The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Lumumba who could stand in opposition to Mobutu”. This was in contrast to the
confinement of the historical Lumumba to the archives and the banishment of his
image from political life and public space after Mobutu’s coup d’état in 1965. 140
The recollection of Lumumba in the 1970s saw him emerge “as a full‐fledged realm of
memory [and as] the only historical figure to incarnate simultaneously the struggles
for dignity, modernity, and national unity”. Because mourning his death could have
no end in the absence of a body to bury, the void “was gradually filled with images”.
In the 1990s, when images of Lumumba resurfaced in political life as “the epitome of
the selfless politician devoted to the people”, he was once again projected as a ‘realm
of memory’ where people used their “knowledge of the past and their experience of
the present” to “formulate their conception of a just political order” and to “demand
recognition of their dignity”. These were the issues of history, aesthetics and
biographical production that A Congo Chronicle sought to enable exhibition goers to
explore through narrative paintings. At the same time, viewers were able to examine
how images of collective memory were constructed. 141
This chapter has been concerned to understand the production of biography through
memorial and visual genres outside the academy. We have seen how the public sphere
has been an arena for the circulation of conventional methods of narration of lives as
lessons on leadership, in which biography has featured as a discourse of power
through which historical events are explained through individual causes. The public
realm has also seen biographies produced as exposés of moral indiscretions in the lives
of the prominent. We have also seen how, in different parts of the world, biography
has been a feature of the ‘memorial complex’ and ‘lieux de memoire’, through which
national public histories have been created in visual form through official intervention.
140 Elizabeth Harney, ‘A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art’, pp 97‐98; Bogumil
Jewsiewicki, ‘Popular Painting in Contemporary Katanga: Painters, Audiences, Buyers, and
Sociopolitical Contexts’, in Bogumil Jewsiewicki et al, A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban
Art, p 26.
141 Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ‘Popular Painting in Contemporary Katanga’, p 27; Bogumil Jewsiewicki,
‘Introduction’, in Bogumil Jewsiewicki et al, A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art, p 11.
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