The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

(probably Nkadimeng) in a resettlement camp in 1979. Maine was the patriarch of an
extended family of immigrant BaSotho sharecroppers, which had farmed successfully in
the south‐western Transvaal for half a century. His life seemed to contradict the notion
that sharecropping had disappeared on the highveld after 1913. 147
A few years before the publication of The Seed is Mine, Charles van Onselen reflected on
the methodology of reconstructing Maineʹs rural life from oral testimony. 148 The
collection of oral testimony, Van Onselen felt, would “generate primary material” which
would make it possible to “document and analyse the behaviour of a virtually illiterate
sharecropper”. It would thus also be possible to “conjure up the life and times of a single
black man in the South African countryside between 1895 and 1985”. Van Onselen
wanted to do justice to “the peculiarities of personality”, while describing and analysing
the behaviour of a single person “within an appropriate class context”. While wishing to
study economic, political and social structures, through biography Van Onselen also
wanted to grasp the actions and consciousness of historical agents and the conditions
under which humans were chained by structures or were able to transcend them. 149
Following Sartre, Van Onselen sought to locate his study of Maine’s life in relation to
layers in a “hierarchy of mediations”, beginning with the ‘family’, notwithstanding the
“permeability” of its boundaries, and the extended family. A third layer of informants
was drawn from Maine’s own “cohort”, black sharecropper farmers in his own age
category and of the same ethnicity. A fourth layer, drawn from the landlords themselves
and their descendants would “assist in restoring some balance” to the data, enabling
points of conflict to be determined “with greater accuracy”. 150
These layers of testimony would provide evidence of a life of black sharecropping
through agreements with poor white farmers, sheltered paradoxically by “white
147Charles van Onselen, ‘The Reconstruction of a Rural Life’, pp 502‐3; The Seed is Mine, p 10.
148Charles van Onselen, ‘The Reconstruction of a Rural Life’.
149Charles van Onselen, ‘The Reconstruction of a Rural Life’, pp 497‐8.
150Charles van Onselen, `The Reconstruction of a Rural Lifeʹ, pp 498‐501.
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