The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

and ‘jumping the fence’ led to the persistence of sharecropping. For Keegan, this
constituted rural class struggle, which both undermined the 1913 Natives’ Land Act and
shaped the nature of capital accumulation in the countryside. 133
These same explanatory and contextualising purposes of Keegan’s article were carried
through in his book on black lives in rural South Africa. 134 This book contained four life
stories of rural experiences of black South Africans on the Highveld in the twentieth
century. These were written in the third person by Keegan and were drawn from oral
testimonies collected as part of the work of the ODP at Wits. In the book, the life
histories were ‘set in context’ by explanatory articles on rural transitions in the highveld
and the value of oral testimony. 135 According to Keegan, the “range of information” and
the “richness and variety” of experiences presented in the life stories constituted an
“oral record pertaining to social and economic life”. Treated by Keegan as a form of
evidence, he argued that these reminiscences of “obscure people” were able to reshape
our understanding of major forces of social change “when set in the larger historical
context”. 136
While each individual life story could be considered to be unique, the purpose of the
historian, however, was to look for patterns, “not reminiscences for their own
sake”. 137 Keegan argued that
each individual’s life embodies something of the common
experience of a larger social group; each individual life reveals
aspects of the experience of a class, of a racial or ethnic group,
of a community, of a geographical region, of a particular kind
of economic enterprise. 138
133 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, pp 196‐7, 204‐208.
134 Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm.
135 The titles of Keegan’s articles contained in Part Two of Facing the Storm are ‘Social
Transformations on the Highveld’ and ‘Oral testimony in the Recovery of Peopleʹs history’.
136 Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm, p 131.
137 Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm, p 160.
138 Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm, p 159.
158