Hip-Hop music is the last place many would expect to find Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje. Yet there he is in a song titled ‘We Built this City’ by Hip-Hop Pantsula (HHP), a famous South African rapper and one of the country's leading entertainers. HHP, real name Jabulani Tsambo, is a pioneer of a South African genre of hip-hop known as motswako, arguably the most dominant style of rapping in South Africa at present, with its proponents winning awards and topping the charts. In ‘We Built this City’, HHP claims Plaatje as an ancestor of both motswako and Mafeking (later Mafikeng, now Mahikeng), the city with which motswako (and Plaatje) are closely identified. HHP raps:

Motswako is defined by its mix of Setswana and English – rappers use both languages over a simple but steady beat. The song in question celebrates the city of Mafeking as the home of motswako. But why Plaatje's tomb? Why claim it as the source from which motswako and HHP's talent grew? Why would a young artist (HHP was born in 1980), raised in the former homeland of Bophuthatswana, claim as an ancestor a man who was more cosmopolitan than Lucas Mangope, the Bophuthatswana president under whose reign HHP grew up, could ever be? Why claim as an ancestor a man whose grave is not even in the former homeland, but in Kimberley? By raising these questions, I intend in this essay to ask broader questions about how, in Native Life in South Africa, Plaatje treated the land as both object and symbolic site of attachment and belonging.