Bombs, ghosts, devils: Mhudi and the new historicism

Abstract

This paper uses the vexed publication history of Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi to try to ‘read’ various aspects of the New Historicism – a school of historiographical thought recently evoked by Zakes Mda in his writing about the novel. Taking the alleged 1976 petrol bombing that is said to have unearthed Plaatje’s lost typescript, my essay suggests that the lingering disagreements in South African literary circles over issues of the ‘correct version’ of the text – disagreements, as we will see, that rage on in the collection of commemorative essays published in 2020 entitled Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi: History, Criticism, Celebration – signal not only the fertility of the novel’s extra-textual life, but the inseparability of that life from the words on Mhudi ’s pages. I argue that conceptualizing Plaatje’s text as indistinguishable from a series of what might usually be considered ‘contextual’ (rather than ‘textual’) interruptions, deviations and anecdotes produces a disruptive set of readings.