The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Higgs’ study was largely a chronological account of Jabavu’s political activism, as well as
his public lives in education and religion. While there was a thematic arrangement to the
study of Jabavu’s “many lives”, the central organising feature was a chronological one, in
which the course of Jabavu’s life was traced from his birth, childhood and education,
culminating in his political failure, and his “ultimate fall from grace”. 61 Indeed, with her
main concern to present the facts of the story of Jabavu’s life as they unfolded
chronologically, Higgs justified the thematic organisation followed by her study, arguing
that “the documentary evidence does support this compartmentalisation”. 62
This realist approach was made more apparent in Higgs’ discussion of her methodological
approach to biography. Jabavu, she said, was “a particularly accessible subject” who
“knew the meaning of his own life”, and who “seemed to wear no mask”. Very little of
Jabavu’s private correspondence had survived. For Higgs, it was therefore not possible to
examine any inner conflict between his embrace of Cape liberalism and absorption of a
western model of civilisation on the one hand, and his self‐definition as an African, his
teaching of African languages and promoting of African rights, on the other. The study of
any aspect of the past, even of an ‘inner life’, for Higgs, required not analysis, but
empirical verification. 63
In the absence of private papers, but with a large collection of published articles,
pamphlets and books, Higgs claimed her study was “of necessity” of Jabavu’s public lives.
Any information about relationships in Jabavu’s private life was shoved aside as opening
a path into the terrain of the unscholarly and to charges of “gossip‐mongering and
voyeurism”. 64 Not only was the terrain of the ‘private’ and its relationship with the
61Catherine Ann Higgs, ‘The Ghost of Equality’, pp 2, 27.
62Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality, p 2. Here, I draw from the dissertation and the book. While the
book is a slightly revised and updated version of the dissertation, absolutely no methodological
changes were effected.
63Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality, pp 2‐3. In fashioning this level of coherence in the study of
lives, Higgs drew on articles from Eric Homberger and John Charmley (eds), The Troubled Face of
Biography, a publication based on a conference that largely defended the approaches and terrain of
conventional, masculinist biography. See Chapter One for a discussion of these issues.
64Catherine Ann Higgs, `The Ghost of Equalityʹ, p 27; Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality, pp
162‐3.
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