The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

early ANC. It was Gail Gerhart’s narrative study of the evolution of black politics from the
ANC Youth League, through the emergence of the PAC, to the development of Black
Consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s that perpetuated the documentary tradition in South
African political history. Whereas Karis and Carter focussed on collecting, assembling and
ordering information or data on nationalist resistance organisations, their leaders and
their political strategies, Gerhart placed the data into a narrative. 44
With its focus on the realm of political ideas, referred to as the “interplay of ideologies”,
read transparently off documents, Gerhart’s study attempted to understand the “role of
the African urban intelligentsia” in the formulation of “African ideology”. The method
through which she tried to accomplish this was biographical, with the chosen subjects,
Anton Lembede, A.P. Mda, Sobukwe and Biko styled as “four individual nationalist
thinkers”. Her interest was in how their ideas, contributed to a “significant strain of
African political thought”, which emphasised “racially exclusive strategies” for
challenging white domination. This “long intellectual tradition”, as expounded through
the lineage of four chosen thinkers, was characterised by Gerhart as the “orthodox
nationalist or Black Power school of African politics”. 45
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the codes and conventions of the Karis and Carter
model formed the basis of much graduate work on South African resistance history done
in the United States. 46 Biographical studies produced as Ph.D dissertations by Catherine
Central Africa’, Journal of African History, Vol 9, Nos 3 & 4, 1968, as well as his The African Voice in
Southern Rhodesia 1898‐1930 (London: Heinemann, 1970). For analyses of resistance studies in
nationalist historiography, see Arnold Temu and Bonaventure Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A
Critique (London: Zed Press, 1981), Donald Crummey, ‘Introduction: ʺThe Great Beastʺ’, in Donald
Crummey (ed), Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (London: James Currey, 1986) and
Bogumil Jewsiewicki and David Newbury (eds), African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa?
(Beverley Hills: Sage Publications, 1986).
44 Gail Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology, Berkeley, California: University
of California Press, 1978.
45 Gail Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, pp vii, 2, 3.
46 See, for example, the little‐known study by South African, John Peter Hendricks, `From Moderation
to Militancy: A Study of African Leadership and Political Reactions in South Africa, 1936‐1960ʹ, Ph.D
dissertation, University of Michigan, 1983. See also Joshua Lazerson, `Working against the Tide: White
South Africans in the National Liberation Movement, 1942‐1964’, Ph.D dissertation, Northwestern
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