The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

scepticism, 35 the use of this notion as an analytical device enabled Drew to grant narrative
coherence to socialist politics in South Africa. In addition, chronological narration and
documentary sequencing were the key methods of reconstructing this grand socialist
unity. Nevertheless, a myriad of fissures, disjunctions and contradictions, suggesting an
assortment of fragments, contradicted any notion of linearity and ‘tradition’.
But Drew did not set herself the task of questioning claims on tradition nor of
deconstructing political statements as modes of representation. Instead, within a realist
epistemology, presented in a language of class and class struggle, she approached
documents with a concern for what they said and how they served as written expressions
of ideas. Documents, for her, were to be seen as containers of facts and archives, as
repositories of collections of facts. Viewed in this way, documents became divorced from
their own history of safekeeping, storage, collection and recollection as they had been
passed along or transacted into circuits of distribution within which they shed old
meanings and took on new ones. 36 Similarly, Drew’s use of photographs was purely
illustrative, as a transparent window on events and people, rather than as a genre of visual
representation. Indeed, in the naïve desire to show the real, her illustrative deployment of
photographs as evidence missed out on the peculiar histories of these images and why it
was that they existed. 37
35See, for example, the much‐cited book edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The
Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
36One example will suffice. The Workers Party of South Africa Papers housed in the Mayibuye Archive
at the University of the Western Cape were ‘mined’ by Drew for 22 documents on the history of
Trotskyism and political alliances in South Africa. No interest was shown in why and how this
collection had survived and how it had found its way into the Mayibuye Archive. The biography of
this collection is indeed interesting. In the first place the papers owed their existence to Claire
Goodlatte, tireless WPSA secretary who had concealed the documents in the roof of her Salt River
home where they were found almost 60 years later. The documents were separated into two sections,
one of which found its way into the hands of a small trader in ephemeral Africana in Cape Town. It
was these documents that were acquired by the Mayibuye Archive (with my intercession). The other
section of the documents was acquired by members of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC and
was eventually handed over to the Department of Historical Papers at Wits University. This section
was unused by Drew.
37Between pp 16 and 17 of South Africa’s Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume Two, (and
on pp 438 and 455 of her dissertation), Drew inserted two photographs taken by Claremont‐based
photographer, Ralph Taylor, of scenes from the mass meeting held by the Anti‐CAD movement on the
Grand Parade on 30 March 1952 to protest against the Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival. The
first, a crowd scene, was attributed to Halima Gool, from whom Drew had received a copy, and has
124