The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

“glimpse into the inner mind of one of the twentieth century’s leading black
personalities”. 40
Bob Edgar’s passion for documenting South African resistance history through biography
did not stop here. In 1996, in collaboration with Luyanda ka Msumza, he produced a
biographical work that traced the evolution of Anton Lembede’s political ideas. 41 Very
much in the mould of Karis and Carter, it brought together Lembede’s writings from his
student days at Adams College in the 1930s with the pieces he wrote just a few days
before his untimely death in 1947. The collection was accompanied by a biographical
essay, which contained a conventional chronological narrative of Lembede’s political and
intellectual life. Lembede was constructed as a “seminal figure” in South African political
thought, not merely because of his “eloquent articulation” of the politics of Africanism,
but because he was “the first to have constructed a philosophy of African nationalism”. 42
Documentary narration, resistance history and political biography
But Karis and Carter has served as a model for more than just the documentary collection
of South African resistance history. Its constitutive elements and procedures have also
formed the methodological basis for its documentary narration. Early intonations of the
concentration on formal political organisations and their national leaders and the
uncritical approach to nationalism were to be found in the research of Edward Feit and
Peter Walshe. 43 Walshe’s book also gave a great deal of attention to the personalities of the
40 Robert R Edgar (ed), An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J Bunche, p 4.
41 Robert R Edgar and Luyanda ka Msumza (eds), Freedom in our Lifetime: The Collected Writings of Anton
Muziwakhe Lembede, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996. One of the South African co‐publishers
is Mayibuye Books.
42 Robert R Edgar and Luyanda ka Msumza (eds), Freedom in our Lifetime, pp 1‐2.
43 Edward Feit, African Opposition in South Africa, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1967; Peter
Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa. These studies of nationalist resistance in South
Africa were part of a more general impetus in African Studies during the ‘independence decade’ of the
1960s which focussed on the politics of nationalist opposition to colonialism. In these studies, earlier
forms of resistance to colonial conquest tended to be seen as the beginning of nationalist opposition.
See for example, Terence Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896‐7. A study in African Resistance
(London: Heinemann, 1967), Robert I Rotberg and Ali A Mazrui (eds), Protest and Power in Black Africa
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) and Michael Crowder (ed), West African Resistance: The
Military Response to Colonial Occupation (London: Hutchinson, 1971). See also Terence Ranger,
‘Connexions between ʺPrimary Resistanceʺ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and
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