The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Biography, as the conventional chronological narrative of political lives, was a key
element in these volumes. This was particularly the case with the endnotes to the
documents, where cryptic political lives of leaders were constructed as part of explanatory
passages. Biography here was seen as a project to trace the trajectories of political thought
and social analyses of individual activists, as an important component of mapping a
history of socialism and its relationships with the political movements for national
liberation. Chronological lives were understood as ‘prisms’ through which to understand
political ideas, policies and strategies, as well as political and social conditions. These
profiles, tucked away in the explanatory endnotes, worked as ‘biographic documents’,
much like Karis and Carter’s Volume 4, and sought to provide ready biographic facts on
leading socialist activists.
The documentary history has also proven to be a durable format. This was demonstrated
by historian Robert Edgar’s 1992 publication of Ralph Bunche’s travel notes. 38 This was a
recording of Bunche’s visit to Southern Africa during 1937, and its importance lay in it
being “one of the few ‘outsider’ accounts of South Africa by a black person”. It was also “a
rich repository of information on black life in South Africa in that period”. 39 As with
others in the genre, biography in traditional form reared its head, particularly in the
footnotes, where biographical profiles of individuals mentioned in the documents were
given. As an exercise in biography in itself, of a subject who had brushed up against South
African social and political life during his visit, the publication of the notes provided a
been carelessly and erroneously captioned: “The Cape Anti‐CAD was a mass movement in its heyday
during the 1940s (sic)”. The second, of the podium of speakers, identified each person, and was also
attributed to Halima Gool. These photographs were part of a set, which had been specifically
produced by Ralph Taylor to be sold as commemorative images of the boycott meeting. The Torch had
sold them in support of the local co‐ordinating committee of the NEUM, and they seem to have been
widely circulated. See Tina Smith and Ciraj Rassool, ‘History in Photographs at the District Six
Museum’, in Ciraj Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis (eds), Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating
and Curating the District Six Museum (Cape Town: District Six Museum, 2001), pp 143‐145.
38 Robert R Edgar (ed), An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J Bunche,
Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1992. Robert Edgar has also produced documentary
history of radical nationalist politics in Lesotho. See Robert Edgar, Prophets with Honour: A
Documentary History of Lekhotla la Bafo, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987.
39 Robert R Edgar (ed), An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J Bunche, p 2.
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