEY

Kimberley’s Sol Plaatje statue at the heart of new wrangle

A life-sized statue of Solomon Plaatje has been languishing in storage for nine years after objections from his family over the way he was depicted

  • Staff Reporter
4 min read
The centennial publication of Sol Plaatje’s seminal, ‘Native Life’ is a timely reminder of his estimation of intellectual work, in contrast to the current disparagement of ‘clever blacks’.
AFRICAN LITERATURE

Conversing across a century with thinker, author and politician Sol T Plaatje

Plaatje encouraged independent thought. He felt that a critical disposition coupled with empirical evidence & public accountability was indispensable.

  • Bhekizizwe Peterson
8 min read
HIE Dhlomo’s esteem of Plaatje and his writing were generally shared by African intellectuals of the time.
AFRICAN POLITICS

‘Native life’ 100 after Sol Plaatje published it

Edited extract of the editors’ introduction in ‘Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present’ (Wits University Press).

  • Bhekizizwe Peterson
10 min read