The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

leaders. These narrow institutional histories of resistance had taken the form of
“national middle class African figures planning, forming alliances, overhauling the
structures of their organisations and directing mass activity”. Indeed, in these accounts,
local political figures almost never came into view and rank and file remained largely
blurred. In addition, moments of resistance in these accounts were rarely “situated in
their sociological terrain”. 73
Moreover, there was a failure to examine forms of resistance, which had unfolded
outside the scope of formal organisation as well as the “variety of urban constituencies
and forms of protest, consciousness and ideology” which had influenced the mass
political culture of the 1950s. 74 These institutional accounts also showed little
appreciation for the dynamics, extent and significance of rural resistance and the social
and political impact of migrancy on rural mobilisation. Not only were small‐scale and
short‐lived instances of rural class conflict obscured, but the scale of rural revolts during
the 1940s and 1950s, and the connections between evolving migrant organisation and the
ANC and the Communist Party were not appreciated. 75
The move away from the purely institutional accounts of politics and resistance in South
Africa centred on the deeds and biographies of national leaders, occurred in the work of
radical scholarship by social historians, which sought to uncover the submerged agency
of ordinary people and give voice to the experience of marginal groups. During the
73 Hilary Sapire, ‘African Political Organisation in Brakpan in the 1950s’, in Phil Bonner, Peter
Delius and Deborah Posel (eds), Apartheidʹs Genesis, 1935‐1962, Johannesburg: Ravan Press and
Wits University Press, 1993, p 252‐3. A central focus has been the history of the ANC, especially in
the 1940s and 1950s, narrated through an account of institutional radicalisation under the
influence of the Congress Youth League and the Communist Party.
74 Hilary Sapire, ‘African Political Organisation in Brakpan in the 1950s’, p 253.
75 This criticism is made, inter alia, by William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South
Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape 1890‐1930, Johannesburg: Ravan
Press, 1987, pp 1‐3. Among the other works that began to address the scale and range of rural forms of
resistance and protest were Colin Bundy, ‘Land and Liberation: Popular Rural Protest and the
National Liberation Movements in South Africa, 1920‐1960’, in Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (eds),
The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, London: Longman, 1987;
Peter Delius, `Migrant Organisation, the Communist Party, the ANC and the Sekhukhuneland Revolt,
1940‐1958’, in Philip Bonner et al (eds), Apartheidʹs Genesis and more generally, Delius’ book, A Lion
Amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal, Johannesburg: Ravan Press,
1996.
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