Every year on 27 April, South Africa pauses to mark the day in 1994 when, for the first time, every adult citizen was permitted to vote. It is a day of genuine historical significance, and the feeling it produces, even now, three decades on, is hard to define.
But what I know for sure is that Freedom Day does something to me that I suspect it does to many people who work in the history of South African political thought: it makes me think about those who wanted this freedom long before it arrived. Thos who worked for it across their entire lives, who died without it, and who understood it with a clarity the democratic dispensation has not always matched.
This year, the year he would have turned 150, I think about Sol T. Plaatje.
The man and his moment
Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was born in 1876 in the Boshof district of the Orange Free State. After his death in 1932 in Pimville, Soweto, he was largely unacknowledged outside a small circle of intellectuals and activists. But his genius could not be suppressed forever. The autodidact mastered at least eight languages; wrote The Mafeking Diary during the South African War (1899-1902); edited three newspapers Koranta ea Becoana, Tsala ea Becoana and Tsala ea Batho between 1901 and 1915; published Native Life in South Africa (1916), a political book against the 1913 Natives Land Act; published Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and Their European Equivalents (1916); published Mhudi (1930), the first full-length novel in English by a black South African; translated four of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana; and served as founding corresponding secretary of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) that would become the ANC. He led the SANNC’s deputation to London to oppose the Land Act.
He was also, by any honest reckoning, a man who never lived a single day of his adult life in a free country. Born a British colonial subject, he became a citizen of the Union of South Africa whose constitution explicitly excluded black people from meaningful political participation. He watched the Land Act reduce African landholding rights to 7% of the country’s surface area, then sailed to London in 1914 to argue the case before a Crown that declined to intervene. He spent the remaining 18 years organising and advocating under conditions of systematic legal and economic subjection.
And yet Plaatje understood freedom more precisely, more comprehensively, and more practically than most of the people who eventually won it.
Freedom is not the absence of chains
The most important thing Plaatje understood about freedom, documented with extraordinary richness across 15 years of his newspapers, is that freedom is not a single condition. It is a constellation of specific rights, capacities, and recognitions, and the removal of any one of them diminishes the whole.
Read his columns from 1901 to 1915, and you encounter a man documenting, with fiscal precision and human detail, exactly what unfreedom looked like in practice. The family whose cattle died on the road because no landowner would permit them to graze. The family forced to bury their child on the roadside because no farmer would allow them on their property. The court in Lichtenburg where a translation chain, English to Afrikaans to Setswana, each step an opportunity for distortion, administered justice on men and women with no recourse to any other.
Freedom, for Plaatje, was not the absence of these specific injuries. It was their active remediation. The right to own land, to vote, to receive a return on your tax contribution, to be addressed by a court in your own language, to educate your children in proportion to what you paid in, and to move through the country without a pass in your pocket.
On 27 April 1994, South Africans won the vote. What Plaatje’s journalism tells us, in meticulous detail, is that the vote was always necessary but never sufficient. Freedom Day marks the beginning of the work, not its completion.
Freedom is multilingual — or it is incomplete
One of Plaatje’s most radical acts which is insufficiently recognised in contemporary discussions of press freedom and language rights, was the simple act of publishing in Setswana.
Koranta ea Becoana, launched its first full edition, a one pager, coincidentally on 27 April 1901. It was published in Setswana in and added English later. Over a decade later, Tsala ea Batho extended this to three languages, adding isiXhosa. This was not a commercial strategy. It was a political argument that the language of the colonised was adequate to the demands of political thought, legal argument, and social critique. It displayed that a community had the right to receive information about its own situation in the language through which that situation was lived. And that freedom, meant to know and be known in your own tongue.
South Africa has 11 official languages. English remains the dominant language of power in the courts of law, boardrooms, national media, and the institutions through which the post-apartheid dispensation is administered. The communities most affected by decisions made in those institutions are, in many cases, communities whose home languages are not English. The gap between official multilingualism and the actual language of power is one of the most persistent structural inequalities of the democratic era.
Plaatje identified this problem in 1901 and spent the rest of his life working against it. We are still working against it.
