The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Whereas Karis and Carter in the 1970s had produced a documentary history of African
nationalism in South Africa, the political scientist Allison Drew in the 1990s produced a
“Karis and Carter of South African socialism”. 31 Spanning two volumes, Drew’s study
tried to document the existence of a “radical left tradition” between 1907 and 1964. The
documents were organised chronologically and arranged within a discursive system of
South African socialist politics. Volume One covered the origins of socialism in South
Africa and the first few decades of its development until the Suppression of Communism
Act of 1950 made open socialist politics illegal. Themes around which documents were
arranged dealt with socialists confronting a “racially‐divided working class”, their
“gradual recognition of the national question” and “their efforts to build political
alliances”. 32 Volume Two took the story further and examined the relationship between
socialist tendencies and the “national liberation movement” from 1943 until 1964.
Documents were grouped in themes of “political alliances” and “building the national
movement”, the “national question”, the “agrarian question” and the “armed struggle”. 33
It must be recognised that Drew’s project made a bold attempt to redress the “historical
predominance of the African National Congress and its affiliated organisations or allies”.
However, as with Karis and Carter, the discursive categories employed by the authors of
the documents for analysing society and discussing political issues ‐ framed as the
national ‘question’, the land ‘question’ and so forth ‐ were taken as given and ‘natural’ and
reproduced by Drew in her volumes. While Karis and Carter attempted to draw a linear
narrative of nationalist resistance politics, Drew sought to identify a “tradition” of socialist
resistance politics, albeit a “heterogeneous and eclectic” one. 34 In spite of the existence of a
growing corpus of scholarly works suggesting that claims on ‘tradition’ be regarded with
31 Allison Drew (ed), South Africaʹs Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume One: 1907‐1950,
Cape Town: Buchu Books, Mayibuye Books, UCT Press, 1996; Volume Two: 1943‐1964, Cape Town:
Buchu Books, Mayibuye Books, UCT Press, 1997. This was a phrase used in discussions between
members of the editorial board of Mayibuye Books, on which I served. These volumes drew upon the
archival research conducted by Drew for her Doctoral dissertation. See Allison Drew, ‘Social
Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism in South Africa, 1928‐1960’, Ph.D dissertation, University of
California, Los Angeles, 1991.
32 Allison Drew (ed), South Africaʹs Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume One, pp 5, 11.
33 Allison Drew (ed), South Africaʹs Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume Two, p 5.
34 Allison Drew (ed), South Africaʹs Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume One, p 10.
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