The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

determine the voice and style in which the final historical presentation is made”. For
Van Onselen, this meant the “almost unavoidable” need to “eschew cryptic quotation
and revert to the third person” in telling Maine’s life. He suggests, though, that Maine’s
“narrative skills” did help “to shape and direct the resulting work”, albeit in a “remote
and indirect fashion”. 154
Drawing on an example from the Kas Maine oral archive, Van Onselen argued that more
critical attention should be given to the theory and method of “data collection rather
than interpretation”. Using an unusual, traumatic moment of recollection, spoken in a
form uncharacteristically lengthy for Maine, Van Onselen showed how it was rendered
in almost the same words by Maine in a later interview. Van Onselen argued that it “not
only tells us about the state of the subjectʹs cognitive processes at the time of these
events, but also reveals one of the codes that he had employed to store and retrieve the
results of an important set of events”. 155 In raising these issues Van Onselen began to
probe language, memory and history in important new ways in South African studies. 156
Indeed, these are the very issues around which questions of self‐narration and the
production of self arise in relation to biography.
These potential advances, however, were not sustained in Van Onselen’s book. The story
of Kas Maine did offer major new insights, but these were not of method in the
production of biography. Rather, the achievements of The Seed is Mine related to the
social processes it studied: the detailed examinations of the black family, the
sharecropping economy and the gradual impact of the encroaching tide of capitalism, of
vicious forms of racism and relations of paternalism. In methodological terms, it was the
ways that Kas Maine used memory as a resource, a storehouse of oral knowledge about
prices, markets, contracts and agreements, and about weather, movement and family,
which were highlighted.
154 Charles van Onselen, ‘The Reconstruction of a Rural Life’, pp 506‐510.
155 Charles van Onselen, ‘The Reconstruction of a Rural Life’, pp 511‐513.
156 Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa’, p 9.
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