The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Biography for social history was a means to narrate lives as individual allegories of
collective experience. In addition, lives of resistance, constructed through social history,
also took the form of heroic narratives and triumphal histories of political struggle. These
attempted to show how “the struggles, successes and failures ... contributed to the
subsequent mass mobilisation and popular and political struggles against apartheid”. 172
This seeming shift to an approach in which life histories and submerged experience were
taken as the connection between the past and political struggle, and between social and
political history, was evident from Luli Callinicos’ popular synthesis of historical research
on the Witwatersrand in the 1940s. 173 This publication showed that the histories of
resistance told by social history were not incompatible with histories of ‘the struggle’
constructed through ‘people’s history’ during the 1980s. In the political movement, and in
the academy, 174 ‘people’s history’ had emerged as an attempt to connect the search for
hidden history into the struggles for ‘people’s power’ and ‘people’s education’. ‘History
from below’ had been mobilised in support of building a national movement based on
resistance politics of the 1950s. In the notion of ‘struggle’, national and class teleologies
had been collapsed into one of the people. History was ‘national struggle’ and the past
contained a “great store of lessons” which had to be recovered. 175
In her study of the 1940s, Callinicos examined the social history of the Witwatersrand
through the life stories and experiences of six people, a cast of characters who had worked
on the Rand. Each biography was constructed as a tale of an individual, unique life whose
purpose was to give face and voice, alongside others, to the social and political histories
172 Luli Callinicos, A Place in the City: The Rand on the Eve of Apartheid, back cover.
173 Luli Callinicos, A Place in the City.
174 The University of the Western Cape, in particular, witnessed the emergence of a ‘People’s
History Programme’, whose objective was the proliferation of layers of ‘barefoot historians’
recording the ‘hidden history’ of oppressed communities within the Western Cape. Located within
the academic programme of the university, it also sought to transcend the boundaries of the
academy.
175 See for example UWC History Department/Education Resource and Information Project, Let Us
Speak of Freedom, Vols 1 and 2, Bellville, undated. See also Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin,
Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986. See Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool
and Leslie Witz, ‘Thresholds, Gateways and Spectacles’ for a discussion of people’s history and the
hidden past.
168