The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Petros Lamula and Lymon Maling, La Hausse examined the dilemmas of social class,
debates about the Zulu nation and the construction of Zulu nationalism, the nature of
political culture and mobilisation and the composition of political leadership. He was
particularly concerned with their careers between 1920s and 1936, a period representing
a “key moment in the re‐construction of Zulu ethnic identity”. 192
At one level, La Hausse’s study was a recovery project of social history, seeking to
rescue from obscurity the lives of two nationalist intellectuals who had been members of
an educated but unpropertied elite. It was an account of the struggle for kholwa
respectability within relations of racial paternalism and dependency, and the role of the
educated cultural intermediary. As in some of his other studies, biography was utilised
as a mirror, reflecting the contradictions of Natal’s fractured African middle classes.
These were subjects who illuminated the political and cultural dilemmas of their social
class. La Hausse’s study was also attuned to social context. He examined the significance
of Lamula and Maling’s careers in the context of “changing local politics, culture and
society [which] structured their populist imagination”. 193
Nevertheless, there were interesting ways in which La Hausse’s study moved beyond
conventional biography. He was interested in the powerfully historicist form of
consciousness which underlay the nationalist imaginings of Maling and Lamula, in their
quest for self‐definition and collective identity through a search to redeem the past. This
took him into an examination of the construction of self‐images and self‐definitions
through writing as well as the scripting of life stories on the part of ‘people’s leaders’.
Through an exploration of forms of cultural transmission between literate nationalist
leaders and ‘ordinary people’, La Hausse was able to examine the uses of and struggles
over the written word.
192 Paul la Hausse de Lalouviere, ‘Ethnicity and History in the Careers of Two Zulu Nationalists’, p 6.
193 Paul la Hausse de Lalouviere, ‘Ethnicity and History in the Careers of Two Zulu Nationalists’, p 37.
175