The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

In these traditional ‘masculinist’ biographies, 72 the focus has been on public lives,
considered in realist mode, drawn from archives seen as storehouses of political
documents as well as the subject’s own writings, understood as unmediated windows on
their ideas. Chronological narrative has been utilised to reorder life courses, conceived as
natural and linear in their resistance efforts. This perspective continued to rear its head in
research on South African political biography, as was evident from the work of Catherine
Higgs and Steven Gish, which came to stand as prominent works in the field. Neither of
these studies even began to reflect on the methodological and theoretical inadequacies of
the legacy they drew upon. And in this legacy of documentary political history, pioneered
in South African studies by Karis and Carter, understanding the public lives of political
leaders was part of a focus on the high politics of resistance institutions.
In contrast, the life history research by South African social historians from the 1980s,
claimed to democratise the historical record and overcome the silences of written sources
by revealing history of the ‘voiceless’ through generating evidence ‘from below’ through
oral history. Biographical research was central to these recovery histories. Working within
a broadened paradigm of resistance from that of institutional histories of black opposition,
studies of resistance and political mobilisation at the local level centred on biographies of
local activists. Social historians also attempted to study lives in a social context. While they
sought to recover the lives of key individuals from neglect and amnesia, they tried to
bring greater complexity to biographical study by seeking to identify and explain class
contradictions and ideological ambiguities. Biography was also a vehicle for studying
collectivities. While some studies tried to reconstruct social biographies of the African
middle class, it was the life histories of ‘ordinary people’, which were at the heart of the
development of social history in South Africa.
Biography, local resistance and collective experience in South African social history
A large proportion of research on resistance and black political expression had focused
almost entirely on formal, highly structured, political organisations and their national
72 See the discussion of the ‘masculinist’ form of conventional biography in Chapter One.
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