The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

middle section had vacillated. Another “more established affluent and reactionary”
section urged workers not to go on strike, resulting in workers regarding an individual
from this group as the “Enemy of the People”. 117
Drawing on Shula Marks’ concepts of the mask and moral ambiguity as a point of
departure, Paul la Hausse studied the career of the “petty criminal, failed populist and
confidence trickster”, Elias Kuzwayo through the notion of the “picaresque”. The picaro,
who supposedly inhabited and traversed boundaries between worlds, was a
“confidence man” who lived “by his wits”. 118 Seen in this way, Kuzwayo’s fragmented
career as trade union activist, teacher, agricultural demonstrator, co‐operative society
spokesman, independent churchman and medical practitioner, labour agent and petty
capitalist was a case study of contradiction and ambiguity as experienced by the
fractured African middle class of Natal. It is this section of the black middle class which
had presented major obstacles to coherent black political mobilisation.
Inside a single life of brokerage, role‐playing and manipulation, Kuzwayo seemed to
combine the worlds of the ‘New African’, the conservative izemtiti, “who had embraced
the new world of the coloniser”, and that of the opportunistic collaborator. In addition
to being a repository of social contradiction, Kuzwayo also occupied a space shared by
the African elite. His life, for La Hausse, held up “a mirror to his times and to the
aspirations of members of Natal’s fractured middle class”. Rather than simply
dismissing them as ‘sell‐outs’ and ‘opportunists’, La Hausse tried to understand the
composition and dynamics of this group, their self‐interest and longings for self‐
advancement, as well as “the cultural worlds these individuals inhabited, fashioned and
moved between”. 119 However, La Hausse showed his discomfort at the potential
instability of a contradictory identity category, suggesting that to be analytically useful,
117Philip Bonner, ‘The Transvaal Native Congress 1917‐11920: The Radicalisation of the Black Petty
Bourgeoisie on the Rand’, in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and Social
Change in South Africa, pp 289, 296.
118Paul la Hausse, ‘So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in
Natal’, in Philip Bonner et al, Apartheid’s Genesis, pp 195‐200.
119Paul la Hausse, ‘So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo?’, pp 195, 201, 219‐220.
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