The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

memory into a written academic product ‐ as History and Biography ‐ under his
authorship and copyright. No attempt was made to engage with the history of his own
life that Maine told. 162
Van Onselen’s designation as author, biographer and historian, as a result of the
multiple translations and appropriations of oral discourses into history, masked the
more complex and mediated authorial process and relations of research involved in the
production of Kas Maine’s life through the work of the ODP. In the first place, research
assistant and field interviewer, Malete Nkadimeng who had conducted more than 80%
of the interviews with Kas Maine and his family, and who had co‐authored the first
biographical article on Maine in 1983 was relegated to the position of agterryer‐in‐chief,
who had lent Van Onselen “his eyes and ears” for fourteen years:
he never hesitated to crisscross the Transvaal in search of data
that might have struck him as boring, crass, irrelevant,
insensitive, repetitive, vague or plain stupid. 163
If Maine’s testimony was assessed as a storehouse of facts, then Nkadimeng was
certainly taken to be the fact collector, the assembler of authentic experience in the
vernacular and the compiler of Maine’s memory for its date with history.
Moreover, the ironic consequence of this ‘epic’ attempt at “restoring Kas Maine to the
historical record” 164 was the deepening of his subordinate status through being named,
categorised and naturalised as marginal and typologised as special. 165 Kas Maine was
inserted into Van Onselen’s history largely as “contextual device” and, in crucial ways,
162 It is interesting to note that in spite of being ‘authored’ by Theodore Rosengarten, All Godʹs
Dangers was styled as an auto‐biography and was written in the first person. It was a translation of
“oral stories into written literature” with Rosengarten styling himself as editor, arranger and
facilitator of Shaw’s narrative. Also, Rosengarten and the estate of the late Ned Cobb for whom the
name ‘Nate Shaw’ was a pseudonym held the copyright jointly.
163 Charles van Onselen, The Seed is Mine, p 10. The description of the ODP field researchers as
‘agterryers’ comes from Bill Nasson, ‘A Sharecropperʹs Life’, p 4. Note Keegan’s translation of
agterryer as ‘black groom’ (Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm, glossary).
164 Charles van Onselen, The Seed is Mine, back cover.
165 Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, ‘Thresholds, Gateways and Spectacles’, p 3.
166