The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

what emerged as a “grassroots critique of local power structures”, the notion of ‘New
Africa’ became integral to proletarian experience in Durban, co‐operatives called for a
moral community of African workers, and urged them to unite and defend their own
interests where existing organisations were incapable of doing so. 89 Similarly, working
class inhabitants of spaces like District Six and Sophiatown articulated a strong sense of
coherence, identity and belonging, drawing on a world of imagination to create
themselves and community. 90
Even with this broadened approach to resistance, organised political protest and the
fortunes of formal political organisations were not beyond the scope of South African
social history. Only now, the focus ceased to be on the grand campaigns of Congress in
the urban areas and attempts at mass mobilisation in the 1950s, as expressed in the
Defiance Campaign and the Congress of the People. Attention ceased to be given simply
to the heroic and pioneering deeds and public careers of national leaders. Rather,
research sought to study local expressions of class and nationalist politics in the urban
and rural areas and to draw connections between national organisations and the politics
of everyday life. Through the application of class analysis to nationalist politics, social
historians also drew attention to social differentiation, contradictions and tension within
popular movements. While biography in the form of life histories of ordinary urban and
rural experience was at the heart of social history in South Africa, it was also a medium
for studies of organised politics on a local and national level, which claimed to be based
on analyses of class experiences and social ambiguities.
Hilary Sapire attempted to explain the local responsiveness in Brakpan to ANC
programmes in the 1950s, suggesting that this was brought about because subsistence
89 Iain Edwards, ‘Swinging the Assegai Peacefully? ʺNew Africaʺ, Mkhumbane, the Co‐operative
Movement and attempts to Transform Durban Society in the Late Nineteen‐Forties’, in Philip
Bonner et al (eds), Holding Their Ground, p 84; Paul la Hausse, ‘So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo?
Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal’, in Philip Bonner et al (eds), Apartheidʹs
Genesis, p 206.
90 Bill Nasson, ‘ʺShe Preferred Living in a Cave with Harry the Snake‐catcherʺ: Towards an Oral
History of Popular Leisure and Class Expression in District Six, Cape Town, c. 1920s‐1950s’, in
Philip Bonner et al (eds), Holding Their Ground; Andre Proctor, ‘Class Struggle, Segregation and the
City: A History of Sophiatown, 1905‐1940’, in Belinda Bozzoli (ed), Labour, Townships and Protest.
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