The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

South African society provided the impetus for an explosion of audiovisual projects and
heritage initiatives to recover the truth of real lives of political leaders as lessons of
democracy, leadership and the triumph of the human spirit. Here Nelson Mandela’s
epic life history, framed as a ‘long walk to freedom’, came to stand for the nation’s past.
In this dissertation, no all‐embracing narration of Tabata’s life as a political giant or
significant intellectual has been constructed. Instead, this study has sought to transcend
the realist paradigm as well as the documentary impulse to discover the hidden
chronological narrative of a life or to expose its concealed moral frailties. Instead of a
biography of I.B. Tabata driven by empirical demands, I have attempted to approach the
individual and biography in a much more theoretically informed way around questions
of narrative, the relationship between subjects and discursive practices, and the
narrative worlds into which people are born. I have sought to understand the complex
relationship between life and narrative, the dialogue between biographical processes
and autobiographical traces, and the narrative worlds of institutions such as political
formations, which have given rise to storied lives. Indeed what started off as a study of
political history became a study of the cultural history of politics as well as the politics of
historical production. What began as a biography of Tabata became a much broader
encounter with the cultural politics of biography in the academy and the public domain,
drawing where possible on those theoretical insights which might produce a much more
nuanced study of biographic formation.
In this dissertation, I have extended David William Cohen’s approach to the production
of history to present a case for examining processes of biographic production. This focus
argues for attention to be given to biographical relations and to an understanding of
conditions of biographical production. It is critical to understand different forms of
biographical mediation as well as the uses to which biographies have been put. It is
necessary to include in this approach an appreciation of multiple and contending
biographical narrations, as well as different genres, mediums and formats in which
biographic narratives have been produced. It is the genealogies of these biographic
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