The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

and La Hausse were completed by scholars closely associated with both the History
Workshop and the Oral Documentation Project of the former African Studies Institute at
the University of the Witwatersrand.
Women of Phokeng was the outcome of a specific project which developed within the ODP
at Wits in 1982, and which focussed on the lives and experiences of black South African
women. This project sought to find ways of balancing biography and generality, of
examining life histories, while retaining a commitment to materialist theory. Indeed, for
Belinda Bozzoli, the life history approach did not mean the abandonment of “materialist
ways of thinking and ordering things”. In the process of research, after biographical
interviews had been conducted with elderly women in different parts of the Transvaal, it
was decided to focus on women from one area, Phokeng, and show “in a rich and in‐
depth fashion” how they “were affected by the vast changes of the twentieth century”. 185
For Bozzoli, materialist theory required a smaller‐scale set of criteria, which could not be
“derived from the grand theory downwards”. The life stories contained the “pointers” to
the ways in which they themselves may have been explained. 186 At the same time,
generalisation about migration patterns, experiences of womanhood, work and protest
was an objective. As Bozzoli explained:
The difficulty will be in capturing both the uniqueness of individual
lives and ways in which they have been told, and the more general
nature of the experiences of these women: to talk of Mrs M, a
resolutely conservative woman who was also a factory worker, who
consistently sought respectability but also retained a cynicism about
politicians and trade unionists; of Mrs S, a pass campaigner and
militant; a `self‐employedʹ woman who values tradition; and at the
same time to capture the common basis from which both migrated,
both suffered, both fought for their individual place in a harsh
society. 187
Petros Lamula (c.1881‐1948) and Lymon Maling (1889‐c.1936), (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal
Press, 2000).
185Belinda Bozzoli, ‘Migrant Women and South African Social Change’, pp 90‐94. This paper tried
to assess the first three years of the research project.
186Belinda Bozzoli, ‘Migrant Women and South African Social Change’, p 93.
187Belinda Bozzoli, ‘Migrant Women and South African Social Change’, p 95.
172