From South Africa, to Europe, to North America and Back: Sol Plaatje, W.E.B. Du Bois and the Routes of Romance

This essay looks at early twentieth-century contacts between South African and Black American intellectuals and focuses on the travels and textual production of South African writer, scholar and politician Sol T. Plaatje (1876-1932), whose work for South Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century and personal exchanges with the African American intelligentsia of the period, particularly with W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), can provide a reflection on the constraints of national or continental models in the study of cultures, and at the same time promote a rethinking of the contemporary transnational and diasporic theoretical landscape. During his 1920s travels—from South Africa, to England, to North America and back—Plaatje drew a revised cultural cartography of the relationships between the three continents: the triangulation of his movements physically sketches a network of inextricable relationships on the Atlantic map, which is essentially aimed at de-marginalizing South Africa by connecting it to transatlantic flows, but which also articulates a critical distance both from European imperial policies and from black American racial pan-Africanism, in ways that tell of a complex use of transnational elements and national or local assertion. Plaatje’s travels, as well as his writings, in fact offer a paradigm for the investigation of the zones of interaction, dependence and distance between Africa and the Atlantic world--an interaction which went on to include the growing presence of ‘democratic’ north America after a failed confrontation with the European imperial power. A comparative reading of two romances, Plaatje's Mhudi (1930) and Du Bois's Dark Princess (1928), aims at delineating Plaatje's dialogic relationship with the black culture on the other side of the Atlantic, in which the triangulation of his sea journeys is clearly inscribed.