The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

told in the book. The lives of these faces with voices were not taken to be histories, but, as
with other studies, were treated as prior to history ‐ sketches or portraits through which to
illustrate economic, social and political processes which were regarded as ‘historical’. Each
life, in their category of recovery, was made to fit standard themes of South African social
history, as they had crystallised on the industrialising Rand in the 1940s. Biography
became a means to narrate lives as individual allegories of collective experience and social
history. These were connected to a historical narrative of national resistance, organised
political bodies and national leaders, who drew on the “culture of resistance” of “ordinary
people”. 176
‘History from below’ brought together culturalist constructions of experience, class and
consciousness and nationalist teleologies of the people and the struggle, to generate a
grand narrative of resistance and the nation. Indeed, intonations of a newfound
concentration on the deeds and qualities of political leaders by leading social historians 177
were an extension of this narrative. It may well be that the seemingly contradictory
impulses of histories ‘from below’ and histories of leadership were indeed compatible.
This compatibility was to be found in the notion of ‘hidden history’ and the conception of
pasts subordinated by oppression and exclusion from the historical record and which
were deemed to be in need of recuperation. It also lay in the categories and subject
positions ‐ individual and collective ‐ constructed by historical models framed in terms of
a ‘domination versus resistance’ dichotomy. South African resistance histories came to be
peopled with “coherent and confrontational subjects”, who had stability bestowed upon
them by the firm boundaries constructed around them. 178
The compatibility of these different histories of resistance also emerged through the
dominant realist mode in which they were written and assembled. Different genres of
176 Luli Callinicos, A Place in the City, pp 58‐72.
177 See the work of Callinicos, Lodge and Beinart referred to at the beginning of this chapter.
178 Jenny Robinson, ‘(Dis)locating Historical Narrative: Writing, Space and Gender in South African
Social History’, South African Historical Journal, No 30 (May 1994), pp 149‐150. Robinson included
La Hausse’s ambivalent category of the ‘picaro’ in her set of criticisms of subject construction by
social historians.
169