The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Much like with other research conducted within the ODP, Mmantho Nkotsoe, a Setswana‐
speaking university graduate, had been employed and trained as field interviewer. It was
she who developed a “striking rapport” with Phokeng women after she had spent a
period interviewing women from different villages. Being from a neighbouring area,
Nkotsoe showed considerable empathy and sensitivity towards the interviewees, and her
knowledge of rural Setswana, her close connections to the women and her youth gave the
life stories a “special character” of “intimacy and interactiveness”. 188 As with Malete
Nkadimeng and The Seed is Mine, the personal qualities and research skills of Mmantho
Nkotsoe were the essential mediating elements between the worlds of the white university
and the rural black village, which made the research project, and the flows of historical
and social knowledge between these sites possible.
Likewise, the life story interviews were put to use for conventional social history
purposes: as sources of evidence for understanding the way of life and sexual division of
labour in sharecropping households, for understanding family relations, ethnicity,
schooling, women’s migrancy, the conditions of domestic service, and social life in
Sophiatown and Alexandra between the wars. Also, the life stories could be read as
sources revealing evidence of hidden forms of consciousness.
However, there were important elements of this study that began to transcend the
empiricist and realist methods of social history. Rather than being styled as a study of
‘what really happened’, with oral history ‐ translated and transcribed ‐ utilised as
illustrative quotations, the life stories were approached as texts “imperfectly reflecting
lives, and more accurately revealing ‘cultural and psychological myth’”. As texts and
through literary methods of analysis, the life stories were approached variously as
“documents, narratives, stories, histories, innocent ramblings, interlinked fragments of
188 Belinda Bozzoli with Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng, pp 7‐11. Interestingly, Nkotsoe had
also conducted oral research for Shula Marks in her biographical project published as Not Either
An Experimental Doll.
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