The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

in “a wide range of inventive political responses and innovative forms of action”. 4 Black
opposition, particularly before the 1950s, was seen as varied, fragmented, richer, more
diverse and less predictable than African nationalist mythologies, in search of a
consistent trajectory of responses, would allow.
In spite of these analytical advances in the conceptualisation of African identities and
agency, other features of Beinart’s history pointed ambiguously to a perspective that
could be seen as less than social. Large segments of text were devoted to political
history, with the personal characteristics of individual political personalities, like Smuts,
Hertzog, Malan, Vorster and Botha, often used to explain historical processes. Reference
was made, for example to the value of Smuts, who had “a personal simplicity and
asceticism”, a “love of nature and environmental concern”, and “efficiency in
government if not in party organization”. His “very capacity for political compromise”
we were told, “permitted a period of relative openness during the Second World War
when the countryʹs more liberal whites and welfare planners briefly had greater
influence than at any other time until 1990”. 5
Notwithstanding Beinart’s intentions to transcend the linear resistance narratives of
nationalist history, key themes such as the history of the ANC as well as race and power
in the context of the history of resistance were dealt with rather uncritically. The
apparent ‘non‐racialism’ of the Congress movement in the 1950s was treated as self‐
evident and was left unproblematised. Without any questions posed, the ANC was
referred to as having had “long established traditions and symbols of resistance” and
the United Democratic Front was seen simplistically as “explicitly non‐racial in the
tradition of the ANC”. 6 Beinart himself, perhaps unwittingly, slipped into a nationalist
4 William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, p 92. For critical evaluations of Beinart’s book, see Ciraj
Rassool, ‘Revisionist Texts’, Southern African Review of Books, No 34, November/December, 1994 as well as
Ran Greenstein, ‘The Future of the South African Past’ (Review Article), Journal of Southern African
Studies, Volume 22, No 2, June 1996.
5 William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, pp 133‐134.
6 William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, pp 215, 234.
110