The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

continued to be silenced within the realm of the academy. 166 He was placed at the centre
of a history of rural social relations as resister ‐ the “gritty and sturdy” sharecropper ‐
through a narrative of survival against the odds within the predetermined ‘natural’
indices of subordination. 167 The ‘hidden past’ of Maine’s submerged experience, read
transparently off individual memory, was equated with resistance. 168 Constrained
within the ready‐made, fixed category of his recovery ‐ as sharecropper‐resister ‐ Maine
was made to stand for the collective social and economic experience of rural society in
twentieth century South Africa. 169
Social history and national resistance
These issues were symptomatic of more general problems in South African social history
in which “the prior ‘great men’ were replaced by ‘great’ universal social agents and their
equally masculine representatives”. 170 The form of Maine’s ‘recovery’ followed the
formula and the categories of representation of the main lines of South African social
history. Oral discourses continued to be mined for literate facts, which were inserted
into a dominant genre of historical realism. This was achieved through
the autocratic author who hides his control over the text behind
the third person singular, the chronological unfolding of the
story that creates the illusion of a natural, temporal
development; the lifelike and detailed descriptions of how it
really was. 171
166 The phrase comes from Nicolene Rousseau, ‘Popular History in South Africa in the 1980s: The
Politics of Production’, M.A. Mini‐thesis, University of the Western Cape, April 1994, p 41.
167 Rousseau (‘Popular History in South Africa in the 1980s’, p 42) refers to the evocative figure of
the “gritty and sturdy worker”, who was crucial in the early urban and industrial concerns of
South African social history, and who was erected, partly, in opposition to the categories of
nationalist politics. See, for example, Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History
of the Witwatersrand, 1886‐1914, Volumes 1 and 2.
168 See the discussion of ‘resilience as resistance’ earlier in this chapter.
169 Kas Maine was undoubtedly the subject of one of the most intense forms of scrutiny and
ethnographic attention in the history of the social sciences in South Africa. One cannot help
wondering about the histories of the academy ‐ in the form of the Oral Documentation Project,
Malete Nkadimeng, Charles van Onselen and others connected to the former African Studies
Institute ‐ and the mediated research process on his life that Kas Maine would have told.
170 Gary Minkley, ‘First Born Rulers’, Southern African Review of Books, No 35, January/February
1995.
171 Patrick Harries, ‘Histories New and Old’, in South African Historical Journal, 30 (May 1994), p 130.
167