The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

‘public’ misunderstood but an empiricist argument was used to justify a conventional
biographical focus on a public career and to close off any possibility of asking questions
about archival trails and the production of lives, as well as the narratives of his life which
Jabavu himself had set in place. The consequence was a formalist notion of what a
biography is, and an untheorised picture of Jabavu’s public career between the 1910s and
1950s, which was seen as reflecting “a very consistent worldview”. 65
Steven Gish’s study of Xuma was another ‘formalist’ biography, in which a life history
was written up from the chronological arrangement of sources. 66 Through a modus
operandi that was rigorously chronological, Xuma’s life was narrated in chapters, which
moved from “the early years, 1893 – 1913” through to “enigmatic elder statesman, 1950‐
1962”. 67 An account of Xuma’s youth in the Transkei in the late nineteenth century was
followed by an examination of his educational experiences in the United States. This was
succeeded by a discussion of Xuma’s return to South Africa in the late 1920s to a career as
a young medical doctor and his entry into the world of the educated African elite on the
Witwatersrand. The narrative traced Xuma’s political evolution and his emergence as a
prominent public figure during the 1930s, and focused on his political achievements while
president of the ANC during the 1940s. It ended with discussion of his political activities
during the 1950s and early 1960s while in retirement from organised political life.
Gish’s dissertation was an attempt to write a biography of an “exceptional” man, one of
“unprecedented educational and professional achievement”. In this list of achievements,
Xuma had graduated from a number of prestigious educational institutions in the United
States, he was the first “western‐trained” African medical doctor in Johannesburg, and he
was the first African to acquire an advanced degree in public health. He was the longest
serving ANC president in its first 40 years, and as president, he helped to transform
African protest politics into a national movement. Xuma was also one of the first black
65 Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality, p 3.
66 Steven D Gish, ‘Alfred B Xuma, 1893‐1962: African, American, South African’, Ph.D dissertation,
Stanford University, July 1994.
67 Steven D Gish, ‘Alfred B Xuma, 1893‐1962’, p viii.
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