The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

CHAPTER THREE
RESISTANCE STUDIES AND POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY IN
SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the role of the remarkable individual in
South African history has taken on new meaning in the academy. There has been
renewed focus in South African historical scholarship on the individual and the great
life as well as an increased concern to understand ‘leadership’ through the medium of
biography. This biographic concentration has also emerged in the work of historians of
South Africa long concerned to develop a ‘history from below’ perspective, an approach
favouring collectivities of ‘ordinary people’, rather than the lives of leaders and the
powerful.
While some social historians of South Africa have engaged since the 1980s with biography
as a prism for social and collective processes and underclass experiences, others more
recently seem to have become captivated by the attributes and qualities of political
leadership. These shifts began to emerge at a time when different accounts of the South
African past narrated through notions of resistance, the recovery of hidden history and the
recuperation of submerged experiences of blacks, women, peasants and workers, have
had to come to terms with the changed conditions of South Africa after ‘the struggle’.
Under these changed political circumstances of ‘transition to democracy’, which
culminated in the April 1994 elections and the election of Nelson Mandela as president,
some of the ‘voices from below’ began to make the transition into becoming ‘voices from
above’.
An interesting barometer of such a shift was the synthesis produced in 1994 by William
Beinart of radical scholarship on South African history produced since the 1970s. 1
1 William Beinart, Twentieth‐Century South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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