Editing Sol Plaatje (section)

== Early life ==

Plaatje was born in Doornfontein <!-- Not to be confused with the Doornfontein suburb of Johannesburg --> near [[Boshof]], [[Orange Free State]] (now [[Free State Province]], South Africa), the sixth of eight sons.{{sfn|Van Wyk|2003|p=}} His grandfather's name was Selogilwe Mogodi (1836-1881) but his employer, the Boer farmer Groenewald, nicknamed him Plaatje ('Picture') in 1856 and the family started using this as a surname. His parents Johannes and Martha were members of the [[Tswana people|Tswana]] nation. They were Christians and worked for missionaries at mission stations in South Africa. When Solomon was four, the family moved to [[Pniel, South Africa|Pniel]] near Kimberley in the [[Cape Colony]] to work for a German missionary, Ernst Westphal (the grandfather of the linguist [[Ernst Westphal]]) and his wife Wilhelmine. There he received a mission-education. When he outpaced fellow learners he was given additional private tuition by Mrs. Westphal, who also taught him to play the piano and violin and gave him singing lessons.{{sfn|Van Wyk|2003|p=}} In February 1892, aged 15, he became a pupil-teacher, a post he held for two years.

After leaving school, he moved to Kimberley in 1894 where he became a [[Telegraphy|telegraph]] messenger for the Post Office.{{sfn|Van Wyk|2003|p=}} He subsequently passed the clerical examination (the highest in the colony) with higher marks than any other candidate in [[Dutch language|Dutch]] and [[typing]] (reported by Neil Parsons in his foreword to ''Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion'').{{sfn|Plaatjie|1996|loc=Foreword}} At that time, the Cape Colony had qualified [[Suffrage|franchise]] for all men 21 or over, the qualification being that they be able to read and write English or Dutch and earn over 50 pounds a year. Thus, when he turned 21 in 1897, he was able to vote, a right he would later lose when the [[Cape Colony]] was merged with other Southern African colonies into the [[Union of South Africa]].{{sfn|Van Wyk|2003|p=}}

Shortly thereafter, he became a court interpreter for the British colonial authorities in Mafeking when the settlement was [[Siege of Mafeking|under siege]] and kept a diary of his experiences which were published posthumously.{{sfn|Van Wyk|2003|p=}}

After the [[Second Boer War]] ended, he was optimistic that the British government would ensure that all males in South Africa would continue to be granted qualified franchise, but they instead handed over the majority of political power to the new [[Union of South Africa|South African government]], which restricted voting rights to [[white South Africans]] only. Plaatje criticised the British government for this decision in an unpublished 1909 manuscript entitled ''Sekgoma – the Black Dreyfus.''{{sfn|Plaatjie|1996|loc=Foreword}}