The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Under the conditions of deepening repression and the consolidation of racial power in
South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, Karis and Carter’s project served as a means of
preserving materials and safeguarding them away from the attention of the apartheid
state. 21 In addition, it served to create a rich documentary base for the academic study of
South African resistance politics in the United States. At this time, South African
political movements were establishing themselves in exile, and seeking out networks of
solidarity and material support. The entry of the South African ‘struggle’ ‐ in the form of
political materials ‐ into the terrain of the academy in the United States granted South
African political movements scholarly recognition, intellectual validity as well as moral
legitimacy.
But the Karis and Carter project was more than merely a collection of documents. The
project was largely responsible for the creation of the academic field of black resistance
politics in South Africa. It also served to establish a framework for the narration of South
African resistance history, with its own chronology, periodisation and constitutive
codes. In the preface to Volume 1, Karis and Carter wrote that the documents
present the drama of more than eighty years of resolutions,
requests, anxious arguments, agonising frustrations, and calls for
action by African leaders and organisations. 22
In this historical drama, the unfolding of events was told through chronological narrative,
with resistance history seen in narrow terms as the history of organised political
formations. Here, political history was a terrain for the assessment of ideas or political
thinking, read transparently off organisational documents, and the relationship of this
thought to political action. This was a realist conception of political history, narrated from
an inventory of political documents whose archived order and chronological arrangement
21 The practice of sending documents reflecting resistance histories to the United States for safe‐keeping
and preservation in university archives continued until at least the late 1980s, with Matthew Goniwe’s
papers, for example, finding their way to Sterling Library at Yale University. There have also been
many stories of documents surviving through concealment in lofts, basements and underground
burial. As many researchers and former activists know, such concealment of documents in South
Africa was not always possible. The possibility of incrimination regularly resulted in documents being
destroyed to protect activists and resistance activities.
22 Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter, From Protest To Challenge, Volume 1, Preface, p xv.
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