The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

1980s in South African scholarship, history ‘from below’ emerged as a counter‐narrative
to power and domination, seeking to incorporate subaltern, ordinary voices in an
approach to resistance, which was understood as founded upon ordinary experience.
The recovery of “subjective popular experiences” in rural and urban settings and the
recovery of largely unwritten and non‐literate ‘underclass’ experiences formed the basis
of histories of resistance which had been marginalised in institutional histories. 76
South African social historians saw themselves as overcoming the silences of written
sources and challenging hegemonic interpretations of the past through oral history
research. 77 According to Keegan, when the reminiscences of ordinary individuals were
set “in the larger historical context”, vast dimensions of human history were revealed for
the first time. More than simply “embellishments of the historical record”, 78 the stories
and voices revealed in oral testimony had the potential to reshape how major events and
processes of social change were understood. It was biographical research in the shape of
the collection of life stories, which was central to this attempt to democratise the
historical record. 79
Social historians also saw themselves as infusing issues of agency, experience and
consciousness into radical historical research, deepening the analysis of class formation
and capital accumulation. These questions had been given little attention in structuralist
research on the political economy of South Africa conducted during the 1970s. The
concern had been with explaining economic structures and analysing the nature of the
state. Much of the early research had been concerned to show that racial structures of
South Africa had been shaped by conditions of industrialisation, 80 while later work had
76 Paul la Hausse, ‘Oral History and South African Historians’, in Radical History Review, No 46/7,
Winter 1990, p 348.
77 Tim Keegan, ‘Mike Morris and the Social Historians: A Response and a Critique’, Africa Perspective,
Volume 1, Nos 7 & 8, 1989, p 6.
78 Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa, Cape Town: David Philip,
1988.
79 Tim Keegan, ‘Mike Morris and the Social Historians’, p 6.
80 Martin Legassick, ‘South Africa: Forced Labour, Industrialisation, and Racial Differentiation’, in
R Harris (ed), The Political Economy of Africa, New York: 1975; Harold Wolpe ‘Capitalism and
140