The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

studies of the picaresque needed to be grounded in the material, and rooted in
“historical processes of change and issues of social biography”. As with the work of
Marks and Willan, La Hausse had utilised biography as a mode of examining the social
history of class and collective experience.
In this research, La Hausse also began to open up the paradigm of resistance as history
from below to incorporate an examination of forms of collaboration. These were quite
possibly ways in which members of a fractured African middle class tried “to resolve
their structurally dependent position within a repressive political economy”. While the
notion of the picaresque seems to be “characteristic of more obscure marginal figures”,
La Hausse argued that it could add to Shula Marks’ research and offer explanations for
the lives of more prominent individuals such as A.W.G. Champion. In addition,
Kuzwayo’s picaresque career provided possible insights into the styles of certain forms
of popular leadership in Natal between the 1920s and 1930s. During this period,
conditions of massive social and economic upheaval were conducive to the emergence
of zealous “instant leaders” from relative social obscurity. La Hausse suggested that
collaboration with the authorities, as part of a strategy of survival, was frequently the
result. 120
To sum up, biography has occupied a central place in the emergence and development
of South African social history. 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, such as those by Sapire and Delius, centred on
biographies of local activists. Social historians attempted to study lives in a social
context. While they sought to recover the lives of key individuals from neglect and
amnesia, they brought greater complexity to biographical study by seeking to identify
and explain class contradictions and ideological ambiguities.
120 Paul la Hausse, ‘So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo?’, pp 221‐22.
153