The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

family had been collected and when his testimony could be compared to other historical
source material. Much like Matsetela’s life history of Emelia Pooe, the account which
Nkadimeng and Relly presented showed how Maine managed to avoid wage labour for
almost four decades after 1913, and evade “those forces which would have captured him
as a farm labourer or relegated him to a location”. In addition to reflecting the high
mobility of sharecroppers who regularly ‘jumped the fence’, Maine’s life story revealed
how the persistence of sharecropping was connected to the technological backwardness
of white farming. 130
The story of Kas Maine also provided “a sense of the detail and complexity of human
consciousness underlying the major events and changes in the rural Transvaal during
this century”. As Maine declared in an interview conducted in 1980: “Die saad is myne,
die skare is myne ... die span is myne. Alles is myne, die grond is syne”. 131 According to
Bozzoli, localised rural studies of ordinary lives such as this provided “nuance and
variation in interpretation” and enabled “unwarranted genralisations about whole
classes of people” to be kept in check. Maine’s life story made “concrete” what would
have been a “hypothetical analysis of the class character of sharecropping” and lent
insight into “the real ... nature of class relations and class struggles”. 132
Notwithstanding such claims about the value of oral testimony for its apparent access to
the ‘real’ and ‘concrete’ world of experience, the importance of Emelia Pooe and Kas
Maine’s life stories for social history was that they were seen to reflect a general social
pattern, that “sharecropping was the dominant relationship of production in most of the
arable districts of the white settled highveld”. The juxtaposition of Tim Keegan’s
analytical study of this process alongside both the biographic studies by Matsetela, and
Nkadimeng and Relly served to turn the life stories of Pooe and Maine into illustrative
vignettes of a social process explained by Keegan as ongoing resistance against
proletarianisation. The resilience of African sharecroppers in mobilising family labour
130 Malete Nkadimeng and Georgina Relly, ‘Kas Maine’, pp 89‐91, 99.
131 Malete Nkadimeng and Georgina Relly, ‘Kas Maine’, pp 89‐91.
132 Belinda Bozzoli, ‘Introduction: History Experience and Culture’, pp 14‐15.
157