What ‘Other Devils’? The Texts of Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi Revisited

Sol Plaatje’s novel, Mhudi, first published by the Lovedale Press in 1930, has been subject to considerable critical attention, and now has canonical status in South Africa. The circumstances of its publication have also been seen as a cause célèbre of the way missionary presses, as gatekeepers, could subvert authors’ intentions and exercise censorship. This case, in relation to Mhudi, was first made by Tim Couzens and Stephen Gray in 1978. They argued that an oral narrator had been removed from the ‘original’ text, thereby undermining its connection with the oral traditions upon which it drew, and thus changing the nature of the text as a whole, and that other textual changes had had the effect of ‘emasculating’ and ‘diluting the original style’ of the book. This view has remained largely unchallenged and accepted as conventional wisdom, providing the justification for a new edition of Mhudi (Heinemann African Writers, 1978; Penguin, 2005) that reverses some of the changes made, drawing upon a typescript in the Lovedale Press archives. In this article, I revisit the evidence and the assumptions underlying these arguments and conclude that there is nothing to suggest that changes made to the text were not entirely at the author’s volition, and that Plaatje’s role and agency as author, and that of the Lovedale Press as publisher, have been seriously misrepresented. I explore some of the broader issues raised, including the interaction of author, publisher and ideology, and also the ways in which interpreting ‘author intention’ can be subject to a range of external influences.