The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

whose value depended on their accuracy and their quantity of information. In this
regard, they resembled the biographical portraits of nationalist leaders, which featured
prominently in the Karis and Carter tradition of documentary history. These life stories
were not seen as history. Indeed, they were regarded as prior to history. For Keegan, the
passage to history required the intervention of the professional historian, trained in the
literate rules and procedures of the archive. In this account, the memory of experience
was analysed as oral remembrance, documented as testimony through oral research.
These life histories were not evaluated as products of the workings of memory, seen as a
genre through which the relationship between the past and the present was negotiated.
The sociology of their production, the politics of the research process, and the multiple
layers of narration involved were questions that were overlooked. 141
These were the very issues that were inadvertently raised by the publication of the long
awaited epic biography of Kas Maine 142 by Charles van Onselen, one of the ‘founding
fathers’ of social history in South Africa, and the director of the former ASI in which the
ODP was housed. Indeed, the arrival of The Seed is Mine to much fanfare and acclaim,
after at least 14 years of research and announcements of its imminent arrival on at least
two occasions ‐ 1988 and 1990 143 ‐ also marked the 17th year of biographical attention
accorded to Kas Maine by virtually the full gamut of researchers in the ODP: field
141 See the discussion of these issues in Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory and
Social History in South Africa’.
142 Charles van Onselen, The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894‐1985,
Cape Town: David Philip, 1996. It was also published by Hill & Wang ‐ a subdivision of Farrar, Straus
& Giroux Inc ‐ in February 1996 in hardback, and by Harper‐Collins in Canada in hardback in March
1996. The South African paperback edition by David Philip was brought out in May 1996. By June
1996, the first South African impression was sold, and a second was scheduled for release in July 1996.
In the United States, the Hill & Wang hardback sold 7 500 copies in the first six months and was
scheduled for production in paperback in New York in early 1997. The book, described as “majestic”
and as a “masterpiece”, won a variety of awards including the 1997 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award
and Herskovitz Prize as well as the Bill Venter Literary Award for 1997/1998. See Institute for
Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Twenty‐Fourth Annual Report, 1
September 1995 ‐ 31 August 1996, p 10; ‘The Seed is Mine wins the R35 000 Bill Venter Literary Award
for 1997/ 1998’, Profile: the House Journal of the Altron Group, Issue 2, 1998.
143 See references in Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm, pp 168‐169, and Paul la Hausse, ‘Oral History and
South African Historians’, p 348. Part of the years of build‐up leading to its publication by three
publishing houses in three countries was the impression that the biography, long in gestation, was an
ambitious project in the history of rural social and economic life in South Africa and that when
published it would in all likelihood be a classic in historical studies.
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