MHUDI

First Edition: 225 pages, original green cloth titled gilt on the upper cover and spine, front free endpaper has been removed, some light foxing, a very good copy. 

Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876-1932) was one of the most gifted and versatile black South Africans of his generation. He was in the forefront of the public affairs of the African people for the greater part of his adult life as politician, writer and journalist. He devoted his many talents to one overriding cause: the struggle of African people against injustice and dispossession during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. Mhudi was the first novel in English to be written by a black South African.  

'Mhudi can be read at several different levels, most obviously as an historical novel reconstructing events which had happened nearly a century before. No historical novel, however, deals simply with the past, for its author commands the benefit of hindsight which knows the present consequences of past actions. In Mhudi contemporary South African politics are implicitly and explicitly present in the account of the rise and fall of Mzilikazi's Transvaal kingdom and therefore the novel observes some of the conventional effects of the historical novel. Mhudi is, however, far from being a conventional narrative. The novel is curiously disjunctive, with multiple narrators, odd shifts of tone and no very clear resolutions to the issues the narrative raises.'  (Anthony Chennels, English in Africa 24 No.1 (May 1997).