The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

narrative at crucial moments, reproducing traditions created by the very nationalist
histories he sought to transcend.
If Smuts was constructed as the voice of moderation, Nelson Mandela was presented as
if he had been born into leadership. In teleological fashion, Mandela’s rise to greatness
was foregrounded through biographical treatment of his “dramatic life” which
“delineates the phases of black nationalist politics” until the early 1960s. It was Mandela
who was “at the heart of the transformation of the ANC from a nationalist protest
movement to a national liberation movement after Sharpeville in 1960”. 7 Indeed, in
Beinart’s work there were signs that some revisionist historians, long sceptical of
histories featuring the role of the individual in history, had begun to explain historical
processes by recourse to the personal characteristics of individual political personalities.
More than this, there were indications in some places that the terrain of resistance, for
two decades the central theme of South African historiography, had the potential to be
extended and take shape as a history of national reconciliation. Part of this extended
master narrative hinged on issues of leadership and the remarkable individual.
Biography in quite conventional form was central to these historiographical shifts.
If Beinart’s synthesis could be understood as a yardstick, which marked a moment of
ambiguous historiographical reworking alongside political transition, then this feature
also reared its head in another setting, this time on prime time public television, in a
programme broadcast live during May 1995. In this programme, academics were
quizzed about the challenges involved in producing a ‘new history for a new South
Africa’. Grasping the opportunity afforded by the enlarged audience, outside the
academic setting, of the nation in their homes, historian and writer, Luli Callinicos, then
of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, articulated a manifesto
of social history and reiterated a concern that ‘gaps’ in South African history be ‘filled’:
History has tended to be the history of the rich, the powerful and
usually the male, great men. I am concerned that we bring ... the
history of women, that hidden abode, the private sphere and also the
7 William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, p 160.
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