Plaatje, Sol(omon) T(shekisho) (1876–1932)

South African novelist, journalist, and political campaigner. Plaatje is best known for Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago (1930; written c. 1920–21), the first novel in English by a black South African. In 1912 he was a founding member of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC; later the African National Congress (ANC)). He also produced works on the Setswana language, including a Setswana–English dictionary, and translations of Shakespeare into Setswana.

Plaatje moved to Mafeking (now Mafikeng), South Africa, as a court interpreter shortly before the Boer War. During the Siege of Mafeking (1899–1900) he kept a journal, which was published posthumously as The Boer War Diary of Sol T. Plaatje (1973). His book Native Life in South Africa (1916) was a scathing indictment of the Land Act of 1913, which limited African land ownership.

In Mafeking, Plaatje edited the English and Setswana weekly newspaper Koranta ea Becoana (The Bechuana Gazette), before founding another newspaper, Tsala ea Batho (Friend of the People), in Kimberley, South Africa. He led a SANNC protest delegation to the UK in 1914 and remained there until 1917, lecturing and writing. In 1919 he joined another unsuccessful SANNC delegation to the Versailles peace conference and later participated in the pan-African congress organized by the US educator and social critic W E B Du Bois. He returned to South Africa in 1923.