SPU congratulates award-winning lecturer in Creative Writing from the Faculty of Humanities, Mr Sabata-Mpho Mokae, on his newly published book titled ‘Lefatshe ke La Badimo’, directly translated as ‘This Land Belongs to the Ancestors’, launched on 20 June 2025, showcasing how land is far more than soil; but a pulse of language, culture and spirit, carrying a philosophy that land belongs to no one, but should be regarded as a sacred inheritance passed through generations.
Mokae’s book, published in his mother-tongue, Setswana, was inspired by the work of intellectual, journalist, linguist, politician, translator and writer – Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje’s ‘Native Life in South Africa’ (1916), where he draws a parallel between the Kgobadi family, who lost their child after being evicted from their land and had nowhere to bury their child. Their story carries deep symbolism to countless black South African families, who were forcibly removed under colonial/apartheid land laws. “This story is like the stories of many black families in South Africa, including my family, who were driven into townships and pockets of tribal land. I had to focus on one family to give the reader a microscopic look into the effects of the 1913 Natives Land Act on individual families,” he said.
In the novel, Mokae intentionally brings Plaatje to life, a character who meets and engages with the Kgobadi’s after they cross the Vaal River, as he did with many displaced black families at the time. Through this fictional encounter, Mokae shows Plaatje’s compassion, anger, dignity – giving readers a more human, intimate portrait of the man behind the novel ‘Native Life in South Africa’. “I created a meeting between Plaatje and the Kgobadi’s just after they crossed the Vaal River from the Orange Free State and Bloemhof. Creating that scene gave me an opportunity to present Plaatje to my readers beyond how he is publicly known – his sympathy, empathy and quiet anger that he usually expressed with dignity, how he carried the Bible together with his typewriter and books. That was a meeting the family never forgot, an everlasting impact.”
Mr Mokae aims to make the 1913 Natives Land Act’s human impact deeply personal and relatable, allowing readers to emotionally connect to dispossession and its generational trauma, impact and what role universities such as SPU play, “Stories of land dispossession, breaking families apart, and disconnecting people from their roots have been powerfully told through films, novels, music, and art. I believe the best way forward is to develop and teach these creative fields at universities. That will help bring the parts of history left out of textbooks into the public eye. If we do this in African languages, we will give our communities a new way to see and reimagine the world.” Mokae is a believer in the power of the written word in piecing together parts of our missing history, “Writing historical fiction has power as it helps the reader imagine and piece together the missing pages of our history,” he added. “Our proverbs, our rituals, our very sense of self, they all grow from the land, when we lose it, we lose a piece of our humanity.”
Mokae hopes the novel will create a platform for conversations about restoration, not just of land, but the identity it stripped away from those uprooted from it.
