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This article was first published in New Frame.
As the ANC celebrates the 109th year of its existence, it is a rebuke to the present to recall the intellectual and literary calibre of its early leaders. Let us take but two: John Langalibalele Dube and Sol T Plaatje.
Dube was elected the first president of the South African Native National Congress, later to be the ANC, in 1912. It was he who led the congress deputation to London in June 1914 to make the case against the previous year’s Native Land Act, by which Blacks were dispossessed of land and traditional agrarian rights such as sharecropping. Plaatje was the secretary on that mission.
He was a politician, intellectual, journalist and author of the seminal
Native Life in South Africa. He was also a writer of fiction. His first and only novel,
Mhudi, was written in 1920 and published a decade later.
Despite being the first novel by a Black South African in English, it had little impact on the literary landscape of the country at the time. However, over the past century, the novel has garnered great interest from scholars.
One notable aspect of the novel is that it centres a woman as its protagonist – the Mhudi of the title – and her role in resistance. Her proactive, adventurous, quick-witted character has led a number of scholars to consider the novel from a feminist perspective. In fact, it has been described as “ahead of its time” for its portrayal of women in an era when women had few rights, and Black women almost none.