The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

esearchers, research fellows, the resident photographer and the director himself.
During this time, Maine encountered the full complexity of the institutional dynamics of
the ODP and the ASI, and divisions of labour contained in it, as he became the ODP’s
main informant on sharecropping in the Highveld. In the process, The Seed is Mine
became South African social history’s flagship publication and Kas Maine’s life emerged
as the quintessential trope for South African ‘history from below’.
It is interesting to note that Theodore Rosengarten’s book about the life of a
sharecropper in Alabama in the United States served as a major inspiration for The Seed
is Mine as well as most of the biographical work in rural social history conducted
through the ODP. 144 During more than thirty sessions of interviews conducted by
Rosengarten, and 120 hours of recorded oral history, Shaw had narrated the ‘life’ of a
black tenant farmer in the “tradition of farmer‐storytellers”. 145 With a rigour “steeped in
genealogies”, naming over 400 people, Shaw’s oral stories had served to create
a human topography through which he travels with the
assurance of a man who knows the forest because he witnessed
the planting of the trees.... [His] family chronicles express both
the bonds among people and a manʹs attachment to the land. 146
Indebted to Rosengarten for his “wonderful portrayal” of Nate Shaw’s sharecropping
life, Van Onselen and ODP field interviewer Malete Nkadimeng had gone about trying
to find “suitable highveld informants” in the quest to explore the complexity of rural
social and economic relations, race, black respectability and resistance in the South
African countryside. Researchers at the ODP led by Van Onselen were particularly
concerned to challenge the assumption that the intrusion of capitalism and the process
of proletarianisation on the highveld involved a linear transition from communal
cultivators to peasants, to labour tenants, culminating in wage labourers. The
“formidable figure” of Kas Maine was first encountered by an ODP field interviewer
144 Theodore Rosengarten, All Godʹs Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, New York: Vintage Books, A
Division of Random House, 1984 (first published, 1974). The article by Matsetela and Relly, and
the book by Keegan both referred to Rosengarten’s study.
145 Theodore Rosengarten, All Godʹs Dangers, p xxii.
146 Theodore Rosengarten, All Godʹs Dangers, p xxiii.
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