Special Licence

Kimberley at the end of the century was a grid of money and dust, a place where languages met because the mines required them to. Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Motswana, young, already collecting tongues, worked as a postman and then as a clerk and interpreter. Elizabeth Nomthetho M'belle, Mfengu, was a teacher, sister of a colleague. They courted. Both families objected.

He would later joke, in a line often repeated, that his people disliked a daughter-in-law whose language had clicks, and hers disliked a son-in-law whose language had none. Whether or not that sentence is quoted from a copyrighted gathering, the fact it points to is not in dispute: this was not a marriage the elders had arranged to keep a world sealed. It was a crossing, and it was rocky, and they did it anyway.

On 25 January 1898 they married by civil licence in Kimberley, a special licence, and then by a Congregational rite conducted by Reverend Davidson Msikinya. Paper first, then blessing. In a colony that was already inventing new cages for African life, a licence could be a small architecture of freedom. It could also be a door into years of political weather they could not yet see.

We do not reprint the courtship letters. Modern scholarly editions own those pages. What can be said without them: they wrote; they argued with kin; they chose each other across a linguistic border that relatives had charged with meaning. Mutuality here is not a sonnet. It is a licence dated in a diamond town.