The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Crucially, this feature found expression through the special place that was accorded to
biography. Indeed, an entire volume of Karis and Carter’s series, Volume 4, was devoted
to political biography. This volume contained more than 300 alphabetically arranged
political profiles and 68 illustrative portrait photographs and group shots of political
personalities and leaders. 25 The vast majority of the political profiles contained in the
volume were no more than a single paragraph in length. This was biography in the form
of the cryptic political life consisting of bare essentials and basic data on the lives of the
subjects. However, the lives of 27 personalities were narrated in profiles of between one
and two and a half pages. These tended to be individual male leaders who had held office
in political organisations, with the longest treatment reserved for the lives of Xuma and
Luthuli.
As political narratives, the biographical profiles contained in Volume 4 sought to present
empirical information on the ‘role’ of the protagonists as subjects in the national story of
resistance in South Africa as told in the first three volumes. Volume 4 also established
political biography as a valid arena of academic research and as an essential component of
scholarly work on South African resistance history. The impact of Volume 4 has been
enduring. The conventional procedures for the narration of lives that it employed set the
tone for much South African political biography that was produced subsequently. Later
researchers have also mined Volume 4 as a collection of primary biographic documents,
almost monumental in their status, which were deemed to contain objective facts about
political personalities.
The format of the Karis and Carter documentary collection proved to be enduring in
expressing ongoing American interest in South African resistance history. Almost twenty
years after the publication of the first volume of Karis and Carter, their long‐time
collaborator, Sheridan Johns together with R Hunt Davis published a documentary study
25 Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (eds), From Protest To Challenge, Volume 4. This volume,
edited by Gail Gerhart and Thomas Karis carries the subtitle Political Profiles, 1882‐1964.
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