The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

translations of these oral interviews formed the basis of published studies of individual
life histories and experiences. Indeed, in this time, the ODP was perhaps the major
centre of biographic production in South African social history, in which biographies
were produced through a hierarchy of mediations. The sociological circumstances of the
research process in this biographical programme of work raise a set of issues around
authorship, the transitions between languages, and the translation from oral transcript
to written history. 125
It is interesting and probably not surprising that it was field interviewers, who produced
the first published biographical studies derived from the oral materials collected by the
ODP. The articles by Ted Matsetela and Malete Nkadimeng (who wrote with Georgina
Relly) were early attempts to make sense of rural life histories, and were characterised
by a quality of ‘first order’ processing and arranging. 126 Both pieces were accompanied
by an article written in the early 1980s by Tim Keegan, then a research fellow in the ASI,
on the sharecropping economy of the Highveld areas of the southern Transvaal and
northern Orange Free State. 127
Women and South African Social Change: Biographical Approaches to Social Analysis’, African
Studies, Vol 44, No 1, 1985, pp 88‐91.
125 The use of the notion of ‘translation’ is deliberate. It refers both to transitions and transformations
from one language to another as well as the issues of power, authorship and the politics of narration
involved in the relationship between oral testimony and written history. See the discussion by Gary
Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Oral History in South Africa: A Country Report’, Paper delivered to the
International Conference on Oral History, Columbia University, New York, 18‐23 October 1994. In an
earlier appraisal of the record of oral history research in South Africa, Paul la Hausse had drawn
attention to the problems of ensuring ʺaccurateʺ transcriptions and interpreting. However, this
approach tended to reduce the issues around knowledge production to a set of technical questions. See
Paul la Hausse, ‘Oral History and South African Historians’, Radical History Review, No 46/7, 1990, p
353.
126 See Ted Matsetela, ‘The Life Story of Nkgono Mma‐Pooe: Aspects of Sharecropping and
Proletarianisation in the northern Orange Free State, 1890‐1930’, in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone
(eds), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa; Malete Nkadimeng and Georgina Relly, ‘Kas
Maine: The Story of a Black South African Agriculturalist’, in Belinda Bozzoli (ed), Town and
Countryside in the Transvaal.
127 Tim Keegan, ‘The Sharecropping Economy, African Class Formation and the 1913 Natives’ Land
Act in the Highveld Maize Belt’, in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and
Social Change in South Africa, and reproduced in Belinda Bozzoli (ed) Town and Countryside in the
Transvaal.
155