Printers' and other devils: the texts of Sol T. Plaatje's 'Mhudi'

Abstract

The recent discovery of a typescript-with-corrections of Sol T. Plaatje's novel, Mhudi, raises problems of both a general and specific nature, and we feel, as introducer and editor respectively of the 20Ist work in the Heinemann African Writers Series, that an account of the arrival of this version of Mhudi would throw some light both on the circumstances of the publishing of work by early black writers in South Africa and on the problems of achieving fidelity to an author's intentions. For, with the Heinemann publication of Mhudi, this, the first full-length novel in English by a black South African writer, appears for the first time nearly sixty years after its date of composition in an earlier, more original version.