Welcome to the Sol Plaatje Archive - the home of Shakespeare in African Languages!
This Omeka-hosted archive is a project of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, a research unit at the University of the Witwatersrand.
It is supported by the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) and the Programme for African Digital Humanities (Afridig).
The image on the left is an endonymic map of Africa (produced by Jordan Engel for The Decolonial Atlas). It challenges us to think about African languages without the national boundaries that are legacies of the continent's colonial history - and it is a useful image to keep in mind while you are using this archive, which is structured by country even though Africa's languages cross borders.
You can click on the menu icon next to the search bar to bring up a list of countries and languages from which to choose. Texts are generally (but not always) categorised according to the country in which they were published.
Alternatively, you can search by author/translator, title/play, language, country, date, place of publication or any other search term. Or you can simply browse through the texts in alphabetical order.
The archive also includes a bibliographical list of scholarly publications on translation in/and African Shakespeares. We encourage you to consult these fantastic resources!