Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi is one of South Africa’s most famous novels.

First published in 1930, it is the first full-length novel by a black South African writer, and is widely read and studied in South African schools, colleges and universities. It has been translated into a number of different languages. Written over 30 years before Chinua Achebe’s famous Things Fall Apart, Mhudi is a pioneering African novel too, anticipating many of the themes with which Achebe and other writers from the African continent were concerned.

Mhudi has had a complicated history. Critics have been divided in their views, and there was a delay of ten years between the time Plaatje wrote the book and when it was published. A century on from when it was written, the time is now right to both celebrate its composition and to assess its meanings and legacy.

In this book, a distinguished cast of contributors explore the circumstances in which Mhudi was both written and published, what the critics have made of it, why it remains so relevant today. Chapters look at the eponymous feminist heroine of the novel and what she symbolizes, the role of history and oral tradition, the contentious question of language, the linguistic and stylistic choices that Plaatje made. In keeping with Mhudi’s capacity to inspire, this book also includes a poem and short story, specially written in order to pay tribute to both the book and its author.

International scholars explore one of the most important postcolonial novels of African literature. Joint winner of Best Non-Fiction Biography, Humanities and Social Sciences Awards 2020 Sol Plaatje's Mhudi is the first full-length novel in English to have been written by a black South African and is widely regarded as one of Africa's most important literary works. Drawing upon both oral and literary traditions, Plaatje uses the form of the historical novel, and romance genre, to explore the 19th-century dispossession of his people, to provide a novel black perspective on their history. It is a book that speaks to present-day concerns, to do with land, language, history and decolonisation. Today the novel has iconic status, not only in South Africa, but worldwide - it has been translated into a number of languages - and its impact on other writers has been profound. The novelist Bessie Head described it as "more than a classic; there is just no other book on earth like it. All the stature and grandeur of the author are in it." A century after its writing in London in 1920 [it was published in South Africa in 1930, for reasons explained in the book], and at a time of intellectual ferment, with debates on decolonisation to the fore, in popular culture as much as in the academy, this book celebrates Mhudi's place in African literature, reviews its critical reception, and offers fresh perspectives. The contributors discuss Mhudis genesis, writing and publication; its reception by literary critics from the 1930s to thepresent; Mhudi as a feminist novel; Mhudis use of oral tradition; issues of translation; Mhudi in the context of African literature and history, and the decolonisation of the curriculum. An authoritative listing of all editions of Mhudi, translations as well as in English completes the book. SABATA MOKAE is a novelist and lecturer in creative writing at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, and the author of The Story of Sol T. Plaatje (2010). BRIAN WILLAN is Senior Research Fellow at Rhodes University, Extraordinary Professor at Sol Plaatje and North West Universities. He is the author of Sol Plaatje: a life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje,1876-1932 (2018), and co-editor (with Janet Remmington and Bheki Peterson) of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present (2016). Africa: Jacana