The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

understand the background, political character and personality traits of African
leadership. This methodological individualism was taken a step further through the
suggestion that African nationalist leadership reflected continuity and that leadership
styles were handed down as traditions. The sum total of this resistance history, through
different phases, could be grasped through the construction of a pantheon of personalities.
In spite of the centrality of the individual and biography to this account, as with Karis and
Carter, no attempt was made to explain individuality and leadership theoretically or to
understand how individuals were produced and leaders constructed. For Hendricks, these
were empirical issues, which could be read off political statements, drawn largely from the
Karis and Carter collection. The objective was to tell a story of leadership in struggle, with
leadership seen as self‐evident. In this story of resistance leadership, historical explanation
was to be found, teleologically, in the unfolding of events.
While Gerhart and Hendricks documented the unfolding of African nationalism, Joshua
Lazerson’s doctoral research was on the participation of whites in resistance to
apartheid. 53 Allison Drew, on the other hand, focused on the development of socialist
politics in South Africa. Concerned to explain the ‘role’ of white South Africans in the
evolution of a “non‐racial political culture”, Lazerson focused on the Communist Party of
South Africa in the 1940s, the Springbok Legion in the 1940s and early 1950s, and the
South African Congress of Democrats between the early 1950s and the early 1960s. It was
in these organisations that “white South Africans who sought to support blacks in their
efforts to change the status quo found expression for their energies”. In his study of
attempts on the part of blacks and whites to “interact as partners in the movement for
political, social and economic liberation”, Lazerson was concerned to uncover what had
brought whites to the African nationalist movement, and what they had brought to it. 54
53 Joshua Lazerson, ‘Working Against the Tide’. Lazerson’s dissertation was later published. See
Joshua Lazerson, Against the Tide: Whites in the Struggle Against Apartheid, Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1994. The South African co‐publisher was Mayibuye Books.
54 Joshua Lazerson, ‘Working Against the Tide’, pp 1‐8.
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