The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

marginalised, grassroots people [and thus] move away from the
history of leaders to a history of people ‐ history from below, social
history ‐ how do people survive, the creative ways in which they
managed to make something in a very hostile environment ‐ what we
call human agency. People aren’t just victims. We want to get the
texture of that life and the way to do it, obviously, is to ask those
people themselves about their history; so it is time we started hearing
those voices. 8
The History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand was perhaps the central
institution in establishing social ‘history from below’ as hegemonic in South African
historical scholarship. Callinicos, then research officer of the History Workshop, had
been instrumental in attempting to make this academic knowledge ‘accessible’ beyond
academic settings. She had been responsible for producing popular histories on behalf of
the History Workshop in a series entitled, ‘A People’s History of South Africa’. Three
volumes had been produced, ranging from a study of class formation and the emergence
of migrant labour to studies of working people’s lives and urban social history. 9 In the
final volume biographies were given a prominent place. These were presented as ‘life
stories’, which sought to humanise and add face to the economic and social processes,
which were seen as constituting history. Along the lines of Callinicos’s TV manifesto,
these lives were presented as ‘history from below’, the voices and experiences of
ordinary people, human agency in the ‘hostile environment’ of an industrialising Rand
in the grip of a tightening racial order.
In spite of Callinicos’s firm commitment to ordinary lives in South African history both
as an explicit critique of histories of the dominant and the powerful, and as an exercise
in democratising the historical record, this critical positioning of herself as historian
seemed to undergo a shift, live on television. Instead of claiming to be wanting to
retrieve and give voice to subjective, underclass experiences in urban and rural settings,
as radical acts of recovery, Callinicos seemed to take up a contradictory vantage point: a
8 Agenda (SABC), 4 May 1995. I also participated in this live debate on new history in South Africa.
9 See Luli Callinicos, Gold and Workers, 1886‐1924, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1981; Working Life, 1886‐1940:
Factories, Townships and Popular Culture on the Rand, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987, and A Place in the City:
The Rand on the Eve of Apartheid, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1993.
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