The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Biographical studies completed as doctoral dissertations in the 1990s have also borne the
stamp of the Karis and Carter legacy. Catherine Higgs reconstructed the public career of
D.D.T. Jabavu as an “extraordinary life”, while Steven Gish tried to rescue the life of “an
extraordinary black South African”, Alfred Xuma, who had “fallen through the cracks of
South African history”. 58 Because of the impact of ‘history from below’, Gish argued, “the
crucial contributions of African leaders who helped shape the struggle for racial justice”
had been obscured. Gish’s project was an explicit call for a return to “personality and
individual initiative” and for the “rediscovery of the individual”. 59 These biographical
studies were perhaps the most explicit academic expression of that feature of the Karis
and Carter historiographical legacy that had given a central place to the individual in the
history of resistance in South Africa. The publication of Higgs’ dissertation in marginally
updated form in South Africa in 1997 was undoubtedly connected to resurgence of
interest in individuals and great men as one of the ways of explaining and celebrating the
creation of the post‐apartheid nation. And this ‘biographical moment’, from which the
academy was not immune, drew in part upon the Karis and Carter’s legacy. 60
58 Catherine Anne Higgs, ‘The Ghost of Equality’, p 1; Steven D Gish, ‘Alfred B Xuma, 1893‐1962’, pp 5‐7.
Higgs’ notion of an ‘extraordinary life’ was drawn from William Zinsser (ed), Extraordinary Lives: The Art
and Craft of American Biography, New York: American Heritage, 1986.
59 Steven D Gish, ‘Alfred B Xuma, 1893‐1962’, p 5.
60 Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D.D.T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885‐1959
(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, and Cape Town: David Philip and Mayibuye Books, 1997).
Gish’s dissertation was also published in largely unaltered form (but strangely, not in South Africa) as
Alfred B Xuma: African, American, South African (New York: New York University Press and London:
Macmillan, 2000). Nevertheless, in South Africa, reviews in the press promoted the book as
“compulsory reading for all South Africans for a better understanding of the ANC in general, its
politics of patience, and also for the role model value it offers black South African youths” (Cornelius
Thomas, ‘Definitive Biography’, Daily Dispatch, 13 May 2000). Around the turn of the 21 st Century,
biographies of resistance leaders continued to be a prime area of publishing for a publisher such as
David Philip. Among these were Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (Cape Town:
David Philip and Mayibuye Books, 1998) and Elinor Sisulu, Walter & Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime
(Cape Town: David Philip, 2002). David Philip had advertised the publication of the latter since 1997.
These two biographical studies were significant because, as serious narrative studies of political lives,
they were both, in different ways, deliberately positioned in ways that sought to bridge the divide
between the academic and the popular. See below. For a discussion of Mayibuye Books and the work
of the Mayibuye Centre, see Chapter Four
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