The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

ordinary experience. It was biographical research in the form of the collection of life
stories, which lay at the heart of attempts by social historians to ‘democratise’ the
processes of historical construction.
Documentary historians and social historians narrated recovered and revealed pasts into
realist narratives of the nation, based upon conventional hierarchies of source and
history, and assumed distinctions between domination and resistance. In these
modernist methods and teleologies of national history, biographies of leaders and
ordinary people were created as ready‐made stories of the nation in microcosm, in pre‐
determined categories of resistance, without an examination of the processes of subject
construction.
Documentary history, political biography and the legacy of Karis and Carter
From the 1970s, a discernable body of research on resistance to systems of racial
domination in South Africa took the form of documentary political history. Many,
though not all, were written by Americans, or by scholars at American universities. The
flagship series of publications in this genre was the four‐volumed, From Protest to
Challenge, edited overall by Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter, with their colleagues
Gail Gerhart and Sheridan Johns each contributing to the editing. 15 This format proved
to be enduring, with Sheridan Johns and R Hunt Davis, and Allison Drew putting
together further publications in this genre, after systematically collecting and assembling
documents deemed to be primary materials of political history. 16
15 Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (eds), From Protest To Challenge: A Documentary History of
African Politics in South Africa, 1882‐1964, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1972‐1977. Volume 1,
Protest and Hope, 1882‐1934 was edited by Sheridan Johns; Volume 2, Hope and Challenge, 1935‐1952 was
edited by Thomas Karis; Volume 3, Challenge and Violence, 1953‐1964 by Thomas Karis and Gail M
Gerhart and Volume 4, Political Profiles, 1882‐1964, by Gail M Gerhart and Thomas Karis. In 1997,
Volume 5, edited by Thomas Karis and Gail M Gerhart, was added to the series. It was released in
1997 under the subtitle Nadir and Resurgence, 1964‐1979 (Pretoria and Bloomington, Unisa Press and
Indiana University Press, 1997). In the late 1990s, Gerhart was also preparing Volume 6 (Challenge and
Victory, 1980‐1990) and Volume 7 (Political Profiles, 1964‐1990).
16 Sheridan Johns and R Hunt Davis, Jr (eds), Mandela, Tambo and the African National Congress: The
Struggle Against Apartheid, 1948‐1990. A Documentary Survey, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991;
Allison Drew (ed), South Africaʹs Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume One: 1907‐1950, Cape
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