Freedom is fiscal — otherwise it is a slogan
The most devastating tool in Plaatje’s journalistic arsenal was not rhetoric. It was arithmetic.
In the Tsala ea Batho columns of 1913 and 1914, he assembled figures that proved the fiscal architecture of racial domination with the precision of an auditor. In the Orange Free State, Natives paid £80,000 in annual taxes. Of that sum, £30,000 went to white children’s education. A paltry £3,000 was returned to the black children whose communities had contributed most of the money. The Kimberley school board begged for £5,000 to house 500 black children while the government spent £24,000 on a building for 300 white ones.
Plaatje gathered these numbers himself from parliamentary records, municipal accounts, and commission reports the colonial administration was legally required to produce but had no interest in publicising. He was doing, in 1914, what we would now call accountability journalism. And his argument is one that Freedom Day invites us to revisit annually: a community that funds the state through its taxes and receives a fraction of that investment in return is not, in any meaningful sense, free. It is subsidising its own subjection.
The numbers have changed for South Africa’s budget, its school infrastructure, health system and land reform programme; but the structure of the argument has not.
Freedom requires someone willing to say the uncomfortable thing
Plaatje’s editorial courage is the most under-celebrated dimension of his legacy. He named, consistently and publicly, what powerful people preferred to leave unnamed.
When the SANNC’s Land Act campaign was being undermined by John Tengo Jabavu, the editor of the country’s oldest black newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (launched in 1884) with substantial white liberal support, Plaatje tracked the electoral evidence that proved Jabavu’s claimed constituency was a fiction. When General Louis Botha told him not to speak about the evictions he had personally witnessed across the Eastern Cape and Free State, Plaatje replied: “You’re telling me? I saw them in Alice, King Williamstown and East London being stopped from ploughing their fields after it rained.” When Lewis Harcourt at the Colonial Office declined to intervene against the Land Act, Plaatje published the full account of the meeting and let his readers draw their own conclusions about what imperial protection was actually worth.
For Plaatje, press freedom was not an abstract principle. It was the daily practice of saying what was true, to an audience that needed to know it, in the face of power that preferred they did not.
South Africa has, on paper, one of the most robust legal frameworks for press freedom on the continent. In practice, it has newsrooms gutted by commercial pressure, journalists facing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) designed to silence investigation, and a media ownership landscape whose concentration creates structural pressures on editorial independence that Plaatje would have recognised and resisted. Press freedom, like political freedom, is not a condition you achieve. It is a condition you maintain, daily, against forces with a structural interest in its erosion.
What Plaatje would say today
I am sometimes asked what Plaatje would make of post-apartheid South Africa. It is an unanswerable question. But thinking about his journalism, its fiscal precision, its multilingual ambition, and its institutional groundedness, I suspect his assessment would be characteristically precise and characteristically impatient.
He would celebrate the vote. He would note, with the same arithmetical rigour he brought to the Free State education budget of 1914, that the structural relationship between what Black South Africans pay into the state and what they receive back has not been transformed as completely as Freedom Day rhetoric suggests. He would observe that the languages of the majority are still not the languages of power. He would note that the press is under pressures that its legal freedom does not protect it from. And then he would sit down at his typewriter, or its 2026 equivalent, and get back to work.
Because that, finally, is the most important thing Plaatje’s life teaches us about freedom. It is not a destination. It is a practice. It is the daily work of documentation, accountability, truth-telling, and advocacy that a free society requires from the people who understand what it means and what it costs.
He practised it for 30 years without security, with little recognition, and certainly without the constitutional standing that every South African citizen now possesses.
On Freedom Day, the least we can do is practise it with the vote in our hands and the full weight of his example behind us.
- Dr Lesley Mofokeng is a lecturer at the Wits Centre for Journalism, University of the Witwatersrand, and the author of The Man Who Shook Mountains (Jonathan Ball, 2023). His doctoral thesis examines the contribution of Sol T. Plaatje to the history of journalism in South Africa.
On Freedom Day, South Africa should reckon with the man who documented what unfreedom looked like — and what it cost
