The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

national and land questions” concentrated geographically on the Western Cape and the
Transvaal, “historically the two main centres of socialist activity in South Africa”. 56
Drew’s dissertation was an explicit attempt “to document”, in narrative terms, the
development of “the less well‐known Trotskyist tendency”, in the context of national
democratic and socialist politics. In Drew’s own words, her study was the “construction of
written history directly from primary documents, many of which have not been published
before”. Interviews with particular socialists were also conducted “to provide insight into
the perceptions and viewpoints of some of the principal figures in South Africa’s socialist
movement”. Where interviews had been used “as a source to establish specific historical
events”, they were “corroborate[d] … with other evidence”. The purpose was to generate
supposedly authenticated ‘evidence’ about intellectual and political history that could be
rendered into a narrative account about socialist political organisations and their leaders.
Statements, decisions, policies and lives were drawn together into a positivist account of
these formations, and their relationship with national political bodies. This was
documentary history almost as mathematics, replete with a graph depicting the lineage of
the “organisational structure” of this fractured “radical tradition”. Central to this narrative
was a concept of the life course and intellectual and political trajectory of individual
socialist activists, the facts of which could be discovered empirically through sufficient
archival research and supplementary interviews. 57
56 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism in South Africa, 1928‐1960’, pp xii‐xiii;
2‐9. Drew’s dissertation was published much later as Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on
the South African Left (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Her dissertation research also resulted in a few
published articles. See Allison Drew, ‘Events were breaking above their heads: socialism in South
Africa 1921‐1950’, Social Dynamics, Vol 17, No 1, 1991; ‘Theory and Practice of the Agrarian
Question in South African Socialism, 1928‐1960’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 23, 2/3, January‐April
1996; ‘South African Socialists and the Agrarian Question, 1921‐1960’, Matlhasedi, Vol 14, No 1,
April/May 1995.
57 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism, 1928‐1960’, pp 8‐9; 103. Apart from
biography being part of the general features of Drew’s documentary history work, there have also been
examples of more explicit biographical research and publication, see Allison Drew and David Binns,
‘Prospects for Socialism in South Africa: An Interview with Neville Alexander’, Journal of Communist
Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, December 1992 and Allison Drew, ‘Into the wilderness: The 1929 Communist
Electoral Campaign in Thembuland’, Paper presented to the conference, The Eastern Cape: Historical
Legacies and New Challenges, East London, 27‐30 August 2003. The latter paper, as Drew mentioned in her
presentation to this conference, was part of a biographical project on S.P. Bunting, and was first
presented to a conference on ‘Communist Biography’.
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