Cinema and the Idea of Fieldwork in Sol Plaatje’s Journeys

Abstract

In the mid-1920s, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje toured the South African countryside showing films he brought from the Tuskegee Institute in the United States. Plaatje’s cinema tours complemented his educational talks on the status of Africans in the Union of South Africa alongside the material he collected for books, speeches and political tours. Focusing on the itinerant cinema as an element of fieldwork, our article asks what can be learned from approaching Plaatje’s research practices. We consider Plaatje’s methods of research in relation to conventional notions of social scientific fieldwork, which also relied on modern media but were often entangled in colonial projects that projected an image of African rural life. Drawing on letters, novels, and accounts of his film screenings, our essay argues for an interdisciplinary engagement with cinema practices in African history that is attentive to the uses of mass media in research and the pedagogical valences of itinerant film screenings. Considering Plaatje’s cinema alongside the value he attached to travelling and mobility, we argue that his cinema puts the field to work and inspires new practices of research in African Studies.