The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

The individual and family experiences revealed evidence of large‐scale processes of
social change, resistance to capitalist encroachment and the emergence of
“intermediary” economic forms. The oral testimony also revealed the workings of
culture, identity and consciousness, and the importance of “individual initiative and
class aspirations”. Once again, the persistence of sharecropping was revealed as the
predominant economic relation in some areas over an extended period of time. Evidence
was also provided of processes of accumulation and social change amongst whites and
the extent of white reliance on black tenants who had kept “a whole generation of
Afrikaners afloat on the land”. The life histories also revealed the ways in which ethnic
identity had been employed by blacks as a means of “communal protection of
resources” and as a “weapon of communal resistance to dispossession”. 139
In spite of Keegan’s commitment to the power of oral history, for him it constituted only
a “supplementary source”. Its purpose was to supplement more formal, written sources
“which provide the larger context of public events, of political and constitutional,
economic and institutional developments”. Human memory in the form of oral
testimony was “given to error, misconception, elision, distortion, elaboration and
downright fabrication”. History, on the other hand, was the product of the “creative
imagination of the historian” which played “the central role in orchestrating and
interpreting the diverse, contradictory, fragmentary, momentary pieces of evidence
which survive”. History depended on the “accuracy” of the footnotes. And for Keegan,
the value of oral evidence, in turn, depended on how carefully it was scrutinised for
“inaccuracies, hearsay or speculation”. Its value also depended on whether the
informant had a “strong, vivid, perceptive memory” and whether his recollections
revealed “larger social experiences and forces”. 140
In this conception of ‘history from below’, biographies in the form of life histories of
‘ordinary people’ tended to be viewed as windows on large, collective social processes.
When translated and transcribed, they stood as life documents, or sources of evidence,
139 Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm, pp 132‐147.
140 Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm, pp 160‐163.
159