The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Instead, photographs continued to be inserted into texts as visual manifestations of the
people, events and landscapes that fill the resistance histories. At times, they were
designed to stand as visual evidence, interacting with written text on the same page. And
so, Luli Callinicos, for example, made use of ethnographic images purely as a means to
identify individuals referred to, without beginning to address the discursive framing of
such images and the forms of mediation involved in their production. 181 This illustrative,
or ‘documentary’ usage, as with others, was accompanied by a caption that sought merely
to describe the photograph as an objective visual description of real life. Another startling
example was the use of a photograph taken by Alfred Duggan‐Cronin, probably in 1926,
to depict what was described in an accompanying caption as “a herd boy in the Leribe
district”. 182 This image was provided to enable readers to visualise what one of her
subjects, Naboth Mokgatle, might have looked like. The very same photograph was used
in another study by Callinicos to depict a herdboy in Oliver Tambo’s district, Kantolo,
near Bizana in the Transkei. 183
Transcending the biographic canon
Notwithstanding the myriad of problems with different genres of resistance history in
South Africa and the forms of biography that have been produced within them, in the
early 1990s, a few biographical studies began to push the boundaries and transcend the
formulae of their intellectual frameworks. Three biographical projects produced by
Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe, Paul la Hausse and Bill Nasson at this time began
to look at the production of lives and issues of identity in ways that went beyond other
studies in methodological terms. 184 It is ironic that the projects by Bozzoli and Nkotsoe
181 See, for example, the photograph on p 7 captioned ‘One of Martha’s sisters at home, in Ndebele
costume’ said to come from a family album of one of the subjects, Martha Masina.
182 Luli Callinicos, A Place in the City, p 14. I saw this photographic image in an album in the
Duggan‐Cronin Gallery in Kimberley.
183 Chris van Wyk and Luli Callinicos, They Fought for Freedom: Oliver Tambo, Cape Town: Maskew
Miller Longman, 1994, p 3.
184 Belinda Bozzoli with Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy
in South Africa, 1900‐1983; Paul la Hausse de Lalouviere, ‘Ethnicity and History in the Careers of Two
Zulu Nationalists: Petros Lamula (c.1881‐1948) and Lymon Maling (1889‐c.1936)’, Ph.D dissertation,
University of the Witwatersrand, July 1992; Bill Nasson, Abraham Esauʹs War: A Black South African War
in the Cape, 1899‐1902, Cape Town: David Philip, 1991. La Hausse’s dissertation was published in
revised form as Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the Lives of
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